Today was so lovely that the only suffering was finding that someone had marked up my library book with a highlighter. This has always distressed me, even in these memory-challenged days of occasionally highlighting texts myself. The difference is that those books belong to me, and my choice of emphasis will not necessarily be annoying others. I have even refrained from highlighting books that I own if I considered the book very likely to be borrowed.
But the previous borrower of this book, Salt of the Earth by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was not so inhibited. Although the book is a delightful piece of light theology—and has already made me love the Pope more—I find myself distracted by the erratic yellow marks. Sets of words have been chosen, so it is unlikely that the marks were made by a monkey or a two-year-old child. But the choices—what is the system of thought behind them? Is there a system? The choice of phrases which are coherent within themselves—“right path” rather than “man on”—argues that thought was involved. Occasionally a new vocabulary word was highlighted (sclerotic), but that was fairly rare.
The following are taken from the page I was trying to read when I paused to write this rant (p. 24). Highlighted words are in bold.
This [a pagan religion leading someone to God] is not at all excluded by what I said; on the contrary, this undoubtedly happens on a large scale. It is just that it would be misguided to deduce from this fact that the religions themselves all stand in simple equality to one another, as in one big concert, one big symphony in which ultimately all mean the same thing.
…in the figure of Christ the truly purifying power has appeared out of the Word of God. Christians do not necessarily always live this power well and as they should, but it furnishes the criterion and the orientation for the purifications that are indispensable for keeping religion from becoming a system of oppression and alienation, so that it may really become a way for man to God and to himself.
Now the reader was obviously not simpatico with the Pope, but he also does not seem to have been deliberately perverse in his markings. These are also not the markings that one would make in order to refute the book. The first example does give the opposite impression from the text, but the second seems to be a highly conventional but pious resonation with the idea of coming to God.
Then the light dawned. The reader had chosen the exact phrases which, if focused on, would keep him firmly in the world of clichés, safe from encountering the author’s thought.
The other words may seem to have fallen dead while all the while they have been germinating, ready to bring forth their shocking fruit at the chosen time.
