Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

All people will fear; they will proclaim the works of God and ponder what he has done.

• Psalm 64:9

And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear.

• Philippians 1:14

“We have much to learn from Sayers about the relevance of Christianity to people suspicious of roof-stained waters. Having marginalized belief in her own life for decades, she can help us understand and address the cultural marginalization of Christianity in our own era. In fact, something she wrote in 1941 could have been written yesterday: ‘People of intelligence have drifted into the agnostic camp, and the world has become persuaded that it is impossible for any person with brains to be a Christian.’ However, rather than denounce skeptics who seem to have murdered God, Sayers chose to build bridges between Christ and culture, having come to love them both. Passionately believing that faith in a Trinitarian God not only makes sense intellectually but also celebrates art and beauty, she despaired when her fellow Christians seemed more interested in maintaining the status quo than in changing lives-including their own.
“An epigraph Sayers placed at the beginning of “The Mocking of Christ” summarizes her concern about Christianity, a concern she addressed for most of her life:
“So man made God in His own image.
“THE BOOK OF GENESIS (Adapted)
“Sayers’s sly adapted tells it all: Christians have adapted their faith in order to maintain cultural practices and political agendas that make them feel most comfortable. Rather than adapting faith to legitimize the status quo, Sayers encourages adopting a faith so filled with trust in God that cultural change can be joyously engaged rather than fearfully denounced.”

• Crystal Downing, SUBVERSIVE, Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers

This biography was rather “shocking” in that I had read all the Lord Peter stories, short stories and novels.  I had read some other items she had written.  I knew she had “quit writing mysteries” to focus on her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  But according to the author, Sayers said late in life that she had done all she could with the character and what was written was complete.

Indeed, she had started with the brother of a Lord.  He was aided by his valet, who had been his batman (sergeant) in World War I, Mervyn Bunter.  Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, Lord Peter or Lord Peter Wimsey in most of the stories, suffered from shell shock, but he loved to solve puzzles and right wrongs.  As she develops this character, giving him depth and breadth, she also develops Bunter, to a degree.  Then a mystery writer, a female writer, Harriet Vane, is accused falsely of a crime, and Lord Peter comes to the rescue.  Lord Peter had done everything except have a love interest.  The love life of Lord Peter with Harriet Vane weaves into subsequent stories.  With Harriet having a detective’s mind in her writing, she helps him solve mysteries, until the final novel where Lord Peter marries, and Bunter also, and they all move to a quiet home in the country, just to find another dead body.  Lord Peter, Bunter, and their wives solve the mystery, and seemingly disappear from the mystery shelves.  There was one short story published about Lord Peter’s children getting into trouble and the old sleuths having to go back to their old jobs for a moment.  But the other novel ideas remained unfinished until long after her death.

But the Sayers that I discovered in this biography was a fighter.  She was often called a heretic.  She might have been to a degree, but she fought for faith in the true God instead of modifying the tenets of what we believe, washing them down so they do not offend the secular world.

Yes, she would have been cancelled, ghosted, and denigrated in society today, but much of what she fought for are things we still fight for roughly one hundred years later.  She did not consider herself a feminist, but she fought for women’s rights.  She stood in the breach on many topics.  She was not afraid of controversy.

In 1957, word of Dorothy L. Sayers death came to C.S. Lewis.  Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ stepson, commented that it was one of the few times he ever saw C.S. Lewis cry.  Lewis and Sayers fought tooth and nail, rarely agreeing with each other, but she was one of the few women with whom Lewis enjoyed intellectual sparring.  She had the intellect to keep up with him.

I have thought about taking a Dorothy L. Sayers book, Letters to a Diminished Church, printed nearly fifty years after her death, as a mini-series, but I may have to write it, bits at a time, much like how the book was written.  Ms. Sayers wrote various essays, and the publisher took the essays that made a complete thought on the subject of a “Diminished Church” and compiled them into one book.

But then, I also recently purchased another Sayers book, this one published over fifty years after her death, The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers.  Note the preposition.  The works of Sayers are critiqued by Sayers herself, with quotations from Whose Body? to Busman’s Honeymoon.  And the discussion is on a variety of moral precepts, with Conscience and Time & Eternity corresponding to the books just mentioned.

With either of these, it will require a large amount of research, choosing the right paragraph or two to focus on, so that Bible references can be developed.

By the time this post comes out, I will have returned from a trip to visit the grandchildren.  And if I am comfortably ahead of my daily post schedule, I want to revisit one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite characters in mystery fiction.

But I may need some help.  “Bunter!  Bunter!!  BUNTER!!!!”  and before Lord Peter could inhale once more, “Yes, m’ Lord.”

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.