For the record, I believe in miracles—real, honest-to-God miraculous events of supernatural authorship. For me, 1971 was a year for such miracles.
It was a year for miracles I witnessed with my own eyes and experienced in my own heart. Miracles that combined to restore hope when hope was gone, miracles that unseated triumphant sorrows and replaced them with joy, and miracles that breathed life into a despondent heart that was near giving up.
True miracles are sometimes delivered, and often foretold, by the most unlikely messengers. Once, in 1971, the messenger came to me disguised as a wry-witted Welsh scholar of diminutive physical stature. A leprechaun-like figure, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and magic in his words.
I first met Gareth Morgan in the hot summer of 1971. I judged him to be in his forties or early fifties, and I was twenty.
Gareth was a brilliant man. An Oxford educated scholar, a member of the classics faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, and a teacher of Latin and Greek without peer. He was the backbone of an all-star faculty that made the UT Classics Department the envy of the academic world—a faculty not only dedicated to research and writing, but to teaching as well.
I was a third-year classics student, newly arrived in Austin, and I recognized how fortunate I was to be in that unique time and place where the titans of my field of study were all assembled. But, there was something wrong in my life, something elementally and viscerally wrong, something which rendered all else a nullity, of no value nor consequence at all. My heart was not in Austin. It was a thousand miles away.
Dr. Morgan was teaching his intensive Latin translation program that summer, and I sat in the first chair at the front of the classroom, in the row nearest the window. Every day I shared an ashtray with a fellow student named Jim who sat directly across from me, and together we sweated and smoked, wore erasers down to nubs, and shared notes and fragments of translation in an effort to keep up with Gareth’s pace. If nothing else, the program was, indeed, intense.
Occasionally, I would glance out the window toward the UT Tower and imagine myself standing on the observation deck at the top of that landmark structure. I imagined that from such a lofty vantage point I could see all the way back to Georgia. At least once a week I would ride the elevator to the top, step out onto the walkway and look toward the east.
Though the horizon met the sky in a humid haze only tens of miles from where I stood, it is a miraculous panorama of memories that the mind can bring into the eye. Secret places in a secluded park, the back corner booth in a small cafe hidden away in a less trafficked part of town, and the precious calm of moments sitting together in my car, lost among hundreds of cars on the upper levels of some downtown parking garage. These images and a thousand others I could see, looking eastward from atop the tower.
Often at night I would lay upon the roof of the aging private dormitory that was temporarily my home. The near unbearable summer heat combined with a restlessness to drive me from my room. I watched the moon pass across the sky and wished upon the stars. I listened to the sound of foot traffic on the street below and the rock music that continually blared from the combination laudrymat-pool hall just across the way.
My heart was not in Austin. It was a thousand miles away.
I heard from almost no one during that hot summer, no word from the world beyond the microcosm of the Classics Department and the Guadalupe Drag. The days dragged on, and a lonely summer slowly drew to a close. The sun disappeared over the hill country horizon, and the smell of autumn, then the approaching winter, swirled everywhere in the air.
I bought a new pair of shoes in October, and two striped shirts, one green, one red. I went to classes each morning and studied each night. Gareth graded my Latin quiz papers, and wrote witty notes in the margins. He called on me in class often, and from time to time I would attend noonday readings he hosted in his office. Though it could not have been true, it sometimes felt as though his choice of texts for these daily socials were specially selected to speak to me.
One morning in November, as I entered his classroom and took my usual seat near the window, Gareth called to me and asked if I could spare him a moment after class. I could not imagine if it was to be some honor or reprimand that he had in mind for me. The former seemed unlikely. I tried to put it from my mind and fix my attention upon the text before us that day. But, as the end of class approached, I could not help but wonder what might be on his mind.
As the classroom emptied and the balance of the class filed into the hallway of Waggener Hall, I remained in my seat. Meanwhile, Gareth was collecting his books and papers, arranging them in his leather satchel with the precision of a watchmaker. When the last student had cleared the doorway he spoke to me.
“Do we have a photograph of her?” he asked.
I could not imagine what he meant. A photograph of whom? I did not answer immediately, searching my mind for his meaning.
“You know very well,” Gareth chided me. “The young woman you bring to class every day. She’s been attending my classes for months, and I should like very much to see her.”
I stood up from my chair, pulled my wallet from my hip pocket and removed a photograph from the plastic sleeve that protected it. I walked a few steps toward him, and he took the picture from my hand.
“Oh, she is lovely,” he responded, holding the photo nearer and studying it with genuine interest. “When am I to meet this beauty?”
I could not respond, and my heart fell heavy at the question.
He returned the photo as he lifted his satchel from the desk, and I turned toward my desk to retrieve my books. Gareth waited for me at the door, and we left the room together, walking alongside one another down the hallway toward his office and my exit.
As we neared Gareth’s office, looking across at me with his ever cheerful and optimistic face, he spontaneously began to recite in Greek the closing lines of Euripides’ Andromache—the very lines that had come to mean so very much to me and the girl in the photo long before Austin. Words that were themselves a hope we had shared, a verse we had carried in our hearts as we’d looked expectantly for a miracle.
Past our understanding the ways of heaven.
The gods accomplish the unforeseen.
What all awaited fails of achievement,
While God arranges what none can dream.
With that he patted my left shoulder and left me, disappearing through his office door.
I left Waggener Hall that morning with a smile on my face. As I walked across the campus, then up Guadalupe Street toward my room, I began making plans. Big plans. Bigger plans than I had ever made before.
I did not know how, I did not know when. I did not know for certain, but I knew in my heart that miracles were yet possible.
Miracles. Real supernatural miracles. Those times when God truly does arrange what none could dream.
Photo Credit: Kumar Appaiah
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It is so easy to become discouraged and to forget God’s promises. We need to always surround ourselves with people who will remind us of God’s work in our lives, and we need to remind others who are worried and are losing hope. There is an old hymn I love called “Standing On The Promises.” We only sing it in church once or twice a years, but every time we do I am reminded of something I too often forget.
I remember Dr. Morgan well from the late 1970s. Leprechaun-like would be a fair description, but he wasn’t always the most benevolent grader. His classes were hard to pass. Still, everybody liked him and those failing grades never seemed to be personal.