From time to time, I will share a snippet of the current book I am reading that really grabs my attention. This one is from the National Book Award Winner Let the Great World Spin by Colum Mccann.
Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. He would have been rejecting faith.
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth–the filth, the war, the poverty–was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.
“Someday the meek might actually want it,” he said.
#1 by Deb Seaton on December 15th, 2009
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Scott, I am always reliant on this fact: you will find what is good and beautiful in the world. You would say that in my perceiving you thus, I “see God in you.” I would say similar, except I would say “I see the god in you.”
Meaning, we are all capable of great good and great evil. You wish to be more than the sum of your parts, more than the nature of man’s black heart. In that striving to be more than merely human, you achieve deification of your own. It’s not another god I see in Scott. I see Scott’s own godhood.
Funny how perspective makes all the difference, no?
#2 by Scott on December 15th, 2009
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You are waaay too kind. I think we all fight that battle between the sacred and profane in our lives. Corrigan, in this novel, is a good microcosm of that. I will writing more on this book when I am done.
#3 by Deb Seaton on December 15th, 2009
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I don’t think it’s me being kind. You choose to look for that stuff. I don’t. I just see what I see. I try to effect positive change where and when I can, but by and large it’s wasted effort. I allow those failures to jade me, and it affects my world view. You don’t suffer from that. Again, you would say it’s an otherworldly influence. I just think it speaks to your mettle.