From the Garden of Orthodoxy to the Garden of Conduct

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When you put flesh onto preaching, blood, bones and twitching muscles, you get literature. Maybe bad literature but in any case.

God likes our stories because they move -- they have conduct, they don't just talke.

I am trying to write a story about the girl who grows up in the Garden of Orthodoxy (see last entry in December 2004) but is booted out with her brother -- not for some transgression but simply because this is part of growing up -- at least for many. She tried to get back in whilst her brother gives up.

Eventually a man of God (Father Sam or someone like him) steers her to the Garden of Conduct, in the midst of which the Garden of Orthodoxy lies hidden. Where is it? This is not easy to say? So she asks: Where then is the Garden of Conduct? And he answers: Everywhere you go.

This mysterious paradigm or parable at least slightly shades in the deeper mystery of the importance of conduct to faith. Faith is not a set of rules or dietary laws, but that doesn't mean you can be a person of faith and do absolutely anything you want. There is a sort of side effect to everything you do. As a sort of subsidiary motion embedded in your actions, there is a second deeper action, which is: your conduct leads you closer to God. Or your conduct leads you away.

John Bunyan captured this perfectly, beautifully. *His* work of fiction is an actual piece of conduct, a good deed in itself. I wish I could say the same of myself.

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