A Message From Beyond
Joshua was an avid reader. He had just purchased “The Collected Stories Of Isaac Bashevis Singer” at the local bookstore. He sat on the sofa of his living room on a lazy Sunday morning with a great sense of anticipation.
He took a short glance at the table of contents. “Seance”, “The Unseen”, “The Last Demon”, “Something Is There”. These headings enthralled him, but as he planned to read the book cover to cover, he did not waste much time on reading story titles, and he turned the page. The author had written a small introductory note, within which contained the following passage.
“For readers who would like me to say something ‘more personal,’ I quote here a few passages (though not in the order in which they were written) from a recent memoir of mine: ‘My isolation from everything remained the same. I had surrendered myself to melancholy, and it had taken me prisoner. I had presented creation with an ultimatum: Tell me your secret or let me perish.’ I had to run away from myself. But how? And where? I dreamed of a humanism and ethics the basis of which would be a refusal to accept all the evils the Almighty has sent and is preparing to send against us in the future. At its best, art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while.”
This small paragraph disturbed Joshua greatly. So much so, that at first he decided he was going to return the book immediately. For a man who had won the Nobel Prize in literature to reduce art to an instrument of escapism was initially too much for Joshua to handle.
But his curiosity had been piqued. Once he started reading, he did not put down the book until he had devoured the forty nine stories contained within.
He felt an overwhelming compulsion to communicate something to the now deceased writer, but just what it was he wanted to say eluded him for the moment.
No, Joshua was not crazy. He knew the answers he was now searching for were purely for his own benefit and peace of mind. Or were they?
Now Joshua, being a rational twenty first century man, did not believe in ghosts. So when he saw an apparition of the man on the book’s jacket cover beside the bookcase in his dining room, he decided he had been couped up in his apartment for far too long, and that a stroll outdoors would do him much good.
As he passed the dining room table on his way out the door, he noticed an open book sitting precariously at the table’s edge. As he went to put the book back upon the shelf, he stared down and a passage from the work caught his eye.
“Trust In God With All Your Heart, And Do Not Rely Upon Your Own Understanding”.
PROVERBS 3 : 1
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