Dorothy Sayers wrote some of the most accomplished detective stories in the genre. She wasn’t so much a crime-writer who could write well, she was an exceptionaly fine writer who wrote crime stories, plays for radio, and a translation of Dante still popular enough to remain in print half a century later. She was also a fine theologian whose slim essay on the vocational value of work, and whose The Mind of the Maker, and Creed or Chaos? are as lucid examples of accessible, thoughtful theology as you’re likely to pick up. I wish she’d written more theology – but some of her theological fingerprints are all over her poetry.
The following poem shows her characteristic sharpness of mind just held in check by an acknowledged deference before mystery – that word ‘perhaps’ at the end of the last line but three, is an unmistakeable giveaway. I confess I love and trust the God revealed in Christ crucified as the One who refuses by lightning to smite the world perfect.
The Choice of the Cross
Hard it is, very hard,
To travel up the slow and stony road
To Calvary, to redeem mankind; far better
To make but one resplendent miracle,
Lean through the cloud, lift the right hand of power
And with a sudden lightning smite the world perfect.
Yet this was not God’s way, Who had the power,
But set it by, choosing the cross, the thorn,
The sorowful wounds. Something there is, perhaps,
That power destroys in passing, something supreme,
To whose great value in the eyes of God
That cross, that thorn, and those five wounds bear witness.
Dorothy L Sayers, From ‘The Devil to Pay’.
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