[13] "The Theology of Scrapbooking"

The Theology of Scrapbooking

by Deidre Price

I have been hit in the eye at least a dozen times with a flash of light. I chalked it up to refraction, reflection, an infrared something—tens of things that make science look good, the stuff of theories and laws.

My first instinct each time was to duck and cover, to shut my eyes as though my brain were a basement, and all of us, the many minions in my mind, were hunkering down for a storm. My body was Kansas. My second instinct, if a follow-up response can be classified as an instinct, was to locate the source, to take a prisoner.

The easy thing was my ring. Beauty attracts beauty, so light finds it, worms its way through it and pops out, a victor, on the other side, unconcerned with the cost of its appearing, a presumptive guest in enemy territory.

Another guess was a person’s watch, some pestering Curious Rabbit who is late and slinging around his personal clock like a plaything, unaware that light is hitching a ride and spinning off daggers like nobody’s business.

My third thought is more a confession of my neuroses and paranoia. I imagined a juvenile sharp shooter, a laser light striking me right between the eyes, and a crowd erupting in laughter over my face, the ignorant target.

I believe in science, in consequents and antecedents, in the grammar of life.

But I also believe God has taken up scrapbooking and is filling his pages with me.