Things That Matter Most: Essays on Home, Friendship, and Love

By Christopher de Vinck

Have you forgotten how wondrous life can be? Christopher de Vinck offers a timeless collection of wisdom on family, childhood, God, love, compassion, buttered toast, snowmen, Hamlet, Bugs Bunny, bees.  

For anyone who is caught up in the hustle and bustle of life, weary and perhaps a little jaded by all that seems wrong in the world, this is a book that helps us to see again. 

In essays that are warm, evocative, and often amusing, Christopher De Vinck gives us back the eyes of a child, the fresh vision of delight, and a renewed reminder that we are surrounded with awe that we often take for granted. This is a book about living with a perpetual array of treasures: the voices of people we love, the taste of marzipan, the sounds of October geese. This is a book that reminds us to look, smell, see, touch, and listen to what is revealed to us each morning. Chris invites us to realize life as we live it, every minute.

Reflecting on the joys of family, writing, and education, Chris doesn’t shy away from loneliness, disappointments and regrets. His is a voice that combines both the joys and sorrows of living, speaking with hope and acceptance, and celebrating the power of simplicity in our modern age.

"In his classic book The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry famously suggested that ‘it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ With the elegance of a poet, the wonder of child-like eyes, and the discipline of one who steadfastly pays attention to the world around and within him, Christopher de Vinck’s Things That Matter Most helps us see with our hearts—to see rightly—those things that are essential to a life well-lived: A place to truly call home, friends who sustain and nurture one another, and the love of a God who knows us as children of great worth.” —Jeff Crosby, author of Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Oct 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781640607392

Christopher de Vinck

Christopher de Vinck is a teacher and the author of eleven books and numerous articles and essays for publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest. He delivers speeches on faith, disabilities, fatherhood, and writing, and has been invited to speak at the Vatican. He is the father of three and lives in New Jersey with his wife. His essays on everyday life have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The National Catholic Reporter, and used in high school and college textbooks as samples of good writing. He has won two Christopher Awards, which celebrates authors whose work looks at the ‘highest values of the human spirit’. His essays have been selected three times for ‘Best Column’ by the National Catholic Press Association. His essay The Power of the Powerless praised by, among many others President Ronald Reagan, was selected by Christianity Today as one of the ten ‘Best Biographies and/or Autobiographies’ of this past century, which also included the works of C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.

Book preview

INTRODUCTIONΟN

The phrase Kyrie eleison is translated from the Greek Lord have mercy, words infused in the liturgy of most Christian religious ceremonies, a petition to God for his guidance and empathy.

If you combine guidance with empathy, you have the liturgy of love.

What did Christ want? A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another (John 13:34).

What matters most in our world of sorrow and chaos? The joy and stability of love.

We are not born with innate mechanisms of love. We are taught that love is the heritage that matters most from generation to generation.

My mother, my greatest teacher, the poet Catherine de Vinck, wrote one of her most well-known poems when I was fifteen years old in the house where I grew up, the house of poetry, the house of my blind and disabled brother, the house where my sisters and brothers and I jumped into the garden looking for salamanders, climbed the trees in the woods, attempted to sell lilacs on the sidewalk:

Love: a basket of bread

From which to eat

For years to come:

Good loaves, fragrant and warm,

Miraculously multiplied:

The basket never empty,

The bread never stale.

What matters most is the fragrance and warmth of love, and we learn love from inside our homes, and from our friends outside the home where such love is miraculously multiplied.

Whenever I spoke with Fred Rogers about an angry person, or a hateful person, he would say in his quiet, recognizable voice of wisdom, Chris, he probably didn’t have a mother who loved him.

When I was a boy my mother bought a record album, Missa Luba (passion-song). They were songs for the African Latin Mass composed by Father Guido Haazen, a Franciscan friar from Belgium. A choir of adults and children performed their rendition of Kyrie eleison. The harmony and mixed voices, the drumbeat, the rhythm, the passion and beauty of that song have never left me. I listened.

