The Golden Thread is a person’s real autobiography – the sequence of deep, significant, mythic-seeming, remembered experiences stretching back into childhood like a Golden Thread

-thus Bruce Charlton.  Read the whole thing.  I think I mostly don’t know my golden thread.  I don’t see it whole, anyhow–different glimpses in different moods–which is to be regretted.

The golden thread is a secret thread.  It can be described, but not communicated.  Here is one of my glimpses:  it’s an evening from when I was a young teenager.  It’s actually multiple evenings that I remember as an archetype.  We are at our old house in Albuquerque.  It is twilight.  My parents are on the bench swing between the pines eating popcorn from a bowl they’ve popped.  They are laughing.  We children, all of us, are up to antics out in the grass.  The grass is cool, so it must be autumn.

I also remember an early May when I first saw Lake Erie.

* * *

I looked online and found the exact spot, mirabile internet.

* * *

I wonder about the Savior’s golden thread.

I wonder if the gospels are in part the golden thread for the companionship of Savior and the apostles.  They do have narrative, but sometimes the different events seem a little disjointed.  Why this incident and not many of the thousands of others John says they could have included? The answer could be that they meant something to those who were there that we do not quite grasp.