foreword
In the book you are about to read, you will find a stirring collection of personal accounts compiled by a most thoughtful and compassionate writer. Certainly, the men and women who divulge them are ordinary people. Yet that is not a weakness, but a strength. Even where we may not identify with their particulars, we become, through hearing what they have to say, participants in their ongoing search for wisdom, purpose, direction. As people whose stories prompt recognition of our own bouts with aspiration and despair, they invite our understanding as kindred souls, our embrace as fellow travelers. Thankfully, the anecdotes in Cries from the Heart are rendered without contrivance: Arnold simply immerses the reader in them. Then, modestly and naturally, he invests them with larger meaning by using them to illustrate his theme: the universal human urge to find worthy answers to the great riddle of existence.
No wonder, then, that the book is more than the sum of its stories, more than a didactic assemblage of experiences. An unusually telling witness to the power of answered (or unanswered) yearning, it summons us to new hope and calls us to a reawakening of the mind and heart.
1.
searching
New Yorker, she was unforgettable in her bright red dress
and in her determination to prove there was no goodness in the
world.
My story is a typical atheist’s story. We come into the world with
a preconceived idea. It’s as if we had a pre-birth memory of better
days. By the time I was fourteen years old, I knew the place
was a mess. I was talking to God: “Look, I think I’ll live through
parental arguing even if I am an only child who has to carry it
alone on her shoulders. But those innocent children lying, flycovered,
in gutters in India – I could do a better job!”
I was born in 1934, five years after the crash of 1929, and
maybe people were just gloomy in those days. Anyway, on my
fourth birthday I was presented with the ritual cake and told I
would get my wish should all the candles go out in one blow. I
took this as a guaranteed pipeline to that Person I seemed to
have known in pre-natal days. I instinctively knew you didn’t
have to pepper him with details so, after one successful blow, I
told him to “make it all better,” period.
Of course nothing got better. If anything, it got worse. At
four-and-a-half I attended my first Sunday-school class. Upon
being told where we were going, I thought, “At last, a chance to
meet God face to face.” A miserable Sibyl met her parents on
return. “How did you like Sunday school, dear?” “Awful. We cut
out white sheep and pasted them on green paper.” Organized,
institutional religion never recouped itself in my eyes.
From that point on life was just something to be endured.
There was nothing I or anyone else could do about it. As the only
child of educated parents, I lived in commandeered luxury. It
took only one “horror” a year to keep me shuddering at the
prospect of coming to terms with the immense philosophical
questions that plagued me. During my grade-school years, the
blood-covered face of a drunk who was staggering upright. (“It’s
all right, dear, he just bumped his head. He’s fine.”) Hearing
about new-born puppies on whom some boys were doing bee bee
gun practice. Running into a flasher after wandering away
from my mother in the supermarket. And ultimately, at eleven,
seeing “by mistake” the beginning frames of a newsreel showing
American forces entering German concentration camps after
World War II. My mother and I groaned and covered our eyes,
but I had already seen too much.
At fourteen, I had come to the end of my tether, inwardly.
My perpetual demand to God for an utterly perfect world had
gone unanswered. There was an overabundance of badness
and, worst of all, I was beginning to see that the goodness was
about ninety-five percent phony. Since the age of ten I had been
methodically reading all the books in our house. I started out
with The Diary of a London Prostitute. Other books I recall were
Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the
Grey Flannel Suit, and Black Boy, by Richard Wright. If my parents
were reading provocative stuff like this, they weren't the parent
I thought they were. In fact, these books were in every
house in town. But they made no dent in anyone’s life. Or did
they?
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