When I was a boy at a picnic I was sitting beside my mother under the shade of an oak tree. She was wearing a plaid skirt, and when I said how pretty the skirt looked she introduced me to the word madras.

It’s called madras. See the square shapes and the different colors, Christopher? I looked.

I remember how much my mother loved the photograph of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux working side by side with other nuns doing the laundry together. Look how they are smiling. I looked.

It is Saint Thérèse who wrote in her autobiography, I have at last found my vocation; it is love!

Each week, when my sister Anne and I carried our disabled brother to the bathroom for a bath, my mother walked behind us reminding us, Be careful. Look. Don’t bump Oliver’s elbows on the door frame. I looked.

It was my mother, the poet, who helped me see the colors in the madras skirt, who asked me to listen to the Kyrie eleison. It was my mother who asked me to look at Saint Thérèse’s smile in that photograph. It was through my mother’s guidance and empathy as she pointed out that I learned about love, that basket of bread miraculously multiplied. Don’t bump his elbows.

Look! Fireflies illuminate the memories of the child in us.

Christopher, here is a glass jar. Go with your sisters and brothers and catch the fireflies.

Fireflies! The glee of catching fireflies, their bodies flashing on the palms of our hands, the entire world for a few moments captured inside a glass jar.

I hope this little book can be a jar in your hands as these words flash bits of light that remind you that goodness, beauty, love, home, and friendships are lighting up what seems to be the darkness when in reality what is dark is just a pause as the fireflies pull in the morning sun for the next day that we choose to love.

I was blessed with the voice of my mother, my greatest teacher. She taught me what matters most, those little things in our lives: madras skirts, songs, photographs gathered inside the glass jar of love. We just have to go out into the garden with glee and catch that light.

Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison.

—CHRISTOPHER DE VINCK

Pompton Plains, New Jersey

Part One

FIREFLIES

WHAT MATTERS MOST

Forty-five years ago I was a new high school English teacher. I looked at my very first students, wrote my name on the board, Mr. de Vinck, turned and laughed. The boys and girls probably thought that I was out of my mind. Then I explained that all my life Mr. de Vinck was my father. No one ever called me Mr. de Vinck, and here I was a first-year teacher with all the authority, an accredited teaching certificate, a college degree, a love of books, and affection for, well, everyone, and I was now Mr. de Vinck.

I looked at them and then I simply started waving my hand in silence, gesturing that the students stand up and follow me. They were reluctant at first. I stood at the open door, didn’t speak, and waved my hand again, inviting the students to follow me. They slowly stood up and followed me down the hall, past the lockers, down the stairs to the first floor, and out into the courtyard.

I pantomimed with my hands the request to form a circle around me, and then I spoke. I need a volunteer.

One of the many charms of being a teacher of teenagers is if you ask for a volunteer, without even saying for what purpose, many will raise their hands eagerly. Such fun.

Bernie was the first one to raise his hand, so I asked him his name and then I had a request.

Bernie?

Yes, Mr. de Vinck?

I was already getting used to that name.

Bernie, I’d like you to make a single footprint in this bit of mud.

Without hesitation, Bernie lifted his foot, stomped into the mud, and created a perfect impression of the bottom of his sneaker. Then I spoke to the students.

We can find the actually footprints of dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago.

My students looked at me with puzzlement.

Seventeen thousand years ago people drew pictures of antelopes and bisons in caves in southern France.

My students were silent.

On July 20, 1969, I explained, the NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong created the first human footprint embedded on the moon’s surface.

I looked at the faces of each student, and then I said, Who are you?

Then I shared with the students that in the book Alice in Wonderland, the Caterpillar asked Alice the same question: Who are you?

I said to the students that in the coming year I wanted to help them all become better readers, better writers, and better people. And then I said that Alice responded, shyly, to the Caterpillar, I hardly know who I am, sir, just at present—at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.

One day, I said to my students, "I was just a kid, and the next I am Mr. de Vinck with the privilege of being your teacher this year."

