Before You Read — A Word About What This Is

There is an older, longer version of this book, and I want to tell you honestly what happened to it, because the story is part of what I have to say.

The first version was a research paper. It did careful work — it traced how the earliest teachers of the Church answered a hard question, it lined up the sources, it proved its points. And it was right. I stand behind what it found. But when my wife read it, and when I read it back to myself, something was missing, and it took me a while to see what. It had the truth of our calling and none of the warmth of it. It explained the love of God the way you would explain a machine. And a book about the love of God that does not carry the love of God has already failed the only test that matters.

So I tore it down to its foundations and built this instead — and kept only the parts a person actually needs to walk the path, and let go of the rest.

Here is the path, said as plainly as I can say it. We have been given a calling so high it should make us tremble. Higher than the angels. And that calling is a school — a long apprenticeship in the very things God is, the things He can pour into a person: His mercy, His patience, His wisdom, His love. We have only just walked through the schoolhouse door. We are beginners, every one of us. And the whole of this book is about that school: what we are called to become, who teaches it, how far down the path we actually are, and the few who walked it far enough ahead of us to leave a map.

I am not going to argue with you here. I am going to show you something. There is a love older than the world, and it has a shape, and that shape is meant to come through you — through ordinary people, in ordinary days, and then, at the end of all things, through those same people made finally and fully what they were always meant to be. I want you to see it, and seeing it, to want it, and wanting it, to stay close enough to the One who is love that He can pour it through you.

I owe you the same honest word I have owed every reader of everything I have written. I cannot teach you this. A book cannot teach you this. Love is not information, and neither is the life I am about to describe. The only One who can pour the love of God through a person is God Himself, by His own Spirit, from the inside. All I can do is point. I am a man standing by a road, saying look — there it is — that is what you are for. The looking is yours. The becoming is His.

And I am not writing to you from the far end of the road. I am on it, same as you — slow, often dim, a mirror that catches the light and loses it and catches it again. If that is where you are too, then come. We will walk it together.

— Michael Winslow