A Whimsical Grace

          When the writer Kurt Vonnegut died a few weeks ago, I felt a small but poignant personal connection. My college senior year required independent study project was on Vonnegut’s fiction—which wasn’t an extensive collection at that point, but included such titles as Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Slaughterhouse-Five.

          Vonnegut had that rare gift (often compared to that of Mark Twain) for staring right into the heart of reality and making us laugh. He was a professed nonreligious person who had both a keen sense of fallen humanity and a genuinely humane vision, a kind of whimsical grace. That was why he could be invited to deliver a Palm Sunday sermon at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City and say: People don’t come to church for preachments; they come to daydream about God.

          Not bad for a nonbeliever.

          The experience that most shaped his writing was a terrible one: As a POW during World War II, he was fortunate to be with a work detail in an underground slaughterhouse in Dresden when British and American warplanes firebombed the city. Back above ground, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

          And yet, he could embrace kindness as a possible response to the madness of life. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the title character greets the birth of twins in this manner: Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

          We who struggle in this world to keep faith have much to learn from those who have seen reality, yet maintain humanity, even if they do so with a cynic’s view of the holy. Actually, I have my doubts about Vonnegut’s professed non-belief. In his last book, a collection of autobiographical essays called A Man Without a Country, he says:

If I should die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
The only proof he needed
for the existence of God
was music.

          Not bad for a nonbeliever.

Peace,

Rod