YOU’VE GOT TALENT!
In August, Jan and I travelled to Hanover NH to have lunch with our son Robert who was leading a workshop at Dartmouth College. I cannot resist a used bookshop; and Hanover had one: Left Bank Books. Browsing its shelves, I did not find any startling discoveries; but I did come home with an 1896 school edition of H. de Balzac’s Le Cure de Tours. On the inside cover, the owner had written his name (Frederic Edwards) along with the date (March 4, 1904) and the school (Dartmouth College) in that flowing cursive script that pre-dates ballpoint pens.
I couldn’t help wondering who Frederic Edwards was and how his book had landed in my hands back in Hanover more than a century after he purchased it there. So I looked him up in Dartmouth’s online alumni records. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1907 and relocated to Montpelier VT where he taught history and directed his high school’s athletics program. By 1915, he was in Austria and Italy leading YMCA work. He returned to New England in 1920 to direct school activities for the Massachusetts Tuberculosis Society in Boston. A note from the Dartmouth alumni magazine may explain his decision to focus his lifework on children’s tuberculosis treatment and care – “Frederic Edwards Jr, son of Principal and Mrs. Frederic Edwards, died at their home in Montpelier VT on December 19 of tubercular meningitis at the age of sixteen months.”
In 1930, Edwards and his spouse are living on State Street in Springfield MA, according to that year’s edition of the Dartmouth registry of living alumni. I found a reference that explained why he had moved from Boston to Springfield. In the 1936 Town of Palmer report, the school superintendent states that 14 of Palmer’s pre-tubercular schoolchildren spent a total of 317 days at Camp Frederic Edwards, the “preventorium” of the Hampden County Tuberculosis Society, thus explaining the Edwards’ home on State Street, Springfield. I presume my little copy of Balzac’s novel had travelled with Edwards from Hanover NH to Monpelier VT to Italy and Austria; then back to Boston and next to Springfield. How it finally returned to Hanover before I purchased it remains a mystery.
This story does have a point. Every one of us leaves a trace of our lives behind us. And it travels farther and lasts longer than we can ever imagine. Even small actions like the purchase of textbook for an intermediate French class can reverberate across generations. Like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Africa ultimately being the generator of a hurricane in Florida, our words and actions sometimes have a long afterlife. In the mystery of God’s ways of working in our world, we never know threads our own lives are woven into the pattern of other lives, other times, other places.
Our gospel reading this Sunday is the parable of the buried talents. Most of us “bury our talents” not because we are afraid like the third slave in the parable. We bury them because we don’t think they will make any real difference in the world, that what we do or say really doesn’t matter that much. Yet even a small gesture – like Frederic Edwards’ decision to purchase a French novel for his college class – may bear unexpected fruit in lives and places unknown to us. So don’t “bury your talent.” Don’t play small with your life. Everything we do has a way of unfolding over time and space into unexpected consequences in others’ lives.
Blessings,
Pastor Thomas