Letter To A Six-Year Old

Preachers, teachers, writers, musicians, artists and anyone one else who deals in ideas have one thing in common: they steal liberally. Some try to make it look like they don’t. Some do it better than others. But whether done well or not, and regardless of any admission; everyone knows that stealing is part of the game.

How do I know this? As a member of a few of those categories, I admit that I steal. A lot. Most of my best teaching ideas come from other teachers, whose activities I “borrow” and implement in my classroom. Preaching? Yeah, I do that too, and am not ashamed to use insights from other people to help out my own message.

Most of the time I call it “inspiration,” but sometimes, as is the case with this column, I admit that someone else had a better idea that I can’t top; so I call it stealing.

In the April 22nd edition of The Telegraph, columnist Damian Thompson tells the story of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, who received a letter from a 6-year-old Scottish girl named Lulu.

Lulu wrote a letter to God for an assignment in her class that asked “Dear God, who invented you?”

Lulu’s father, Alex, sent her letter to several church leaders and either received no response, or theologically complex responses. But Archbishop Williams’ letter stood out to Alex because of its simplicity and thoughtfulness.

He wrote:

Dear Lulu,

Your dad has sent on your letter and asked if I have any answers. It’s a difficult one! But I think God might reply a bit like this –

‘Dear Lulu – Nobody invented me – but lots of people discovered me and were quite surprised. They discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn’t expected.

Then they invented ideas about me – some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible. From time to time I sent them some hints – specially in the life of Jesus – to help them get closer to what I’m really like.

But there was nothing and nobody around before me to invent me. Rather like somebody who writes a story in a book, I started making up the story of the world and eventually invented human beings like you who could ask me awkward questions!’

And then he’d send you lots of love and sign off.

I know he doesn’t usually write letters, so I have to do the best I can on his behalf. Lots of love from me too.

+Archbishop Rowan

I wish I had come across this letter first so I didn’t have to steal it. But, as it turns out, so did Thompson, who stole it from the Times where it was written by Alex, who is himself a journalist for a Scottish newspaper. If we wanted to get technical, we could say that Alex actually stole the story from Lulu and Williams.

Regardless of originality or lack thereof – Williams’ response deserves to be retold.

Short URL: http://osawatominews.com/?p=1156

Posted by admin on May 4 2011. Filed under Jeremy Gulley. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry