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Perspective: Joy's Call

K. Kliche
/
Pixabay

“Redeemed humanity is still young; it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life,” says George MacDonald in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. I can’t shake this image of joy months since I put down Lewis’ novel where he imagines what would happen if people could take a bus out of hell to heaven.

Most things I read online and see on TV bathe me in fear, so much so I have had screaming dreams of flying into space and trees. Be afraid of lunch with your friends, of people standing nearby in church singing hymns, people whose race is different than you.

But joy’s call points to the dull winged butterfly, its antennae so delicate there are balls on each end. It points to Neowise, faint as a ghost in the sky until your binoculars shows its star like a bright-eyed mare with a long, streaming tail. It points to the light stroking blades of grass, and the wind billowing through a hay field. And the not so quiet growth of the corn pushing to the sky from a weak plant to hefty stalks, tassels blooming, ready for plant sex. (Did you know each kernel is a genetically separate individual?)

Shake your fist at the fear. Look for the glory that fills the earth.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

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