The seraphic Mrs. Richardson and I have been reading the 1960 scifi classic A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. each night for a while now.  Walter Miller produced an amazing work in Canticle (one of the first post-apocalyptic scifi works to be published), and we're thoroughly enjoying it.  Yet Miller was a tragic figure.  He was a tailgunner in WWII and helped in the bombing of a Benedictine monastery in Italy.  This affected him deeply.  After the war, he converted to Catholicism and later, apparently, he had an ongoing affair with another scifi writer.  He would become an extreme recluse who ultimately took his own life in 1996. 

Another writer, Terry Bisson, was charged with finishing Miller's unfinished sequel to Canticle (a book entitled Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman).  He had been approached about it before Miller's suicide, and Miller agreed with the choice of Bisson to help him overcome his own gridlock in the work.  Tragically, he ended his own life shortly after Bisson was chosen.  The two never met.

It's a strange and sad story.  As I've been reading Canticle and learning more about Walter Miller, his story has really grabbed me as mysterious, sad, and very interesting. 

Some years ago Bisson wrote about landing the job of finishing the sequel to Canticle, about Miller's suicide, and about how he (like Miller's own agent of forty years!) had never met Miller personally.  In the midst of his discussion, Bisson writes this:

"As I worked, I fell in love with the book, and oddly enough, with Miller himself. I can't imagine two more dissimilar writers. I am definitely a stylist (at least I like to think so) and my politics are materialist, Marxist and modernist. Miller's history is cyclical (nothing gets better) and his heroes are holy fools. He expects little from people, yet loves and forgives them, over and over--which is what Christianity is all about. I guess."

Bisson's "I guess" really grabbed me when I read it last night.  I don't know if he said it with a shrug of the shoulders or merely to communicate ultimate disinterest in the issue.  Regardless, Bisson's guess about "what Christianity is all about" strikes me as something that no person can really be indifferent about. 

If indeed the Christian faith communicates that God "loves and forgives [people] over and over" then is seems to me it isn't something we can say with a shrug of the shoulders...anymore than we can say, "There's a billion dollars worth of diamonds in a shoebox under my bed...I guess."  Or, "My kid just discovered a cure for cancer...I guess."  I mean, you can't just casually say, "Oh, and could you pass the mustard..." after something like that, can you? 

Indeed, Bisson's guess is the very hope of my own life and of the lives of all those who have called on the name of Christ.  It is also, I might say, the only hope of those who haven't.  And that's because Bisson's guess is right on.  It is what Christianity is about:  the self-revealing love of a Holy God manifested in the person and work of the incarnate God-man Jesus the Christ and actualized in the forgiven and redeemed hearts of fallen humanity. 

And, again, Bisson is right:  God does forgive us "over and over."  "Seventy times seven," is how Jesus put it.  Bisson's shrugged-off throw-away line is what the Bible calls "the gospel"...and that's very, very good news!