Having heard the name of Dorothy Sayers for many years and specifically seeing her "The Mind of the Maker" on various lists of books that Christians should read, I was excited to dive into this classic with our church book club. Having emerged on the other side, I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I read.
Without question, Dorothy Sayers was brilliant, witty, and articulate. She had strong opinions and expressed them well. She had strong faith and wrote about it thoughtfully. But our group wrestled over the course of several weeks to figure out what to do with "The Mind of the Maker." We discussed whether she was trying to use human creativity as a means to better understand the trinitarian God or trying to use her particular view of the trinitarian God to help her readers understand their creative nature. We mostly decided that the answer was "yes," that she was doing both things, in a rather integrated and simultaneous (but sometimes cumbersome) fashion. But that's a fancy way of saying that many of us couldn't decipher what she was trying to do through this book.
An obvious barrier for our ability to understand and embrace the book was the immense cultural gap between a mid19th-century Brit and we 20th-century Americans. Her literary references were at least 95% unknown to us, such that her points of reference were meaningless (without tedious internet research).
But beyond that, there was a sense from our group that this book was really meant for writers, rather than for Christians who don't happen to be writers. There is no doubt that the art of writing was her consistent narrative thread throughout the book. I was able to extrapolate some of her points relatively seamlessly to the sermons I write, but the engineers and teachers and administrators among us struggled to bridge that gap. I believe that she was making universal points, but she left it to the reader to find their way from her examples to their lives. We had to connect those dots.
Ultimately, what I did gain from this book? I found her framework to describe the Trinity as Idea (Father), Energy (Son), and Power (Spirit) to be fresh and profound and helpful, while also opaque and inaccessible. I found her invitation and call to embrace the creative life that is part of our being created in the image of a creative God to be galvanizing and exciting. I found her reflections on free will and sovereignty to be lively and clarifying. I found her analysis of clamhood to be brilliant and funny. I found her critique of our tendency to look for inappropriately simple solutions to unsolvably complex problems to be timely and timeless.
Like many (but not all) of the folks in our group, I'm glad I read this book. It contained some nuggets that helped me think about God and about my own creative impulses differently. It made me laugh. It made me think. But it also made me grunt, sweat, and mutter under my breath. "The Mind of the Maker" was a tough slog. To reward myself, I think I'll check out Sayers' Peter Wimsey mysteries and enjoy the expression of this brilliant mind in less taxing form.
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