My wife received an address book for Christmas. With the ever increasing reach of technology, the address book is heading the way of vinyl recordings and incandescent bulbs. Our old book was at least several years old and probably more like a decade. We're social creatures and the McKim family "Book of Contacts" was much the worse for wear.
For the first time really, the exercise of copying the old book's contents forward to the new one was very poignant. There were a good many people in our old book who have passed. There have been many address changes for those that remain. Sometimes such a change is positive, sometimes negative.
It should be no surprise to anyone that time passes and that things and people change. Indeed, this time between Christmas and New Years is the unofficial season of auld lang syne. Never the less, the scope of change and loss can be surprising or even arresting.
John Donne in the devotion "For Whom the Bell Tolls" speaking of the universal church and of the issue of human change frames it this way:
"When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member.
"And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another."
Our McKim address book is more mundane then John's but is never the less likewise connected to all the others, as are we all.
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