Redeeming the Time
Frederica Mathewes-Green
The following was adapted from the author’s response to a talk by David Mills entitled “Cultivating the Catholic Imagination,” given at Touchstone’s 1996 conference, “In the World: The Gospel of the Resurrection in a Culture of Death.”
An early draft of David’s talk had a lengthy section dwelling on a Raymond Carver short story titled “The Small Good Things.” In this story a couple order a birthday cake for their son, Timmy, and then the child is struck by a car. Things seem all right for a few days, but then Timmy collapses at school and is taken to the hospital. The parents naturally are so caught up in all this that they forget to pick up the cake. The baker becomes irate over this—he’s finished the cake and hasn’t been paid, feels he’s been cheated—and begins leaving angry, anonymous phone messages for the parents, including the question, “Don’t you care about Timmy?”
By now Timmy has slipped into a coma. The parents are at his bedside when he wakes up suddenly, screams, and dies in his mother’s arms. As they’re leaving the hospital, they realize that the doctor has been hinting that they will be investigated for child abuse. They come home shattered, only to find another message from the baker. At this point they figure out who the anonymous caller is and drive over, though it’s the middle of the night. The mother screams at the baker, he screams back at her, until the father breaks in to explain what has happened to them.
At this point the baker apologizes. He explains that he has lived alone for so long he doesn’t know how to act toward people anymore. He sits the couple at his kitchen table and brings out a tray of fresh rolls. He invites them to eat: “Eating is a small good thing at a time like this.”
In the previous version of David’s paper, he had brilliantly used that image of the “small good things” to represent what the Catholic imagination has to bring to our culture. He said that we are not driven by the “great big things,” the ideologies underlying that pale and bloodless (in a sense) search for the thing that will set all the world right. How bloody that bloodless search turns out to be, as millions die in the path of it. But we as sacramental people can appreciate instead the small good things.
A Small Disagreement
I brought up all of that to disagree with it. It is a not a profound disagreement, but I wanted to take those words and turn them around. For I think that one of the things that poisons our era is not the appreciation of the small good things (which are so very good), but our being narcotized, numbed by consumption of an endless series of small yummy things.
These small yummy things come toward us constantly, like the little chocolate candies coming endlessly toward Lucy on the conveyor belt, as she desperately stuffs them in her mouth. They come endlessly toward us through advertising, television, barraging us any time we walk through the store, feeding our envy of our neighbor’s possessions, and demanding we buy and consume more and more. And you get that buzz, that brief moment of flight, as for a moment you are lifted up by the joy of owning something new, consuming something new. And then it fades and you have to buy something else.
This constant, demanding stream of small yummy things saying, “Buy me, devour me, consume me, buy some more” is what keeps our secular neighbors, good people though they may be, from seeing the only truly great big thing—what Mary was willing to sit at the foot of Jesus to hear, the one thing needful: to know our God and Father, and his son Jesus Christ. The great big thing that made this world and set it spinning, that creates and sustains us all. It is the endless succession of candies, the small yummy things, that distract our neighbors from the great big thing.
So having flipped around David’s words, but still analyzing the situation just as he did, I ask: What do we do, then, to cultivate the Catholic imagination? How do we live as Christians in a world that is submerging into anti-Christianity ever more deeply every day?
Frederica Mathewes-Green is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and a contributor to the Christian Millennial History Project multi-volume series. Her books include At the Corner of East and Now (Putnam), The Illumined Heart (Paraclete Press), and The Open Door: Entering the Sanctuary of Icons and Prayer (Paraclete Press). She lives in Linthicum, Maryland, with her husband Fr. Gregory, pastor of Holy Cross Orthodox Church. They have three children and three grandchildren.
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