The gift of Asher Lev

Dave Long promised a while ago that there would be a discussion of "The Gift of Asher Lev" on his blog, so I took the book out of the library and started reading it.

What an amazing book. It's about a boy who must draw, who must paint, who has a gift of seeing the world in all its detail and all its grandeur and has to capture what he sees, even at the expense of his own and his family's happiness.

The author, Chaim Potok, gets you inside this artist's seeing. He describes it so well that my senses came alive. I was seeing like the boy in the story. I drove to the new hotel housing my health club. Rain pattered against the car roof and wind stirred the green shrubs around the parking lot. I really heard the sound, and, on getting out of the car, felt the cool drops hit my cheeks and saw the rain drops streak down and hit the asphalt and dance upwards again.

Inside the health club, I read the old library book while I worked out on the elliptical trainer, moved almost to tears by the power of this story. I'm thinking, this author is Jewish and his characters are all Jews, but the power of God is so powerful I could almost become a Jew. But then I remembered that I am grafted into Israel. I am adopted into that tree and fed by its roots.

After working out, I stuffed the book into a locker and climbed down the stairs to the swimming pool, with my "Asher Lev" eyes still open. Three people were already in the pool. I prefer it when the water is glassy and I have the room, with its view of the sky and the golf course, all to myself.

I climbed in, and a balding man greeted me, "Welcome to the pool." In the lane set aside for laps, a young man with an egg-shaped face was doing laps, creating major wave action in the turquoise water.

An elderly woman was also doing laps, though in the main part of the pool. She wore a clear shower cap, the kind hotel guests get with their little bottles of shampoo. Her big head, her well-padded back made her seem almost neck-less as she paddled slowly back and forth, her lipsticked mouth serious. The water made her legs seem strangely foreshortened.

On the edge of the pool, a clear, blue plastic container the size of a pill bottle caught the light. Every time the old woman did a lap, she seemed to be fiddling with the little container. Did it have a nose-plug or ear plugs in it? Was she keeping her nitroglycerine or some other pills in there? Then I noticed that she was putting transparent, oblong beads or stones into the container from a little pile. I could hear the faint clatter of glass on glass. She was counting her laps by moving her little clear beads into the blue pill bottle!

Can you see her? Oh, to be able to pass on the eyes the Chaim Potok gave me in "The Gift of Asher Lev".

I felt a rush of tenderness for her. Then I remembered hearing how the rosary originated. In an Advent lecture at my little cathedral, we were told that the Desert Fathers used to count their prayers by moving a little pile of stones from one place to another. Eventually, those stones became beads.