“Now I Paul myself beseech you, by the mildness and modesty of Christ, who in presence indeed am lowly among you, but being absent, am bold toward you. But I beseech you, that I may not be bold when I am present, with that confidence wherewith I am thought to be bold, against some, who reckon us as if we walked according to the flesh.”—2 Corinthians, 10: 1-2 (Douay-Rheims Version)
He wrote with a boldness, passion and expression of spirit shared raw and bare, with those whom read. In his writings, one sensed machismo and bravado of a man living for the glory of self-experience.
But, whenever he was present, he lived different.
He was quiet, deferential, with a kindness in consideration to learn and listen to another. He was not the passions of his written words. He showed tempered, purified, as if the writings were medium for the expurgation of weaker elements for the refinement and strengthening of a spirit.
In small attentions, and even subtler acts, one held witness to the means by which he affected worlds; and when she thought of how he wrote—all that he had shared—she understood that he had guided her own world to shift.
The change was a witnessed openness to love. Though answered, lived, and given more completely by another, it was he that opened her heart to possibility: an absurdity in bold words of a meek man that led her to believe again in good and selflessness souls.
He wrote with an avarice for life lived in passion and abandon for corporeal experience. Yet, in living presence, he was otherwise.
His desires, if there, lived tempered; and his passion, discerned, expressed from eyes that glowed in light of a different love.