Sacred Text by Sandy Carlson

Sandy Carlson honored me by graciously accepted my invitation to be a Guest Blogger on the Horizon.

She lives in Connecticut, where she teaches college English, “mucks around with blogs,” and photographs graffiti for the project that never ends, strangeattractions.info. She is also the author of Writing in Faith.

Sacred Text

by Sandy Carlson

“I was in the paper!” my 5-year-old nephew hollered as parents’ home, through dad’s office door, over the exercise bike, around a pile of shirts, and between my father’s chair and mine. I was helping my dad add some addresses to his Yahoo e-mail; we stopped because some yahoos are more important than others. Adam’s joy is clearly one of them.

“I was in the paper for my birthday!” he shouted. We looked at the paper. Yes, indeed: four years ago Adam was on the kid’s page of the local newspaper in honor of his first birthday. “Oh, look,” Adam said, another story: on that same auspicious day, Adam received a free cake from Luigi’s bakery in Bridgeport.

We read slowly, so he recapped: “I was in the paper and I got a cake for my birthday!” We congratulated him as if it were yesterday. As if it were today. Then he said of my daughter: “Della was in the paper too for different things. Grandma showed me.”

My mother saves stuff. “Every little paper they write on, I keep. Goes straight in the album,” she told me when Adam released us and we went downstairs. Ah, yes, mother brings order even to this chaos.

Adam is important, beloved, wonderful. He, like his brother and my daughter, has the Midas touch of the grandchild. He knows this because every scribble “goes straight into the album.”

I teach English, I write, and I edit for a living and for others for the joy of it. I marvel at written language, how little dots and squiggles capture thought and feeling — life itself. Writing is about inspiration, the breathing in of the Spirit. It’s all sacred, somehow. These gifts are perfect when they come from the soul. People care very deeply about their words.

It’s always been my contention that the typo police — those who go as far as highlighting typos in printed works and mailing them to their authors, for example — lack the spiritual depth to accept the whole of a story — the soul — so they go where they are comfortable, to the unimportant, flawed part. They can’t handle the gift, so they linger in the darkness they cast on an error and comfort themselves with the belief that the other guy is flawed, that the gift fell short of the mark. It takes patience and compassion to accept the wounds such people inflict, to recognize that they wound because somewhere deep inside they hurt. They make a virtue of their cruelty by calling it perfectionism. They shut out others.

Over the years, I have worked to figure out which of my mistakes and the mistakes are worth worrying about. I have yet to find a keeper. Mistakes are information from which we learn. Tools. Gifts, in a way.

Neither my dad nor I would have told Adam his big news was four years old. Wouldn’t that be cruel? And foolish, considering the big story, the Truth, is that he is beloved and beautiful, that he is sacred. It doesn’t matter what year it is when he opens his arms wide for a hug, to love and be loved.

I can’t imagine a more fitting post for this Father’s Day. Thank you, Sandy!