This review of Frank Schaeffer's most recent book would come across as an indictment - indeed, it is an indictment, but... - if it weren't ultimately humbling. I am reminded of the sour taste in the mouth, the bitter hard knot in the centre of the heart, that much of today's irony inspires. I remember that I am often the bearer of that very irony. And while I think this site is fabulously clever, I know that it, too, subsists on this same sort of tearing-down of spirit. I will laugh and feel foolishly known, and that may be good in certain measure. But to turn and do the same to others... when will we learn how to speak the truth in love? Let us humble ourselves, recall ourselves and be made rightly low. Remember that I will never know a thing unless first I love it.
Working at the Main Library has surprising advantages. Just now I stepped out of my office, walked five paces across the hall, scanned a badge, and walked under the civic center plaza to the elevator that stretches from beneath the earth up to the mayor’s office on the fourteenth floor. I didn’t have so far to go—just up one level to the utilities counter, where a sympathetic, amused woman named Sue shut down my gas payments. It took less than five minutes. I finished packing up my kitchen days ago. My cake pans were in boxes sometime early last week. But as I walked through the underground loading dock on my way back to the office, I was distinctly aware of the finality of what I’d just done. I would never, from that moment on, be able to bake for anyone out of that kitchen. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a very big deal, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of a certain identity, namely being “the person who bakes a lot”. I made a tiered wedding cake for some friends (because...
Comments
Post a Comment