How full the world is of meaning, how pregnant the shapes of cities and mountains, ready to speak. If it is strange, in dreams, to see the same places recur as if there were indeed some dream-world independent of the random flickerings of our brains, then it is stranger still to find the earth itself take on the shadows and lingering, insubstantial certainties of a dream.

Well, let me tell the story, though I doubt I can do it justice. I woke up early on Saturday after a little too much eau de vie poire at Cynthia and Hubert’s the previous night, with a restless heart and a desire to see the ocean, so I walked down to campus to pick up my bicycle. Berkeley is absolutely dead at 7 in the morning on a weekend, and the gray light gave a strange cast to the buildings, of preternatural solidity and emptiness, as if they were the ruins of a departed civilization. Bike retrieved, I rode down Allston or Addison toward the marina, crossed 80 on the new bike overpass, and made my way out to the western shore. Sounds of rigging clinking against masts, someone shouting to huddling, miserable marathon trainees, and as much a sound as a smell, the unmistakeable sea wind. Oh, I felt good, all nerves and muscles. I even felt good after my rear tire went flat down near the yacht club. The moment it happened I had the strange sensation of knowing that it had to have happened, that way and in that place, a sort of presque vu, déjà vu and jamais vu rolled into one.

So I locked the bike to the rack at the Cal Sailing Club, hid my bike pump under a pile of brush, and started the walk back. Passed the marathoners, now walking slowly on their warmup leg; stopped at the Seabreeze Cafe for coffee. As I crossed back over 80 the fog was lifting from the hills, which under those conditions looked like a solid wall of green and blue, interrupted only by the notch of Strawberry Canyon. Left on 4th, under University and through the little shopping area. I’ve been down in those parts, and the warehouse districts to the north and south, at night to take photographs. But never at that time of day, and the strange thing is that streetlamps, like stagelamps, produce a sort of hyper-reality, while morning light is far more gentle and ambiguous.

Further north I cut through University Village, the cookie-cutter neighborhood where UC Berkeley subsidizes the rents of postdocs with families. A happy place, with bicycles chained to back porches and all sorts of plastic toys scattered about. There’s an older section with housing that resembles projects from the 70’s; these seemed darker and sadder, on their way to becoming like the unoccupied row houses at the abandoned naval base on Point Richmond (but they will be torn down before they grow that old). Thinking of Point Richmond somehow expanded my imagination in both space and time, and I felt simultaneously the exuberent optimism of the postwar period, when most of the houses in Albany and Richmond were built, and the subsequent decay of the collective American dream that left the neighborhoods empty of any spirit, dingy houses with a few flowers, fruit trees, and sterile lawns.

I had reached the point in the walk where my senses had filled, and my thoughts began to move independently of my feet and my eyes. Of course, those thoughts were in some way predicated by what I had seen, but it is rare that I can see how. Perhaps it came from looking at the shadow of love (you must not think that the things any age values are not chosen out of love), from seeing that love can build ten thousand houses and leave a million artifacts: all of which can become meaningless and empty to the next generation. One man or generation thinks it loves something; another one takes a step back and sees the fear and shame that fed and fed off that love.

I realize, as I try to write this, that it’s not possible to convey the intensity or even much of the content of the realization I had walking up Solano, of how impossible it is for human love to be untainted by fear and shame. In theological terms, we are required to love God and our neighbor, but the very fact that we are required to love makes it impossible to love: love must be given freely, and the moment one feels that it is required, love is gone. Fear and shame battle with resentment and nausea. Perhaps you do the “right thing”, perhaps you don’t, but it no longer has anything to do with love.

Nor is it possible to convey the full force with which the nature of grace became clear to me (there at the Circle). Grace actually transforms fear and shame into love; it counts what we do, even with imperfect motivations, as good. And at the same time, by removing the requirement for love, permits love. This is nothing short of a miracle, the only miracle there really is.

What one sees from this is why the Christian church (schismatics aside) has insisted, since the beginning, on Real Presence, because if God does not actually transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (or at least infuse it with the substance of Christ’s body and blood), then how can anyone understand that grace actually transforms evil motivations into good ones? And in this notion of grace perhaps one also can see the true nature and meaning of works: not as requirements for pleasing God, but as a means of grace. For it is only by trying to love that grace can operate on those motivations.

I may become a Catholic yet. There is clearly something operating outside of my control.