Remembering a friend

A while back I found this passage from a letter Samuel Johnson wrote upon discovering a childhood friend had died:

I hope we may long continue to gain friends, but the friends which merit or usefulness can procure us, are not able to supply the place of old acquaintance, with whom the days of youth may be retraced, and those images revived which gave us the earliest delight.

I learned this morning that my best friend since childhood, Norman Burdick, died. We shared many interests. We talked and argued, our favorite pastime was conversation. We liked many of the same things, especially mysteries, and an admiration for Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. We also shared experiences. Norm, and his wife, Faith, welcomed me into their temporary home in England where Norm was doing a teacher exchange. They took me to Wales and Oxford. I particularly remember Snowdonia, and Conwy Castle, and the Kilns, and Lewis's grave in Headington (the picture below), and Magdalen College, where Lewis taught. I remember squirt-gun fights in the dark in the basement of Norm's parents' house when we were kids. I remember a Fourth of July in 1969 in Washington, where we experienced teargas for the first time while attending an anti-war concert near the Washington Monument (Norm was in the Army, out of uniform, and we were in DC for "Honor America Day," definitely not opposing the war). There are many more things that come to mind, and that will continue. Faith is in my prayers. So are his brother, Ken, and sister, Linda, and his many friends, former students, and relatives.

Norm was a Christian. When separated by geography, on vacation, in college, while he was serving, we wrote letters. I've saved some of them. This was part of a letter he wrote to me while he was in the Army:

I've been reading the gospels—and perhaps more forcibly than ever before, I've been struck with the pure drama, the unique tragedy with the happy ending, the sheer literary achievement in this play directed by the hand of God.

It is drama and tragedy in a higher form than any play ever written, life outdoing art, or perhaps the art of God outdoing that of man.

In ways, in its high drama and boisterous brutality, the story resembles Shakespeare, and nowhere more so than in the crucifixion.

The complexity of Shakespeare's characters is dwarfed by the sheer awe Christ's words and deeds create. And the others do symbolic actions with an exact rightness even Shakespeare might envy.

The Last Supper, with the presence of the traitor, his existence announced, but identity strangely not revealed, as if he were an Iago or Edmund; the strange scene of Christ praying in the garden, God asking God to let this pass from Him, while not far from Him His disciples cannot even "wake with him one hour" for His sufferings, then the line and transition, the most dramatic I know, "the hour is at hand for the betrayal of the Son of Man." The symbol of the Judas kiss, the washing of Pilate's hands, and the fleeing of all away from Him, brought to its height in Peter's threefold denial. All of this the complete rejection of Christ by man. Then there is the cruel treatment of Christ, the brutal and boisterous humor of the common man, from casting lots for the cloak to the crown of thorns and the vinegar.

Then, after the formal "Tragedy" ends, the only perfect happy ending to a real tragedy that I know—the hero triumphs in death and is resurrected. And it's a tragedy with an ending that means life not only for one, but for all.

And for me, one of the proofs of it all is that it is this perfect a tragedy. I do not believe in some unknown Jewish writer or writers that much greater than Shakespeare: I do not even believe in a mortal man able to write some of the lines of Christ. And most of all, I do not believe in anyone either convinced of Christ or trying to create a new religion, who could write those lines I still don't wholly understand, that render His isolation complete, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

That line in dramatic effect is greater than anything Shakespeare ever wrote. Its mystery is stupefying. And no spreader of any gospel would have invented it; only a man who was there and who heard it, and who felt compelled to tell all other truths would have put it in his account of the one he believed was his savior.

Norm became an English Professor.