This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Dec. 9, 1939.
Are you having any fun? This is the question the radio is asking all its listeners today. I have just listened to it for the third time, and when I took letters down to the mail box on the road, two girls on their wheels on their way home from school were singing it.
It is a fair question, too, and one I would like to hear answered by many people. So here and now I am going to set down as truthfully as I can my own answers.
I remember, soon after I came out here in the country to live, I had a letter from a city woman, who asked me how I managed to put in my time, “right out in the country.”
Than one was easy. No day is quite long enough from the time the sunrise dyes in the east until we hear the 10 o’clock news and know that bedtime has arrived. But this matter of fun is another story.
People’s idea of fun changes with the years. I once thought that sleigh-riding down a hill, even with the chance of the sleigh upsetting, and walking up again pulling the sleigh, was as much fun as one heart cold hold. But that doesn’t look so attractive now.
However, life has compensations. When one door closes another opens, and every age brings its own enjoyment. Even now, in the rain, when the days are short and the nights long, there is great enjoyment even in looking out at the green fields, from which a silver mist is rising.
In one field, which lies to the south of us, stands one solitary tree, as shapely a tree as the one that appeared in the old Manitoba primer above the caption: “This is a tree.” It has been left standing because of its beauty. The owner of the field has put us all in his debt by simply leaving it.
Soon after we came out here to live, I experienced a warming of the heart when I noticed this beautiful tree standing alone in the field, and knowing why it had been left. I had it all put into words for me one day when Robert Frost’s poem entitled A Tuft of Flowers was read over the radio in the Atlantic Nocturne from Halifax.
The poem tells of a mower who went out one morning to cut the grass on the field. He had hoped to have for his companion another mower, only to find that he had come early, cut his share of the grass, and departed, and that was a disappointment, but he said to himself with a little bitterness that a man is alone anyway; all men work alone whether they work together or apart.
But as he went on with his work a butterfly came flying here and there, evidently looking for something, and at last darted across the brook and lit on a tuft of bright flowers which the other mower had spared for their beauty. And because of that a sudden message came to the lonely mower, and he felt his heart warmed by a sense of companionship, and all morning he even talked to his unseen but beloved companion. The poem closes with these two lines:
“Men work together,” I told him from my heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”
I believe the great joy we feel in working with our fellow men makes one of the bridges that carries us over the valleys of transition; one of the things that remain when life, the robber, has stolen from us many of our pleasures by stiffening our joints and dulling our emotions.
In that delightful play, Babes in Arms, Judy Garland, stung by the darts of jealousy, leaves the show that she and Mickey Rooney are going to put on and goes to her mother, who is one of a vaudeville company trying to win back the popularity that moving pictures have usurped. The mother gives Judy a piece of advice that set my blood tingling. She told Judy to go back no matter what had happened.
“No good trouper ever walks out on the show,” she said. “That’s final and unbreakable.”
And that is true all the way through life. Having put our hand to the plow we must not even look back, much less go back. The show must go on. The work of our hand is of more consequence than any one of us.
Last night, we had a social in our church hall. The usual church social with the long table down the centre of the hall, well covered with plates of sandwiches and cake, cups and saucers.
The social was a part of the anniversary services to mark the 45h year of the church and the 69th year of the Sunday school. At this time of year, anniversary services are going on all across the country, and as I sat there I could see down the years socials like this extending back to infinity.
This little church which stands at the foot of Mount Tolmie has a lovely name — St. Aidan’s. It goes back to the fifth century and the monastery of Iona on the west coast of Scotland.
From Iona, missionaries had gone out from time to time to convert the English in Northumberland, but they always came back with hardluck stories. The English, they said, were a bad lot, fierce and untamable. They were “as wild as their own wild beasts.”
Then up spoke young Aidan, who said he would like to go. He was not afraid of wild beasts. Naturally, the older men though young Aidan was just showing off, so they warned him and told him to go to it. Years past and the local sages said they had known all the time what would happen and they took comfort in the thought that they had warned him.
Then one bright day, Aidan came back with six young Saxons, “fair skinned, red-cheeked and good to look upon.” Young Aidan knew his people and so to save all argument, brought proof of his work. I thought of these young men last night as I looked at the youth of our modern St. Aidan’s. Here they were, young, strong, fair skinned, red-cheeked and good to look upon.
The gospel message preached by young St. Aidan has been preached by many successors in caves, on the mountainside, in fishing boats, in hunters’ cabins, in grain elevators, by men on foot, on horseback, in old Fords, men of all colours and of many creeds, men in overalls with hard hands and men in surplices who stand behind pulpits.
The method does not matter. It is the message that counts. It has sweetened and ennobled the human race and given direction and meaning to their lives and some day, if we are all faithful, it will pierce the dark clouds of war and selfishness, and bring in a great day of universal gladness. But we must remember the one unbreakable rule, we must never walk out on the show, no matter what happens.
This is what I was thinking as I listened to the music and the reports and the greetings and saw the pageants and drank coffee from the durable church cups and ate their good ham sandwiches and nine-day pickles, and heard the rise and fall of the conversation, rhythmic as the waves on the seashore.
I could see the whole story of the Christian church as a sequence — a serial. The play goes on, only the players change, and it’s great to have a part in it, even a small part.
It’s fun. Fun to belong to something infinitely bigger than yourself.
