It is easy to despair when the vicissitudes of life and the entropy of the world conspire. Yet Christ’s Gospel never shines so brightly as when placed in front of the black pall of the uncertain and the inexplicable.
Scripture reveals truth authoritatively. Our best literature repeats that truth in stories from our real and our imagined places. Truth and imagination are, thus, handmaidens to spiritual formation.
I read T.S. Elliot’s Murder in the Cathedral today. The Missouri-Englishman’s works are splendid examples of dispatching the handmaidens in this good work.
In days like these, this line of Eliot gives hope:
“Destiny waits in the hand of God, Shaping the still unshapen:
I have seen these things in the shaft of sunlight.
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesman
Who do, some well, some ill, planning And guessing,
Having their aims which turn in their Hands in the pattern of
Time.”
It is a good time to fill our minds with imagination-enriching books that stir up the truths. The truth of God is infinitely more hopeful than the most calamitous news on earth.
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