Strong Meat (with Mold)
A Butterfly’s View of "The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays" by Dorothy L. Sayers
Author’s Note
Plans to weave each of my responses to Dorothy L. Sayers’s “The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays” into a comprehensive essay for a beloved journal were thwarted by whimsy – the technologically malicious kind. However, whimsy - of the serendipitous sort – called me to share both a butterfly’s view - dancing between flower cups in this, a Substack series - and the eagle’s view, available on An Unexpected Journal.
May both entice you to explore the meandering gardens of Dorothy’s writings.
Craving Something…Different
“Strong Meat”, a discourse on time and our attempts to escape it, retreat into it, and conquer it, left me hungry.1 Not hungry in the sense of un-full, but hungry for something with a different taste. Like when we eat a sweet, gooey, strawberry jam sandwich, but we really craved a salty, crunchy, garlic-enhanced pickle.
It was her need to turn evil to good - out of necessity through time - that scratches at my taste buds.2 The jelly, in this case, is mango to which I am allergic, having experienced the allergen of evil more than once in my life. I find no reason, biblically nor logically, to deny evil’s full stature as evil, even if some good does come out of it.
She (nearly?) contradicts her own statement on the issue - that two opposites cannot be true in one space - in a previous paragraph when she writes of denying the reality of two concepts of simultaneous time, ex. “God is the Ancient of Days and the I AM”.3 God can be then and now and later. God does not need to be only today to not be of yesterday or of tomorrow
Evil can be evil and good can be good and evil does not need to change to good to baptize its presence.
Newbie on the Fly
Before you reaction negatively to my (possibly illogical) thought process or my hesitation to fully ride the Dorothy train, please remember: I am a newbie to Sayers’s work so I may not understand her point, and at this stage in the writing, I have not finished reading the book. I’m writing about the garden as a butterfly on the fly, essay by essay, only coming back to clean up spilled pollen (general editing) before publishing. But I do think this “strong meat” has some mold.
No Escape
I do agree with her when she says:
“In contending with the problem of evil, it is useless to try to escape either from the bad past or into the good past.”4
Many have tried, all have failed, myself included.
Twisting Evil for Relief
Our views begin to diverge again when she goes on to say, “The only way to deal with the past is to accept the whole past”...had she stopped here, I would have nodded agreement, but she continues…“and by accepting it, to change its meaning.”5
I didn't leap off the train line, but I did step a bit toward the exit, cautiously curious about her insistence that evil can be changed to good, simply by looking at it through a difference lens. I do know others who live this way, but it comes at such a great cost I cannot do it myself. I can look evil in the eye, call it evil, then find a response to the evil that can safely be placed in the “good” category. But I cannot twist evil into something it is not just for the relief of calling it good.
The Tracks Merge Again
Fortunately, I can concur with her that Christ bearing the evil does relieve us of the burden of evil. However, I still say that: He does not need to call it good to do so.
Butterfly-view Recommendations
Read “Strong Meat.” (For free access on Internet Archive, see endnotes below.)
Subscribe to Beyond Xistence. Next post in series: “Allowing Time for Holistic Belief.”
Read “Dorothy L. Sayers Messed Me Up” on An Unexpected Journal.6
Notes
Dorothy L. Sayers, “Strong Meat,” in The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays (New York: Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987), https://archive.org/details/whimsicalchristi0000saye.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid.