Pentimento

A Word From Our Sponsor

There’s something refreshing about waxing on in stream of consciousness after a pastor delivers a touching sermon or one that hits the high note. But there’s always a part of me that feels like sharing the ideas that I blog is partially rooted in having to borrow unduly from the articulate preaching from which they are birthed.

I’ve struggled with a personal disclaimer for this, but in the spirit of what you are about to read, I, again, had to borrow the “words I wish I wrote” from a book by Robert Fulghum, a preacher, entitled, aptly, Words I Wish I Wrote:

As a child, I was taught the Christian view of life according to the Columbus Avenue Baptist Church in Waco , Texas. By age 21, I had things figured out for myself. Or so I thought. Forty years later … I laugh. My reconsideration is well described in the words of playwright Lillian Hellman, in the introduction to her biographical reflection entitled Pentimento:

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter “repented,” changed his mind. Perhaps, it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

To see and then see again … this quality of pentimento. There is a transparency to my accumulated writing. When I look deep beneath my declarations, I see the underlying thoughts of others. As hard as I have tried to speak my own voice, I realize now how much of what I have said is neither
original nor unique. Thought is forever being revived, recycled, and renewed.

At twenty one, I could discuss transportation theory with authority. At sixty, I know which bus to catch to go where, what the fare is, and how to get back home again. It is not my bus, but I know how to use it.

To choose one’s own way. But in so doing, I’ve found that others have always been this way before me. And they have spoken of the way in words I wish I had written – in language I could not improve upon. Not a discouraging realization at all, but the recognition of great companionship.

I absolutely am indebted to the great preaching heard at Mt Zion which provides ALL the pentimento underlying what anyone reads … reworded … in these pages.