Recalling my last visit to my Uncle Irving

"If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness." Paul II Corinthians

I find that as the Xmas season approaches  the joy of awaiting the  birth of the Christ child is  mixed with recalling past  Xmas times and people  I loved who are no longer here.

I began thinking of the Mowry family, my paternal grandmother was a Mowry.  I suddenly  began recalling the last days of  one son of Ida Mowry Jenckes, my Uncle Irving Jenckes, my father's only brother.  Dying of cancer, he was being cared for at home and I went to visit him.  When he learned that I was downstairs waiting to see him, he asked that I be brought upstairs to his bedside.  When I saw him, he was sitting reading his Bible which he did daily.  He asked my Aunt Winnie, his wife, to leave us alone and  then he began reading aloud to me from St Paul's  Letter to the Corinthians--the great  teaching about love:
"If I should speak with the tongue of  man and angels but have not  love, I am as  tinkling brass or clanging cymbals."  He would pause and ask me what each line meant.  He was very intense and his gaze searched my face fiercely. When  he got to the lines that begin--"When I was a child"  and conclude "Now that I am a man I put away childish things."He came to a full stop.

"Explain this to me," he demanded. He asked, " what are the childish things?"
I remember that I thought--why he reads this Bible every day, he is a  staunch Baptist--he must know the answers.

Then I thought again --maybe he is aware that now  I have a PhD.  and  he is asking me as a scholar to  interpret the lines. Such a self-flattering thought to calm my nerves.
So I took up the old, worn Bible and read the passage aloud several times.  Then I treated it as if it were a problem  of literary criticism--some crux in  a sonnet by Shakespeare or a dense passage from Eliot's The Wasteland. I explained to Irving that the childish things could be the toys, the tantrums, the willful disobedience and defiance of youth.
I'll never forget how he looked at me and said simply,"No, try again." after I tried and he repeated that direction three times, I put the Bible down and said "OK I give up." 
And he asked me directly--  what childish things I had given up, discarded--and in the throes of my  prideful agnosticism I thought and I wanted to blurt out--
my rosaries, my scapulars, my novenas, my childish Faith--

I said nothing, just picked up the leather bound volume and resumed  reading. When I reached the  point about "seeing through a glass darkly," he stopped me again--"what is that glass and why darkly?"

Then I had another not so brilliant thought--oh, he is dying and he  is reading Corinthians for solace--. So I mustered up my Platonism and told him that the  fact that we have bodies and eyes of flesh permits us to see only material, earthly things, but when we die and our spirits are free of the constraints of the  physical  then we will know the  spiritual truth of everything.
Well--he said wearily--that's a start..  He dropped his head back on the pillow and closed those eyes. Almost on cue my Aunt Winnie came into the room to say that I should go down for tea with my cousins, Mary, Grace and Roberta. And I must admit I was glad to leave that room.

It has taken me many years to see that interview less darkly and to understand that  Irving was not asking me  questions for his sake, he was doing it for my sake. He was bearing witness, using his scarce energy to  raise  questions in my mind about  FAITH, HOPE and LOVE.
He was  acting like that  notorious HOUND OF HEAVEN,  acting on behalf of that GOOD SHEPHERD,  seeking that lost  sheep that was his niece and turning me towards eternity.

"Whoever brought me here will have to take me home,"  Rumi