Proper 22 Year A - Philippians 3:4b-14 (I've been reading Borges)

 There exists, in the archives of a certain church whose name I have been asked not to reveal, a résumé unlike any other.

I saw it only once.

This was many years ago, although I confess that the date has become uncertain. The archivist, an elderly priest named Alvarez, insisted that the document had been found in 1912 behind a loose stone in the sacristy wall. His predecessor claimed to have seen it there in 1874. A marginal note in a parish register, written in an eighteenth-century hand, refers to “the paper which must not be read aloud.”

The paper itself was unremarkable.

It lay face up on a table.

There were schools listed upon it, honors, titles, offices, languages mastered, journeys undertaken, books written, authorities consulted. At first I assumed it belonged to some forgotten bishop.

Then I saw the first line:

Circumcised on the eighth day.

The second:

Of the people of Israel.

Then:

Of the tribe of Benjamin.

A Hebrew born of Hebrews.

A Pharisee.

Zealous.

Blameless under the law.

I laughed, supposing this some elaborate clerical joke.

Alvarez did not laugh.

“You recognize it,” he said.

“Of course.”

“No,” he replied. “I mean you recognize the document.”

I looked again.

To my astonishment, beneath the words of the Apostle there now appeared other lines.

My university.

My degree.

The title of the first article I had published.

A prize I had received when I was thirty-two.

The name of a professor whose approval I had spent years seeking and longer pretending not to desire.

I stepped away from the table.

Alvarez nodded.

“It does that.”

I asked him whose résumé it was.

“Everyone’s,” he said.

That answer seemed absurd, but the longer I looked, the less absurd it became.

The paper had begun to lengthen.

It passed over the edge of the table and descended toward the floor. Names accumulated on it. Rectors and bishops. Teachers and physicians. Benefactors whose gifts had built churches. Families whose names were carved into windows. Men whose books had been forgotten but whose confidence remained strangely immortal.

Then came smaller distinctions.

Who knew when to kneel.

Who knew when to stand.

Who could pronounce the Greek.

Who knew which fork to use at dinner with the bishop.

Who had been Episcopalian for six generations.

Who had arrived last Sunday.

Who possessed the correct opinions about matters which, twenty years earlier, no one had known required opinions.

The list continued.

I noticed that the room had changed.

The chairs nearest the résumé had moved closer to it.

I am aware of how impossible this sounds. Nevertheless, I saw them move.

No hand touched them.

One chair simply found itself nearer the table than another.

A second turned slightly so that its occupant would command the room.

A third vanished entirely.

“The Romans understood this,” Alvarez said.

I asked what he meant.

“Philippi.”

At that instant the church archive disappeared.

Or perhaps it did not disappear.

Behind Alvarez stood a Roman street.

Stone inscriptions announced offices and honors. Citizens passed beneath them, carrying the invisible architecture of rank with greater certainty than they carried their own bodies.

The parish archive and the colony of Philippi existed simultaneously.

I saw then that the résumé was not a sheet of paper.

It was a ladder.

Men climbed it.

They did so eagerly, graciously, even humbly.

Some thanked God as they ascended.

Beneath the rungs were other men and women whom the climbers did not see.

I thought suddenly of Jacob’s ladder, but this ladder did not reach heaven.

It reached only the ceiling.

Paul entered the room.

I knew him immediately, although I could not explain how.

He was smaller than I expected.

He looked tired.

He studied the résumé without surprise.

“An impressive life,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered.

He placed one hand on the paper.

Then he turned it over.

The room trembled.

The Roman inscriptions cracked.

Several chairs slid backward.

A bishop’s portrait fell from the wall.

Somewhere, impossibly far away, a choir stopped singing in the middle of a phrase.

On the blank reverse side Paul wrote one word.

Loss.

Below it, another.

Shit.

I protested.

Surely the things listed there were good things.

Education.

Discipline.

Tradition.

Faithfulness.

Knowledge.

Even sacrifice.

Paul looked at me as though I had misunderstood a very simple argument.

“They were gifts,” he said.

“Then why call them loss?”

“Because you made them measurements.”

I cannot say whether he actually spoke these words. It is possible that I supplied them afterward. Memory, like theology, sometimes discovers the sentence it requires.

The room changed again.

There was now a road where the table had been.

Paul was running.

This seemed ridiculous. He was an old man, or nearly so, and imprisonment had not improved his health.

Nevertheless he ran.

The remarkable thing was that he did not appear to be winning.

Others passed him.

A young woman moved easily ahead.

An old man walked with a cane.

A child stopped to examine a stone.

Someone in a wheelchair traveled beside them.

Several people had sat down altogether.

Yet no one appeared to be losing.

I called after Paul.

“What is the prize?”

He did not answer.

“What are you trying to reach?”

Still he ran.

Then I saw the hand.

It came from nowhere.

Or rather, it came from the direction toward which Paul was running, though such a thing should have been impossible.

The hand reached backward through the road, through Philippi, through the archive, perhaps through history itself.

It grasped Paul.

Only then did I understand that the Apostle was not running in order to reach the hand.

He ran because the hand had already reached him.

The road vanished.

The table returned.

But the table was no longer the archivist’s table.

Bread lay upon it.

A cup.

Around it stood the people whose names had filled the résumé.

Professors.

Children.

Bishops.

Widows.

The accomplished.

The forgotten.

People who knew the catechism by heart and people who still watched everyone else to discover whether they were supposed to stand or kneel.

Each approached with empty hands.

Bread was placed in them.

No one presented credentials.

No one was asked for proof.

The person who had written twenty books received no more than the woman who had forgotten her own name.

The bishop received no more than the child.

The saint received no more than the sinner.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that each received everything.

I looked for the résumé.

It was still there.

Face down.

I reached to turn it over.

Alvarez seized my wrist.

“Why?”

I had no answer.

The question frightened me.

Behind us the communicants continued toward the table.

Their hands were empty.

Yet each seemed to carry an entire life.

The bread disappeared into their palms.

The road opened again beyond them.

I could see Paul in the distance.

Still running.

Still not arriving.

I thought of all the years I had spent arranging the evidence of my existence into some defensible order.

Degrees.

Books.

Appointments.

Achievements.

Errors carefully omitted.

Failures translated into experience.

I understood then why the résumé could never be completed.

It was an infinite document because the person who writes it is trying to perform an impossible task:

to prove that he deserves to exist.

The table offered another answer.

We receive before we achieve.

The sentence appeared nowhere on the paper.

Nevertheless it seemed older than the archive, older than Philippi, perhaps older than the world.

Alvarez extinguished the lamp.

In the darkness I heard footsteps on the road.

Then a voice.

It came from ahead of us and behind us.

It came from the table.

It came, impossibly, from within my own empty hands.

The voice said only one word.

“Mine.”

Years later I returned to the church.

The archive had been renovated.

No one remembered Alvarez.

The priest who showed me the room assured me that no résumé had ever been discovered there.

I believed him.

Before leaving, however, I noticed a table in the corner.

On it lay a single sheet of paper.

Face down.

I did not turn it over.