Meditations on The Road

I've been going through a lot of fiction lately, the residual effect of three years of forced theological reading. The latest book I read is call The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The story is about a father and son in a post-apocalyptic America - pretty heavy stuff. I picked it up because it won the Pulitzer Prize this year. Parts of it are devastating, other parts are painfully hopeful.

I finished it last night and have been thinking about the book since then. In the end it is our love for each other, the goodness at makes us human, that separates us from the tide of chaos that consistently laps at the edge of our civilizations and lives. One of the books nameless characters says to the boy of his father, "She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time."

We can't forgot who sustains us, who created us, who came to live with us in the world, and who call us to shine like stars. There are things we cannot do, because to do them denies and destroys our very ontology. Sin doesn't just separate us from God, sin separates us from ourselves.

Remember, it is the breath of God that fills us all.