I was an English major in college. How I loved the good literature!

I have said that literature served me its universal and eternal truths, and so it happened that I was knowing God before I knew I was, before I had any idea I was. It was the truth in literature that drew me near God then just as God Himself draws me to Him now.

Last night I was reading through a college anthology I picked up somewhere. Although I’m afraid I read mostly junk now,  it made me happy to be reading really worthwhile literature.

God in Heavenletters™   has often mentioned world thoughts and how we believe world thoughts and do not believe in ourselves.

This what I’m going to tell you may not seem dramatic to you, but it was to me, at least, last night it was.

I was reading a selection from Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. This selection is called Hands. 

Wing Biddlebaum (not his real name) had been a truly wonderful teacher who brought out the very best in his students whom he cared about with all his being. He would put his hand on a boy’s shoulder, or ruffle his hair, and from this innocent expression of his caring, the townspeople accused him falsely of molesting the boys.  Wing was hounded out of the town, never to teach again.

He went to a new place far away and worked in the fields and picked crops. His hands could pick a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries a day.  He stayed to himself and didn’t make friends except for one young reporter with whom he became himself again.

…The two were walking in the fields on a summer afternoon and had stopped to sit upon a grassy bank. All afternoon Wing had talked as one inspired. By a fence he had stopped and…had shouted at his friend, the reporter, condemning his tendency to be too much influenced by the people about him.

“You are destroying yourself,” he cried. “You have the inclination to be alone and to dream, and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk, and you try to imitate them…”

“You must try to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to dream. From this time on, you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”

So many years later, I read this same theme in Heavenletters. How closely are the threads woven, and now, suddenly, they match up in a story by Sherwood Anderson I had forgotten and in many Heavenletters, the titles of which I have forgotten.