Foreword
FOREWORD
In spite of strong movements in the past few decades, I suspect that what an editor told Dorothy Sayers half a century ago in Britain may apply even now in America: “Our public do not want to be admonished by a woman.”
Most of the time I don’t want to be admonished by anybody. I’d rather just do what feels good without being told it isn’t a good thing to do. When people ask how I feel about an issue, it would be easier simply to answer the question instead of getting down to brass tacks and trying to think about it. I find that my feelings generally change after I’ve thought about something, and even if they don’t I’m convinced that thinking rather than feeling should determine my actions.
Here are essays on great themes—Hope, Truth, Freedom, and such. There are essays on lesser themes—nostalgia, boredom, spontaneity. They rise from the everyday life of one individual who tries to see things, to understand things, to learn from them.
I try to interpret the meaning of the visible in terms of the Invisible, for it is on that level that all things find their ultimate meaning. As a Christian I believe that all my problems are theological ones—that is, that all have meaning on a level much higher than the level on which I live my life. This idea, of course, is anything but new. It is what Christians have always believed, but many of us do not always live and act as though we believe it. I remember once asking somebody whether he believed a certain thing. “Not specially,” was his answer.
I am trying to believe “specially”—in a way, that is, that radically affects everything I do every day of every week. It does make a difference to me that the God who created, names, and numbers the stars in the heavens also numbers the hairs of my head. Such a triviality! I drop quite a few of them in the wastebasket every morning—but God counts them. It makes a difference to me that the God who ordained (which means set in place) the sun, the moon, and all the galaxies, also ordained a worm—to teach a prophet a lesson. He pays attention to very big things and to very small ones. What matters to me matters to Him, and that changes my life.
“You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal possession,” wrote St. Peter, a man who knew quite a bit about anxieties.
The writer to the Hebrew Christians reminded them of Old Testament times when the people of God had a tabernacle in the wilderness, “a holy place in this world for the eternal God” (Hebrews 9:1 PHILLIPS). He mentioned ordinary things—a lamp, a table, loaves of bread, curtains—and extraordinary things: a golden altar and an ark, the cherubim of glory, the mercy seat. But all were visible and tangible, and all were “full of meaning.”
My house, my kitchen, my desk, my very body are meant to be holy places in this world for the eternal God. It is from this vantage point that I write.
Because the pieces were written over a period of years, there are occasional irregularities—inevitable repetitions, and the use of tenses which no longer apply, for example when I speak of my mother in the present tense, although she died in 1987. I have made no attempt to expunge or alter these.