Tu Me Rends la Vie — Though I Walk in the Midst of Trouble

George Bowen was an American who went to Bombay as a missionary in 1848. In 1855 he resigned his mission salary and chose to live on what an Indian preacher earned — and he did that for the rest of his life.

He stayed in that city for forty years and died there in 1888. He is remembered in India by a name he never asked for: the white saint of India.

Which matters for reading the page above. When Bowen writes that trouble is numerous and that dreams of earthly bliss get dispelled, he is not a comfortable man philosophising about hardship. He chose a life most people would call a disappointment, and he kept it for four decades.

He has earned the right to say what he says next about freshness at sixty.

The psalm does not say though I walk near trouble, or though I glimpse it. In the midst. Au milieu de la détresse.

It is the same construction David uses in Psalm 23 — though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Neither psalm promises a detour. Both describe a road that goes directly into the middle of the thing and out the other side.

And note the tense: I walk. Present, continuous, ordinary. Not when I fall into trouble, as though it were an accident, but as I am walking — which assumes it is the terrain rather than the exception.

Then the promise, and it is stronger than English usually carries. The Hebrew word behind revive means to make alive, to keep alive, to restore to life.

And the Segond is better than the English here. Tu me rends la vie — You give me back my life.

That is not consolation. It is resuscitation. God is not promising to make the walk pleasanter. He is promising to keep restoring something that the walk keeps costing.

Which fits Bowen's whole argument, because the danger he identifies is not pain. It is deadness. And the exact remedy for deadness is being given back one's life.

Here is the sharpest observation on Bowen's page, and it is easy to read past. These disappointments in too many cases deaden the heart; destroy its poetry, its enthusiasm, its sensibility.

He does not say disappointment makes people sad. He says it makes them numb.

And that is the more serious injury, because it looks like maturity. A person who has been let down enough times stops expecting, calls it realism, and is quietly praised for it. The heart grows a callus over the place that hurt, and the callus cannot feel anything else either.

Poetry, enthusiasm, sensibility. Those are not luxuries in Bowen's list. They are signs of life. A heart that has lost them has not become wise. It has become partly dead.

And this is the line to sit with. People get angry with God for allowing His divine power to be surpassed by the poor conception of a mortal.

Bowen is describing a very common and rarely-noticed grievance: God did not match my daydream. The imagination builds a version of how life should go, and when reality does not conform, the complaint is filed against God for underperforming against a script He never wrote.

And the phrasing exposes what is happening: a mortal's poor conception has been set up as the standard, and the Almighty has been marked down for failing to meet it.

Which is Liguori's lesson from July in different clothes. Le's own words then were my thinking was wrong and I was tired of my winning. The imagination had drawn a plan, and the peace came when she stopped defending it.

This is the part that keeps Bowen from being merely bracing, and it must not be missed.

His cure for disappointment is not lower expectations. He does not say stop hoping, or expect little and you will not be hurt. That would produce exactly the deadness he has just warned against.

He writes: they that go with ALL their hopes and aspirations to God, and seek in him what the world cannot give.

All of them. Nothing trimmed. The hopes are not reduced — they are re-addressed. Taken to something that can carry their full weight instead of something that will buckle.

And the result is not stoicism. Their hearts shall live. Which is what the psalm promised in its own words: tu me rends la vie.

It should be said plainly that this page arrives at an awkward moment, and that the awkwardness is only apparent.

Le is in France looking for a home. And Bowen writes about dreams of earthly bliss which must soon be dispelled. Read carelessly, that could put a chill over a good and happy search.

But he is not warning against wanting a house. He is warning against asking a house to be God. Those are entirely different things, and the second one is what breaks hearts.

And this household has spent a month being immunised against precisely that error — seven separate times, from seven unrelated sources. Home is where I am. Eu mesmo o acompanharei. His secret place our home. Even the sparrow has found a home. Notre cité est dans les cieux. C'est toi qui m'assures mon lot.

Which means the looking can be exactly what it should be: a real search, enjoyed, with nothing riding on it that it cannot carry. The house does not have to be the answer, because the answer was settled in a doorway in Caldas da Rainha on the thirtieth of July.

Bowen ends with an observation and then explains it, and the explanation is the best part.

The observation: wonderful it is to see in the Christian of three-score years, all the sensibility and enthusiasm, the freshness, and glow of youth. Everyone has met one. They are unmistakable and rare.

The explanation: his feelings partake of the nature of the immortal realms which he contemplates and seeks.

You become like what you look at. Which is not Bowen's idea — it is Paul's. We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image. Jowett taught it in July: stand in the light and become luminous.

And Bowen adds the detail that makes the difference. The paradise he looks at is in the skies, and is every day drawing nearer. Everything else a person can look at is receding. Youth, strength, the years, the places lived in. He has fixed his gaze on the one object that is getting closer rather than further away — and a man looking at something approaching does not have the face of a man watching something disappear.