We had a family celebration at our house today. Tuesday, the tenth of February, will be David Higgin's birthday; we celebrated today when everybody could be together.

For some reason I can't explain, being together with family today reminded me of a day twenty-something years ago when Joseph Fletcher and his wife, both of them almost ninety years old, were staying the weekend with Margaret and me at Whittaker House at Darrow School; and Joe and I stayed up to talk after everybody else had gone to bed. Joe was the author of several books that I particularly like, the best of which is "Situation Ethics.' He was an Episcopal bishop, retired already for many years the night we had the conversation in which he told me he had "lost his faith." It was one of the most astounding moments of my life. The poem was started a day or two after they went home. I finished it just a couple of weeks ago.

JOSEPH FLETCHER

Like a Buddha fashioned by a novice carver
and older than I remembered
he settled into the great chair across from mine
enjoying my coffee and the glow from my fire.
We talked of family and friends and familiar places
before we moved into the sanctuary of the mind
where nothing else existed but the two of us.
In the narthex of that place we paused
to drop and leave behind the garments of the day
and stepped into the nave to wait.
The dove of intimacy doesn’t descend at once
but shows itself by sound of fluttering first,
a kind of teasing bird, or shy.

Joe said, I think you should know, my friend,
I’ve lost my faith.” Only that, then silence.
“In what?” I said, which wasn’t an adequate question.

He said he found it impossible to believe
in what he had been trying for seventy years
to know for certain beyond a shadow of a doubt.
He said that when he knocked on doors
he had expected to open
he found them to be doors to nowhere,
if they were doors at all.

“What about the ideas, the books?” I said.
“What about your ordination?”
I wanted to say, “What about God?”
Instead I said, “I love you.”
And he said, “That’s the only door there is.”