Beyond the reach of the chariots of fire

In her poem “A World Where News Travelled Slowly,” Lavinia Greenlaw, in just three verses, practically gives us the history of communication.

First, she talks about how it took letters carried by couriers on horseback four days to reach their destinations. Because of the difficulties of travel, the personal had to yield to the more urgent and official news, such as on matters of state, and so “while the head had to listen, the heart could wait.”

Then came the semaphore, by which through “the judgment of swing in a vertical arm” the news “travelled letter by letter, along a chain of towers, each built within telescopic distance of the next.”

And then the “clattering mechanics of the six-shutter telegraph.” But this “still took three men with all their variables added to those of light and weather, to read, record and pass the message on.”

And finally, the modern technology—telephone, cable TV, cell phone, the Internet—which is so fast and immediate “we’re almost talking in one another’s arms.”

But the speed and impersonality of the modern means of communication raise questions of authentic interpersonal exchange and privacy. “Coded and squeezed, what chance has my voice / to reach your voice unaltered and to leave no trace?”

I remember the letters that I sent to my parents when I was a young man schooling in a foreign country halfway across the globe. It would take a month for the mail to reach my folks, and, assuming that each party immediately sent a reply, the exchange could not be more frequent than once every two months. Of course, I could make a long-distance call, but because this was very expensive and—thanks to our being on opposite time zones—extremely inconvenient, the call was limited to matters of the utmost urgency.

With the wife, however, before our marriage (after which I hardly ever left her side), when I was away for six months in Manila, I had a more frequent exchange of letters, a more constant recourse to the telephone and the telegram, especially on birth anniversaries and Valentine’s Day, the message delivered together with beribboned roses by a young singing courier.

Somehow the letters, calls and telegrams reduced if they did not dissolve the physical distance between us.

Now, if I recall, this was what the philosopher Martin Buber said, that distance is the third factor in every personal relationship—“Where ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ meet, there is the realm of ‘between.’”

When I wrote the letters and made the calls and sent the telegrams, I wanted to close the distance between me and the woman of my affections. In effect, the distance between us occasioned the care and endearment, and became synonymous with love.

For me the triad of “I,” “Thou” and “between” parallels the Blessed Trinity even if only in a tangential manner.

There can be no truer meeting and dialogue than of the Father and the Son, and between them, there can be no greater love than the Holy Spirit.

And the Holy Spirit closed the gap—already unbridgeable before the Fall and after that made infinitely more so by sin—the distance between man and God. Through the power of the Holy Spirit and with her consent given in faith, Mary conceived Jesus, God made man.

Oh, what a distance the Son of God travelled to become human like us. We cannot measure it by light years or even with the help of angels riding on chariots of fire. But perhaps we can get an idea of it from this little poem by a nun that I found in a Catholic magazine years ago when my letter took all of a month to reach the old home. The words come from Mary as she reflects on the infant in her arms: “My flesh is a far country, and in my arms he squandered his inheritance.”