Fiat Voluntas Tua

Ashamed of his fright, he tried to pray, but the prayers seemed somehow unprayerful -- like apologies, but not petitions -- as if the last prayer had already been said, the last canticle already sung.

So at least you know from this passage what Walter M. Miller, Jr. means with the title of his 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. ISBN 0553273817 It could be argued that Leibowitz himself is the protagonist of the book, despite his being dead six centuries before the story begins -- Leibowitz was a scientist who worked on nuclear weapons that, in the early 1960s of the world of the novel, were used to start a nuclear war in which those who survived struck back against scientists, politicians, eventually anyone who was literate whom they saw as contributing to the destruction of the world. And much as the church functioned after the fall of Rome in the fifth century as the preserver of knowledge, so functions what would eventually become the Order of Saint Leibowitz (he "found religion" after the war). Much of what happens in the novel gets filtered through the perception of church abbots and monks as the world builds itself up again and later destroys itself. Again.

Steel screams when it's forged, it gasps when it's quenched. It creaks when it goes under load. I think even steel is scared, son. Take half an hour to think? A drink of water? A drink of wine? Totter off awhile. If it makes you seasick, then prudently vomit. If it makes you terrified, scream. If it makes you anything, pray.

This time, though -- the novel takes place in the twenty-sixth, thirty-second, and thirty-eighth centuries respectively -- the church is able and ready to take the knowledge of the world with them to another planet already settled by humans. Canticle won the 1961 Hugo Award (think the People's Choice Award for science fiction) and it still resonates, especially in an age when we see the world and fear we will destroy ourselves before divine intervention that could come any year, any day, any minute now. Pause. And the English translation of today's title, the Latin phrase for "Let Thy [God's] Will Be Done" can appeal to us even if we're not particularly faithful. As much as we want control in our own lives OF our own lives, we want to believe more than just about anything that there's more to life that just we ourselves. We have to believe that, don't we?

But there was no balm to soothe an affront to professional pride -- then or in any other age.

So much for just reviewing my weekend, although I did finish reading Canticle just before going to church Sunday morning after I'd tackled it for two weeks. It hurt toward the end. Sunday afternoon after church I spent with Martha at Trinity Hospital; we'd already been there two weeks before the day after she fell in a customer's near-45 degree angle driveway and gave her back neck muscles a major whacking. Diagnosed as a concussion yet not knocking her out, at about noon home yesterday with the kids I got called by Martha's oldest sister Malesa and she said Martha stood up in choir and got dizzy and -- this is what really scared her, for it's evidently never happened to her before -- forgot the words to a song she's known from memory since childhood. She was strongly advised to go into the ER and a few minutes later Sarah, Jeffrey, and I met her there. The kids couldn't stay -- they went with Lesa to Grandma and Grandpa's house -- but I did until she had an MRI and got prescriptions.

She has a checkup Wednesday so we should find out more. Then we're home for the evening last night and Jeffrey is asking loudly why he and Sarah (but mostly he) has to go to bed "early", early being school bedtime and Mom and Dad get to stay up! Shouting matches with our kids just do not work, so I break in with how the younger you are the more sleep you need (sometimes this works, I'm serious; I tried to remember how my dad answered me when I asked roughly the same question, but I'm afraid all I remember is the tone of his response) and he cracks deadpan as I sit down on the couch, "Like you do?". Pause. And I laughed, because I walked right into that! For I am notorious for falling asleep on the couch after I get off work at night or in the afternoon or even after I'm home from bringing the kids to school -- still, they could stand to sound a mite more appreciative that Daddy does all this work to keep money coming in to provide for this soon-to-be-less-scant life.

Fiat Voluntas Tua, David