I am tired of being told that I can be whatever I want to be.
I am tired of hearing that I can make my own way. I do not want that.
"You grow into your real adulthood and wholeness and selfhood by learning the steps in the dance. The dance is there.
It is already choreographed. The music is playing. All creatures--all stars, all archangels, all lions and eagles and oak trees and oceans and grasshoppers--all are dancing, and the great thing is to learn the steps and move into your place."1
That is what I want.
The world is not a vast, teeming chaos. It is a vast, teeming cosmos. In the Greek, an order. In that order, virtue is not a thing "of use to society." Virtue is human excellence--the highest and best of which we are capable.
I want to find my place in the world and in community, not to be an island. Silly democratic moderns.
"What we human beings need, Lewis would urge, is not the blazing of new trails but the grace to walk the well-trodden trails well."
Amen.
1The quote is from Thomas Howard's essay, "The Moral Mythology of C.S. Lewis," which can be found on this page, or directly here.
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