OPENING SALVO: Wreck/Reckoning
EXCERPT //
“I wasn’t raised in a religious household, but my mother told me as a young adult that I might like both the beauty of the buildings and the people of faith inside them; my belief was not required. Imagine, she told me, what it must have been like for peasants in England—poor, disenfranchised, continually laboring just to stay alive—to encounter a Gothic church filled with art and music and the possibility of beauty and redemption.
She was telling me both that my aesthetically oriented, systems-inclined mind would appreciate the wonder of a flying buttress, and that even if communion itself felt false, I might find community there with others who shared do-unto-others values. This rule may have been one of the few laid down in our house, in addition to taking care of one’s own domain and actions. No curfews, no bedtimes, as long as you were being good. No people we could not talk to or messes we could not make, as long as we cleaned them up. No questions we could not ask, no tree height we could not climb to, no places we could not go unless we veered into the territory of the unkind.”
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