What he may not see is that he stands in some danger of losing himself in the strangely engrossing business of simply "being busy" gradually he may find that he is rather uncomfortable whenever he is not "being busy." And, gradually too, he may find fewer and fewer moments in which he can absent himself from activity, in which he can be alone, can be silent, can be still-in which he can reflect and pray. He believes this, quite sincerely, and he finds ample support for such belief: on all sides he's assured that he is doing the much-needed job of "waking up the parish." Which is not a hard thing for a young priest to hear he may even see himself as stampeding souls to their salvation. There's a great attraction to this: he's doing what he likes to do, and he can tell himself that it's all for the honor and glory of God. “There are, after all, certain social duties that a priest has toward his parishioners, and if that priest is as I was-energetic and gregarious, with an aptitude for such occasions-these duties and occasions have a way of multiplying. It was only now, in these last months before his death, that the outline was filled in, that without preliminary or explanation, my father suddenly began to talk of my mother as he had never talked before, in words and phrases lit with a bursting lyrical warmth and love that had been stored up and held within him all this time, and that was now released because, I think, he knew his own time was so short, and because he did not for a moment doubt that very soon now he would be joined to her again. This was my father's: the heart of his grief, which he chose not to expose. And yet we all have within ourselves those private spaces that are uniquely our own and that we cannot share. Was this unfair, an injustice to me? It must seem so, and I suppose in a way it was. “And while he spoke of my mother often and fondly to me, he always did so incompletely, in a strangely peripheral way, so that I grew up with a picture of her that was really little more than an outline.
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