Graced Resilience - Edward Heidt

In Ed's account of 1965-1966, we have the advantage of his double vantage point, an artist's sensibilities: Ed, in that year of his letters home to his family, and Ed, reflecting and refracted as he approaches sixty years later as a Basilian and fifty years as a Vatican II priest, outstanding teacher, gifted actor, director, playwright, and friend. As person recursively looking back and forward, the Ed we witness there (now) is also the Ed of "here" in the letters, looking back from his nearly sixty-year trajectory made of resilience. In a now-archaic word and a more recent one, both true: edifying and authentic.

Thank you, Ed.

-John Thompson

Have you ever returned to a place that meant a lot to you and you see it and your self's if for the first time? As T. S. Eliot writes so cryptically:

We shall not cease from exploration

And at the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

Reliving that year and that place and seeing himself in them as if for the first time, he realized that he experienced it as Ferlinghetti's "tightrope walker spreadeagled in midair," each step and stance taken toward a higher perch and yet with each step and stance he "constantly risks absurdity."