Letter to a Godchild by Reynolds Price

Author:Reynolds Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Wells Cathedral, a thirteenth-century structure in the small town of Wells, England. The three striking inverted arches at the crossing which surrounds the altar were added in the fourteenth century when lower supports proved insufficient to bear the weight of the tower above. The resulting effect of the repair is entirely original, mysteriously startling, and an ultimate witness to human fallibility and resourcefulness. (Angelo Hornak/ Corbis)

In long retrospect I estimate that my subsequent years of work as a writer and teacher may have communicated—to a few hundred thousand readers and a few thousand students—the way in which one relatively lucid and respectably educated man has managed to live at least six decades of a life that (while it’s committed a heavy share of self-intoxicated incursions on others and has broken at least five of the Ten Commandments) has so far hurled no dead bodies to the roadside. I’ve likewise abandoned no sworn partners or children, and have managed to turn up—shaved and sober—in a writing office, a teaching classroom, a kinsman’s or lover’s or friend’s place of need on most promised occasions. My students can learn at least that much from campus rumor, occasional remarks of mine in class, or my published work.

I’ve been especially chary of broaching anything resembling full discussions of my private relations with God in the arenas of either of my careers, in writing or in university classrooms. I don’t see my secular classrooms as pulpits. So for years at Duke I’ve taught Milton’s Paradise Lost, the most deeply probing religious text in our language, and the Gospels of Mark and John; but I do so with almost no discussion of my own beliefs. That’s partly because, by nature, I’m among the world’s least proselytizing souls but also because the particular shape of my beliefs formed itself so gradually, and in response to such personal tides, as to be almost incommunicable if not incomprehensible to others.

In recent years, however, I’ve relaxed a little on the subject if they come to me in private. But I still decline to talk about my private religious experience with most individuals and with all groups. And that reluctance is almost entirely owing to my realization that impromptu speech, in my case at least, is prone to headlong imprecision which I’m eager to avoid. Writing about faith, though, has become a different matter for me—one more subject to scrupulous and exact expression.

I’ve written of my faith in two volumes of memoir, a number of poems, a published letter to a dying young man who asked for my views, a study of the ethics of Jesus; and now I’m writing this new letter to you. Even at Duke University, after more than thirty years of teaching Paradise Lost, I’ve begun very lightly to confess to my students that I’m a renegade Christian and that they might be at a certain advantage in studying a Christian poet such as Milton with me. Wouldn’t they like to study Homer with, say, an actual Zeusian

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