Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Thou dost hold my right hand
                Psalm 73:23 RSV

On the wall of my mother-in-law's bedroom in Louisville, Kentucky, hung a framed quotation in hand-lettered Gothic script:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year;
"Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown."
And he replied, "Go out into the darkness and put your hand
into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light
and safer than a known way."

More than fifty years ago, when I went to Louisville to meet my new in-laws, I would step into that room, read these lines by Minnie Louise Haskins, and puzzle over them. The words in that frame seemed to me the embodiment of everything Unitarians rejected. An anthropomorphic deity (how could anyone hold the "hand" of God!). Blind faith (why should being led around in the dark be better than stepping out in the clear light of reason?). Such outmoded religious notions, Aunt Helen had assured me, were believed only by ignorant people.

My mother-in-law, Helen Sherrill, however, was not ignorant. An author and authority on early childhood development, she must have thought this enigmatic quote important to hang it where her eyes would light on it first thing each morning.

Later, when Mother and Dad Sherrill moved to New York City, the Haskins quotation hung on the wall of her bedroom there. It hangs today in my bedroom. In the years since I first read those words, I've become an adherent of that "outmoded" religion. And I've come to see in Haskins's prose-poem the traveler's guide to heaven.

Our hand in his is of course a poet's way of expressing trust. And why should dark be better for our journey than daylight? Because, I've come to feel, holding our hand is God's delight.

Oh, there are practical reasons, too, why he cannot banish the darkness here and now. Light - his Light - would show us too much. In 1991, an operation was performed on a blind man named Virgil. For forty-five years, neurologist Oliver Sacks reported, Virgil had functioned effectively as a sightless person. Suddenly able to see, he was overwhelmed by a torrent of impressions bombarding a brain that could not process them. He became disoriented, listless, miserable. When an illness destroyed his new-won vision, Virgil welcomed the return of blindness.