Berry's new book ends with the title story A Place In Time. It takes us right into the present (2008). It mostly tells the story of Mary and Elton Penn who married for love even thought it made for hard beginnings as Mary's family shunned them for their entire lives. At the very end of the story, after Mary and Elton have died, Andy Catlett is talking with their daughter Martha and he hears that once Mrs. Mountjoy (Mary's mother) reached out to Martha ... this was too late and was not reciprocated but it left Andy pondering. "Andy had often proposed to himself that joy, the joy of love or beauty or of work, could so abound in this world that it would overflow all of this world's mortal vessels. But that night he was thinking of sorrow, filled suddenly with the apprehension of such hurt and sorrow as might overflow the capacity of the world, let alone that a mere life. ...
...He thought, as we all have been taught to think, of our half-lit world, a speck hardly visible, hardly noticeable, among scattered lights in the black well in which it spins. If all its sorrow could somehow be voiced, somehow heard, what an immensity would be the outcry!
In the silent, shadowy room in the great night he was thinking of heavenly pity, heavenly forgiveness, and his thought was a confession of need. It was a prayer."
Amen.
Comments