The graciousness of a great man
C.S. Lewis once said that an atheist couldn’t be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere, according to George Herbert — ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises; fine nets and stratagems’.
At the age of eight I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist, but God had certainly mapped out a strategy to call me to himself through my reading. The oldest in a rowdy family of five children, I sought solitude in books as soon as I could read. We lived in an outer borough of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a bit too rural at that time to warrant a public library, though we did rate a weekly visit from the bookmobile.