Sublime

her quiet creed: “Our faith might cause our light to shine on some other heart which as yet had no light of its own.”

Grace Macaulay – in whose veins ran Essex rivers and Bible ink; in whose philosophy the devils of hell and the saints of Bethesda did battle with her reason and her nature – sat with her phone on the bare floor of a Hackney room and thought of Thomas Hart. Come home, he’d written, you wretched child, and I am wretched, she thought, and I think I’d

She was born a Quaker. As such, she found herself in a vastly different social milieu than other American girls—a world with at least a window open to other possibilities. Her family believed in absolute equality of the sexes.

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

she “lives at a rate and intensity and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy.”

“Her intellectual gifts do but minister to a moral character that is the noblest and best balanced I have ever met with in life.”