Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Writing?

 

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Writing?

(With apologies to Larry Norman)

Why, Lord? Why?

Why do I read the Playboy magazine and drool?

(At the writing not the pictures.)

Why do I revel in the sensuous prose of Updike’s Rabbit

Or the verbal virility of an articulate Senator

In defence of an adulterous President?

I have turned green, Lord at the clever lines

Of the commercial scribe who can seduce millions

In a thousand words or just ten,

Making mass conversions beyond the imagination of

Those fire and brimstone sermons.

With burning ire I read,

(but read, I do, every word of it)

Shourie’s nicely penned slurs on your Church,

The frothy gossip of social reportage,

The succulent phrases of the songwriter

And the many wordy unheavenly mansions of the Internet.

And then, Lord, I come.

With trembling hand and greedy spirit

To read what they have written in Your name.

To drink at the literary fonts of my baptism:

Books, leaflets, magazines, pamphlets of godly intent

Promising enlightenment, inspiration, grace.

And then I weep.

For myself.

For what has happened to me.

I am stuck in the first chapter, Lord.

The first page. The first paragraph, The first line.

What has happened to me?

I struggle to wade through the syrupy thickness

Of pious verbiage and regurgitated righteousness.

I hear echoes of those one or two sermons of pop religiosity

Raised to the power of a thousand.

What has happened to me?

My eyelids turn to stone and drop down

On well-meaning eyeballs.

What has happened to me, Lord?

I stumble through stony paths of our religious magazines

Strewn, deliberately, it seems

With boulders of ecclesiastical jargon and theological thistles;

Words becoming in that fervent moment

Penance for the simple reader.

And then I pause, chastising myself.

Be a good boy and read good reading, I tell myself.

Am I being a spoilt child, Lord?

Have I been pampered by the delectable fare of secular expression?

By the ghostwriters of the devil?

I am not sure, Lord. I am not sure.

Have not eye, mind and spirit caressed the pages of your Gospel;

Your Old and New Testaments?

Augustine, Aquinas, Á Kempis. John of the Cross. Teresa of Avila.

And in phases of earnest searching, Merton, Rahner and Küng?

Have I not relished them all and found sustenance in their words?

Or even in the intellectual stimulation of a C.S. Lewis

And that soul-searching creator of Pepone and Don Camillo?

No. I will not complain like a spoilt child.

I will pray for the grit, the patience the charity

To be able to plod through the facile and most difficult passages

Written for my edification and gain.

I will read on my knees, theological dictionary and church history at hand.

I will. Yes, yes, I will.

Modified from an article published in the Examiner some years ago.