Just two pages before in A Year, on November 27, there is an excerpt from The Problem of Pain that really struck home with me as a writer. Writing of the mighty spirits God made we call angels, Lewis described some of them them as wanting to have a place, a life of their own in which they would take care of their own pleasure and security. In return these angels "would pay some reasonable tribute to God in the way of time, attention, and love, but which, nevertheless was theirs not His."
Lewis continued, "They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, 'This is our business, not yours.' But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were and eternally must be, mere adjectives."
Perhaps you have to own more than one Thesaurus and write full time in order to appreciate that last sentence. I have wanted to be a "noun" for my whole life. I have been quite proud of myself when I do something I think is good. Maybe it was because of my Roman Catholic education and the Baltimore Catechism. I was on a spiritual point system in which the condition of my soul was represented by milk bottles that were white (good), grey (average) and black (very bad indeed). Life was a continual struggle up the mountain, to do good, to give back to God something I had taken for my own. The more I gave the better shape my soul was in. I didn't easily forget the lessons of my youth.
Suddenly though I realize I never had anything to give. Everything was His at the start. There is no "giving back". I can serve Him, take care as well as I can of the creation that was always His. I can be an adjective.
