Letters to God found washed ashore
November 03 2006 at 10:48AM
Atlantic City, New Jersey - Some of the letters are comical (a man asking God to let him win the lottery, twice), others are heartbreaking (a distraught teen asking forgiveness for an abortion, an unwed mother pleading with God to make the baby's father marry her). The letters - about 300 in all, sent to a New Jersey minister - ended up dumped in the ocean, most of them unopened.
The minister died two years ago aged 79. How the letters, some dating from 1973, wound up bobbing in the surf is a mystery. "There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach," said Bill Lacovara, who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted a flowered plastic shopping bag and retrieved it. "This is just a hint of what really happens.
'A lot of struggle'
"How many letters like this all over the world aren't being opened or answered?" Many of the letters were addressed to the Reverend Grady Cooper, though many more simply said "Altar". According to the text of several of them, they were intended to be placed on a church's altar and prayed over by the minister, the congregation or both. Some were neatly written in script on white-lined paper, others in a feverish scrawl on tattered scraps of paper or note cards.
Many were crinkled from being in the water and then dried out after Lacovara fished them out of the sea. A dog-eared business card inside one of the letters identified Cooper as associate pastor of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Jersey City. A woman who answered the phone at the church office confirmed Cooper once was a minister there, and had died nearly two years ago. The current pastor did not return several calls. Other documents in the bag, including bank statements, listed Cooper's name and an address for him in Jersey City.
A death certificate was issued in 2004 for a Grady Cooper.Lacovara speculated that someone cleaning out Cooper's home found the letters and threw them on the beach in Atlantic City, about 160km from Jersey City."I guess rather than just throw them in the garbage, maybe they thought they'd set them out to sea to bless these people," he said. Lacovara said he is sad that most of the writers never had their letters read. But he hopes to change that soon: He is putting the collection up for sale on eBay. - Sapa-AP
This article was originally published on page 4 of Daily News on November
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