Building Somebody Else's Cathedral

I am fortunate enough to have another vocation, for which I am paid. I work as a caregiver with adults with developmental disabilities. It is not always easy work to do, and it is not always fun, but it is always worth the time and effort. It is always worth the exhaustion at the end of the day. It is often menial, but it is never pointless. The Shepherd of Princes is about this work, and has much in common with it. As it changed from a personal vanity project to this new, better, thing, it also became increasingly a part of my larger, deeper vocation as a caregiver. I would do the work, and come home and write about the work. They were two sides of the same coin, two different shifts at the same job.

This is how it has been with The Shepherd of Princes. It stopped being about me a long time ago, which is the only way it has actually come into being. I had to die to the identity of the author, die to my own presence in the work and my sense of ownership over it. Only when the novel stopped being mine did I become free to write it. I had to let other people read it and speak the truth to me about it. I had to listen to my friends who insisted that I was not done, that I had to rewrite this section, then rewrite it again. I had to kill my darlings on the order of my friends. I am, at bottom, a very lazy person. I would never work this hard on a personal hobby. But to keep from disappointing friends that I loved, I would.

C.S. Lewis says that God’s intention is to bring a person “…To a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.”