I told my students that we are an accumulation of events and emotions, experiences and sensations, and we can know ourselves by looking at our own personal stories.

Here is Bernie’s footprint, I pointed. There will never be another person like Bernie.

Bernie smiled. His friends hooted and whistled. Bernie took a bow.

If you want to know who Bernie is, I said, ask him about his mother and father. Ask him about his favorite food, the movies he likes, the girls he likes. More whistles and teasing.

What we love and who we love says a lot about who we are. I told the students about a shy poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, who loved geraniums and roses. Emily Dickinson loved to write poetry about the slant in the light, a fly, grazing grain, and she wrote about death and love, silence and eternity. She wrote about dreams and immortality. Emily left her footprint on the earth through her poems.

So I told my students that September morning that we were going to read novels, poems, plays, and throughout the year I was going to ask them if they could find themselves in these stories. "Who was your favorite person in To Kill a Mockingbird? Did you like Gatsby the man? What advice would you give Romeo and Juliet?"

The stories that we read, I said, and the stories that we live offer the places where we can discover what is essential in our lives, and where we can discover who we are. ‘Who are you,’ the Caterpillar asked, ‘and I will be the Caterpillar all year.’ The students laughed.

When we know who we are we can build a life upon wisdom, love, and compassion, and set the footprint of our lives firmly onto the earth for others to find who need the evidence and the inheritance of goodness as a guide for the future. When we know what matters most, we know where we are going.

I looked at the students in the courtyard, smiled, and said, So let’s get going back into the classroom and begin.

MY SPIRITUAL NEIGHBOR

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

—FRED ROGERS

For eighteen years, Fred Rogers was my closest personal friend. We met at the HBO studios in New York in 1985. I was working on a research project for a company that wanted to develop a children’s television program, and because Fred was coming to the city for an interview, the producers thought it would be nice if I met Fred to enhance the direction we wanted to take with our own project.

I opened a door to the green room and there, waiting for me by himself, was Fred on a metal folding chair. He stood up, extended his hand, and said, I’m Fred Rogers. I’m so pleased to meet you. I thought I was going to interview Fred about the ins and outs of developing a children’s television program, but when Fred said, I am so glad to have this time to be with you, I worried that he was just being polite, and that the conversation was going to end quickly.

Our conversation lasted eighteen years. He asked me about my life and my wife and children. He reached for his wallet and shared pictures of his wife and children. We spoke about authors that we appreciated. He loved Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. "Do you know the book The Phenomenon of Man? Fred asked. I shared with him one of my favorite quotes from that book: I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life." He looked at me and smiled. The interview was over. Fred embraced me, said how nice it was to meet me, and off he went to the cameras and lights for his taped interview.

Two weeks later my wife answered the phone at home and said there was a Mister Rogers for me. Hello Chris, I wanted to say how much I enjoyed meeting you. I was startled, recognizing that famous voice and wondering why the famous voice was being carried over the wires and into my house. Fred asked, Do you know May Sarton?

"Yes, I know her work quite well. She wrote a terrific essay in the New York Times about solitude, and I like her poems. I shared with Fred a line from May’s poem Spring Planting: To plant our anguish and make for it a home," and I shared that my parents, like May, were born in Belgium.

Would you like to come to Pittsburgh and be on my program with me and May?

A few weeks later I was sitting on the swing with Fred in his television neighborhood and speaking with him and May Sarton about writing and poetry.

After that, Fred and I spoke on the phone at least once a week, and when email was invented, we wrote back and forth every day. Somewhere along the line I asked him why he wanted to be my friend. Chris, when I first met you in New York, you didn’t want anything from me. You didn’t want my autograph, you didn’t want me to endorse a product or give a speech. You seemed to like me for me.

I did like you for you.

You know, it’s hard to make genuine friends, especially when a person is on television every day.

The more time I spent with Fred, the more I realized that he was not just a friend, but a man with a deep, radical spirituality. Often,