Dorothy Sayers' Letters to a Diminished Church (I)
[Trivia: At the conclusion of the Declaration of Independence, what three things did the signers mutually pledge to each other?]
I’ve recently begun Dorothy L. Sayers’ Letters to a Diminished Church, a collection of essays published during her career. Sayers was an English poet, playwright, and writer, a friend of C.S. Lewis’, who lived from 1893 to 1957. These days she is most well-remembered with the public for her detective fiction featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, and in some Christian circles for her essay on classical education “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
Like much great literature, parts of it feel exotic while other lines feel like they could have been spoken yesterday. One part in particular, though, felt salient to what I’ve written about here. Speaking on the subject of the Church’s dogma, Sayers writes,
the cry today is: “Away with the tedious complexities of dogma—let us have the simple spirit of worship; just worship, no matter of what!” The only drawback to this demand for a generalized and undirected worship is the practical difficulty of arousing any sort of enthusiasm for the worship of nothing in particular.
I think Sayers would have had some harsh words for the West Point administrators who revised their mission statement to commit their cadets to “Army Values.” Because the Army has values. They don’t value anything in particular, they just have the spirit of value. It’s undirected. Good luck getting young men to become enthusiastic, to commit, and to sacrifice for—nothing in particular.
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Answer: Their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. And yes, they spelled honor without the “u.” Happy birthday America.