Last night we watched a marvelous documentary on the life of Eugene Walter, a native Mobilian, best known for his poems and short stories and his novel The Untidy Pilgrim. He was one of those rare souls whom we encounter along the way who refuses to live life conventionally. He was an artist at heart; one of bursting imagination, a musician, painter, poet, novelist, critic, essayist, a gourmet cook, and raconteur extraordinaire. He ran away from home at an early age, barely finished high school, but his genius was undeniable. In World War Two he enlisted and was sent to the Aleutian Islands as a cryptographer, coding and decoding messages. After the war he moved to Paris and was instrumental in establishing the prestigious Paris Review at which he wrote essays on the works of such luminaries as Isak Dinesen, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and others. He learned French and Italian fluently and effortlessly. He later moved to Rome financed by a wealthy heiress and continued his writing. There he struck up an acquaintance with Federico Fellini and assisted him in translating many of his films into English; he even played cameo roles in several Fellini films. He loved to tell tales of the South; of Mobile Bay, tales of characters he knew and admired; he loved to throw lavish parties purely to just celebrate life. He was always out of money, and relied unapologetically on the generosity and kindness of his friends. He finally returned to his beloved Mobile about which he said did not really belong to North America, but was more akin to a Caribbean paradise. He loved the architecture, the food, the drink, and his friends. He died here in 1998.
Eugene Walter, so much like other such sojourners, characters of genius whom we encounter, are really strangers in a strange land. They live on the margins of convention, perhaps not so much out of choice, but probably because they are compelled to do so. It is an unavoidable calling for them to observe life as it truly might be and report upon it to the ones who can’t see it for all the clutter of our tightly held conventions. They are our prophets, whom for many are at best irrelevant or worse, crazed; but we ignore them at our peril.To live into one’s genius is to live close to one’s true nature. Not all of us have the grand visionary genius that stands out so prominently in the likes of Eugene Walter, but all of us are born with an innate genius that knows the truth when we see it or hear it, knowledge from the source….and it most usually comes to us in surprising ways….not in the ways of convention….but on the wings of prophecy brought to us from the mysterious margins of life, by strange and mysterious couriers….So our role as people of faith and conscience is to “keep awake,” pay attention, for truth lies in wait to spring upon us.
I’m sure Eugene Walter had his many faults, a dark side, like all of us, and because of his heightened genius I suspect a more intense dark side… but such is the life of a prophet… His eyes could pierce the mists of modern convention; he could see and name the beauty and truth that lovingly surrounds us….in art, in the life of the imagination, in hospitality….He could see and name beauty and truth that is always present, pervasive. And he chose to give himself to it, heart and soul. In our gospel reading for this Sunday Jesus Insults a Syro-phoenician woman, she not a Jew, but a former mortal enemy of the Jews, who has asked him to heal her daughter. He calls her a dog, a racial slur to be sure….and then he gets his dose of truth from this surprising prophet: that God even feeds the dogs….Jesus is called out, and is in essence converted….That is a Jesus I can relate to….One who sometimes fails to see, but lives in a predisposition to be open to the truth. That is our true nature as humans:….to live open to the truth, and to expect it in surprising ways…..and know that it will set us free, and to celebrate with heart and soul such precious freedom….and remember finally to make sure we show hospitality to the stranger, the ones from the margins who show up among us, because as the writer of Hebrews tells us…we may just be entertaining angels unawares.
