Note: “On This Shelf: An Affirmation of Vocation” has lain dormant for more than a year. We’ve welcomed a fourth baby in that time and, while I have less time to write than ever, I somehow always find time to read. Heretofore, then, I’ll devote “On This Shelf” to book reviews. I begin with “The Life-Giving Home” by Sally and Sarah Clarkson because it is, quite spectacularly, “an affirmation of vocation.”
“The world is thy ship and not thy home,” says St. Thérèse of Lisieux. As a panic-inducing pandemic sweeps the globe, this fact is well worth remembering. We have always been and will always be subject to illness and death — but this mortality need not be a cause for despair. The very doom that stalks us also summons us to hope, for, as C.S. Lewis once so memorably put it, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the most logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” On this earth, the insatiable desire for life meets death at every turn — unless and until we understand this time on earth as a pilgrimage and death as a passage into new life.
Then, even on this earth, we can find rest and refuge. As we travel light, holding the things of the earth loosely in our minds and hearts, cleaving to the Creator, placing ourselves lovingly at the service of the bright eternal souls that surround us, sudden vistas of suggestive beauty will greet our tired minds and refresh our weary bones.
Very often, these glimpses of the eternal will appear, paradoxically, at home.
Continue reading →