A friend at work lent me a book recently called The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

It’s a short book (127 pages) written by Thornton Wilder in 1927 and I have read it in more or less one sitting (bar eucharist and evensong) yesterday. It’s an amazing little book and the synopsis on the back cover tells you all you need to know before you read:

‘An ancient bridge collapses over a gorge in Peru, hurling five people into the abyss. It seems a meaningless human tragedy. But one witness, a Franciscan monk, believes the deaths might not be as random as they appear. Convinced that the disaster is a punishment sent from Heaven, the monk sets out to discover all he can about the travellers. The five strangers were connected in some way, he thinks. There must be a purpose behind their deaths. But are their lost lives the result of sin? … Or of love?’

The story looks at each of the five characters who were on the bridge, all the while asking what connects these people and why this has happened. Thornton Wilder said that he was posing a question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?” It seems to me that he was challenging the all too common ‘over judgmental’ view of God that sees God as a schoolmaster looking to catch people out and dish out punishment for every and all sin. He was, I think, challenging the view of God that causes people to blame God when bad things happen to them whether that be a flat car battery in the morning or a hurricane that flattens their house. It challenges the pettiness that many seem to think God exists in – a God that says ‘I don’t like what you just did, so I’m going to do this nasty thing to you!’

That is not the God of love that I have a relationship with!

This wonderful little book challenges us to really ask what life is about and what is important. The final words of the book cause me to ponder and reflect:

‘…soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.’

This little book has been an amazing read – why not go find it!