Unlocking History: A Note of Thanks to Dorothy Sayers

I am convinced that I grew up in a parish out of time.

I know that many churches seem trapped in amber, but when I say that my childhood church, an Evangelical Lutheran (ELCA) congregation in Staten Island, existed somehow out of time, I can point to a peculiar array of examples. There was the failure to adopt standardized liturgies, the parish administrator who still used a typewriter in the 2010s, and the community’s complicated relationship to its Norwegian history, despite its changing demographics

Most notable, of course, was the exodus of members when, in 1999, we called our first woman pastor. This was (technically) New York City and nearly thirty years after preceding Lutheran bodies had begun ordaining women, but it was too much for many members of our community who walked out our doors.

Despite these community histories, I did not expect it when, in the mid-aughts, my grandmother confessed to being something of a biblical literalist. As we climbed into my mother’s car after church, I squinted at her, noting that our pastor seemed quite clear on points like “you can believe in evolution and in the Bible.” I posted up several other potential arguments, but she wasn’t swayed.

Today, as the Church remembers the life and works of Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1957), noted writer, apologist, and Christian humanist, the history of such complicated historical narratives – both personal and communal – comes into focus as though someone has twisted a kaleidoscope. Sayers was a peculiar character, a noted mystery novelist, but also a playwright, translator, and essayist, offering a dozen different ways by which to enter her legacy. It is with her admission of her own early historical failings, though, in an essay entitled “A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus,” that I wish to open the path.

Out of the Mind’s Vaults

Sayers’s premise in “A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus,” originally published in the posthumous essay collection, The Whimsical Christian (1987), is as such: as children, we create clear categories and compartments regarding history, myth, and fable, even in the places where they overlap and inform each other. The stories of the Bible, then, live in a secure vault that is not quite of any other time and place beyond the Bible itself. Bible figures had their own worlds and standards inapplicable to ours.

Sayers had long experienced this isolated version of the Bible, which is why Cyrus suddenly shocked Sayers out of her childlike way of thinking. Familiar to her first from the world of classics, he burst into the Bible and the divisions of history crumbled. He’d broken one of those firm containers of childhood.

With Time and Tranquility

I encounter the challenge of talking about the Bible and history all of the time in my classrooms, but it’s not all about timelines. But rather, it is about tone, as Sayers observes in cracking open the reality of the Bible. Instead of the bright illustrations of Bible stories in neatly printed booklets, these figures, including Jesus, had only to slip into messy reality where they didn’t quite seem to belong, and so she plays a game with her readers.

To help us understand “that history was all of a piece,” a notion that Sayers describes as disconcerting, she offers up a fake literary review, positing John as a sort of memoirist-scholar who has, in his final years, been convinced to write down his recollections and sort out any messiness or contradictions in the other Gospels. The framing is smart, funny, and deeply human in the way it emphasizes Jesus’ and John’s places within a community for whom telling these stories had ramifications. Sayers’ faux-literary announcement notes that “Many new episodes are related [in John’s Gospel]; in particular, it has now become possible to reveal the facts about the mysterious affair at Bethany, hitherto discreetly veiled out of consideration for the surviving members of the Lazarus family.” We encounter Sayers playing with time, imagining these Gospel events as though they had occurred in much closer proximity to our own lives. History, after all, cannot help but weave us together.

Releasing the Bible from strict containers, demands that we also set aside the notion of “the earlier, the purer,” according to Sayers. This allows us to accept the gaps and differences between John’s story and Mark’s as much as we might nod along to both sides of the local gossip. Instead of insisting on the first telling, we take our time, pausing “until grief and passion have died down, until emotion can be remembered in tranquility.”

That last line, of course, is not Sayers, but Sayers’ cribbing Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” and is how he describes poetry: emotion remembered in tranquility. Sayers, however, has stolen the line as a tool of history. Stories, she tells us, are messy, and so it is at a distance that we can begin to reassemble them, to understand the continuous yet tangled thread of history. 

As for the poetry hidden in this construction, John, the authorial figure of this essay, makes good use of poetic language as he sets forth the story of his life and times. And Sayers, as an author skilled in a wide variety of genres, saw how much we needed these varied styles. Without the Bible, the classics, and history all admixed together, she could not have seen Cyrus traipsing through these varied tales, slipping through the openings linking them together, nor could she have crafted such an essay to help us understand her bold ideas.

Sayers’ life and work invite us to ask how we, too, can find the gaps in the story of how it’s always been, so we can move into the next moment in time. When it seems like your community has been sealed up into an old way of being, how might you move beyond the surface, uncovering time’s intervention so you can create something new? 

I don’t think my grandmother died a creationist; she changed a lot in the last fifteen or twenty years of her life, but it’s hard to say. The Bible was, in that church parking lot moment, trapped in its airtight container, but it was nonetheless part of a collection that – with time and tranquility – would open up a broader story I think we both could have inhabited.