Letter to a Godchild

PrefaceThis book is the text of an actual letter addressed to the son of longtime dear friends. It was first intended as a brief gift at the time of Harper Peck Voll's baptism in the year 2000 in the church of Saint-Ferdinand des Ternes in Paris. I was not present at that baptism and am not a Roman Catholic, but Harper's parents were kind enough to let me assume the title of honorary godfather. For years now the child has lived some three thousand miles away; and while we've had occasional moments of telephone conversation -- when Harper takes the phone from one of his parents -- I've had to imagine from photographs what sort of person he's becoming.From the sound of his growing voice and from my first actual memory of seeing him, I've proceeded to expand the initial letter. The first memory is simple but imposing. On the working theory that people are born, to a large extent, ready-formed in personality and character, I've leaned expectantly on the act Harper performed when -- in my wheelchair (which he'd never seen) -- I visited him and his parents in New York. He was only some eighteen months old; but when he glimpsed my rolling chair, he trotted across the large room and employed all his strength in pushing a long coffee table completely out of my way. No one had asked him to do it. From the start, I took that to be a hopeful sign -- his clearing a space for me and the fact that, some months earlier, his first words had beenbookandsoap. At widely separated intervals since the child's baptism, then, I've rethought the gift with slow enthusiasm and have continued to develop it in the intention of arriving at a document that would be genuinely helpful to a friend in his early adult years.It has seemed feasible to me that, by describing succinctly, and as honestly as I could manage, the advancing line of my own religious life, I might provide a useful sense of how one person's existence shaped itself round an early inexplicable event and moved onward from there till now, the start of my eighth decade. The letter was not intended to be a child's book or even something an adult could read to a child, but I haven't convinced myself that such a gift was pointless.When I myself was a pre-schoolboy, I received as holiday presents from my father's sisters a few volumes that at first proved incomprehensible to me -- as words on a page, in any case; their illustrations were another story. I stood the books on my parents' bookshelf, though, and mostly thought of them as secrets waiting to unfold before me when I'd earned full access -- that is, when I could read English sentences of some complexity. In its final form here then,Letter to a Godchildis a substantial communication from a family friend to a child who may someday wish, or need, to read it -- perhaps in adolescence or whenever after (few things are more unpredictable than the age at which a particular text may communicate with another human being).I hope also that numerous other growing children will find it of interest, and even good help, when they're ready to turn to something on this order. Parents themselves, hoping to rear strongly grounded children, might possibly read this account of one person's childhood and youth, and the faith that grew in those years, and gain further awareness of the conditions of environment and training which helped to sustain that man's faith through long decades with their inevitable devastations -- physical, psychic, and intellectual.Not at all incidentally, it's meant to be of potential use to young men and women who are not Christian and were not reared in such families. Christianity happens to be the tradition in which I first encountered the notion of a creating power in the universe -- an awesome overarching power which appears to witness some of our lives, perhaps all our lives, steadily. But the same creative power which impels my own faith says iPrice, Reynolds is the author of 'Letter to a Godchild', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416588030 and ISBN 1416588035.