The writing of an autobiography usually comes late in a man's life. At some seventh day of his creative work he stops to rest and contemplate what he has done. Often he has fame and fortune; his genius has been abundant. His life - something glorious, something to be admired, a source of consolation - will be read by many friends and followers.

Raymond York, who was born in 1908 somewhere between third base and home plate at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, has great fame too: he is known for miles around Jersey City among red-headed girls and blue-eyed boys, his students still, who have learned from him life's main lesson: that the truth of life is love. His fortune, too, has been great: for he has been taught the truths of his life - some of them dark, but most of them bright and gay - by St. John himself, founder of the Strolling School of John. His genius, finally, has been abundant: in this work and in his only other book, The Truth of Life is Love, Father York offers a synthesis of revelation and life which is unique in all literature. His learning, humor, imagination, kindliness, all the things that he would ingenuously call his Americanness, are the tings from which true creation is made.

Yet Pentecost Comes to Central Park is not an autobiography but Christography. It is one man's unique vision of "the Blessed Christ," the Big Kid up avoe who writes with red and gold chalk on a blackboard that is the Dodger blue of heaven itself.

The best way to read his works, Father York has advised, is with an onion sandwich and beer if you are celibate; with your red-headed or blue-eyed spouse in one arm and the book in the other if you are married. Best of all is to read this book on some Central Park bench in your own city where, looking out from time to time across the greedwood, you will see Reality turn to face you, and see things you have never seen before.