fine & strong & simple

"I Embrace You With All My Heart"

Below is a letter that the author Albert Camus wrote to his favorite teacher soon after he, Camus, won the Nobel Prize for Literature:

19 November 1957
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.
But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.
I don't make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
Albert Camus

(Thank you, Kristi, for posting this on Facebook!)

I remember having to read Camus' The Stranger in French class, IN FRENCH, in high school, but I admit I don't remember much about it.  But in the years since then, I have learned different things about Camus and wish I had paid better attention when I was 16.  Or read him in English!  Obviously, I still can...think I will add that to my Reading To Do List right now!

But relevant to what I have to say today are those seven words at the end of his note:  "I embrace you with all my heart." Many of you know that I have lived in a bunch of different places – indeed, I think we are on our 13th place to live since we've been married (30 years).  I have made wonderful friends in all those places, and because I do not have a close relationship with my parents, my friends have become my family.  I pray for my friends often, but I do get frustrated that I seldom get to see any of them.  I am here, and most of them are hundreds of miles away.  I start thinking that maybe they've stopped being my friends (!), or they've forgotten me, or I haven't been grateful "enough" for what they mean to me .... etc. etc. etc.  

But my HEART and my SOUL are able, through the Spirit, to embrace and acknowledge and adore these people, these relationships, these memories and epiphanies and confrontations, the love and the delight.  What an astounding thing!  I can trust that God the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit keeps our hearts close, brings my friends to my mind and brings me to my friends' minds, and that IT'S ALL RIGHT.  These are people I'm going to spend eternity with – surely I can wait a little while until the forever comes.

So to all the women and men whom I loved instantly or have grown to love so deeply over the decades, I say this:  "I embrace you with all my heart!"  What a lovely, lovely thing to say to someone and to feel about someone!  I want to have as generous a love for all of you as you have had for me.  That welcoming spirit, that acceptance, that gentle advice-giving, that listening heart, and the hugs when they're possible, the freedom and the trust and the vulnerability – to me, that is pure, simple Christian friendship.

"Everything will be all right in the end.  If it isn't all right, it isn't yet the end."  ~Anonymous