Books, Time, and a Christening Cap
Written by Elena Sorenson
This reflection was first printed in the 2024 Well-Read Mom Summer Magazine.
I knew I’d teach, read, and write literature from a young age. I was a long way into my goal when I realized I disliked teaching. Instead, I found work that supported my reading and writing habits. After each workday, I returned to my apartment, reading silently through novels and trying to write little stories for children. But by the time my twenties were nearly over, it was apparent a few things were missing.
The literary life had become a solitary pursuit, and I’d forgotten to make friends. As for faith, I was a half-and-halfer. Half in and half out of church. Nothing makes you more alone friend-wise and God-wise than half-and-halfing. I liked being alone until I didn’t. Marrying my husband and having a baby was a welcome blessing. But having gone it alone for so long, and now with a new baby, I could barely contain my desperation for friends. Because each novel you read changes you somehow, and becoming a mother changes you markedly, reading was replaced with listlessness. Why read when there’s no one to relate with over the story? I prayed for friends and hoped they’d be literary.
Six years ago, with my eight-week-old daughter in my arms, I started Googling. “Nothing good can come from screens,” I told the baby. “But hopefully something will, right now.” I stumbled on the Well-Read Mom website. Then, the group locator page. There it was. A group met only a mile from our apartment. I hastily emailed the leader, asking if I could come to a meeting.
I drove over to Sarah’s house on a dark, snowy December night. We discussed “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” which is possibly the most difficult-to-understand story by Flannery O’Connor. By the time I left, I knew I’d found a wonderful group of literature lovers. I could belong with them. Then everything changed.
I was a Christian but not an enthusiastic one. I’d tried to leave the faith several times in my teens and twenties but always found myself back in a pew somehow. This I ascribe to literature. I read Gerard Manley Hopkins, Graham Greene, Bram Stoker, Barbara Pym, and Susan Howatch throughout my early adult years. I read most of them to this day. But Christianity was far more interesting when part of a plot. It was clear, even to me, that I preferred to read about faith than actually take up its commitments for Christ’s sake. My husband was a faithful Christian, and I was profoundly grateful for that. But now, with a baby, we needed to teach her the faith. This seemed like a challenging undertaking, given my ambivalence about it. All that was in the process of changing.
A pivotal moment had already happened, at my baby shower, a few months before I found Well-Read Mom. I was given a christening cap of white hand-tatted lace. The moment I held it, I felt I’d been given a key. In my faith tradition, the sacrament of baptism is never bestowed in infancy but much later on. But it was made for a newborn’s head, and because such a gift is a corollary to baptism, it was clear that the baby and I had been given more than something pretty. Her baptism became one of many beginnings.
T.S. Eliot, in The Four Quartets, wrote of time. His conversion, one of ardently seeking God while meditating on humanity’s response to modernity, affixed itself to beginnings precipitated by endings (Little Gidding, line 216). Marriage, a new baby, and new friends ended solitude, and even how I approached my beloved Christian literature. The Well-Read Moms and I read together faithfully each month. We strolled our children in the parks and went to the library together. The closer I grew to these women, the more I saw how much they cared about Christ: how much time they spent with Him and how to teach their small children to love Him. That they cared about what Christ might think of them began to shift my reckoning slowly. To intellectualize faith through the safety of a literary buffer was one thing. To seek Him and His gift of piety was quite another.
Six years of listening, disagreeing, agreeing, and reading Dorothy Day, Rumer Godden, and Sigrid Undset with Well-Read Mom can change a person and her family. My husband and I were confirmed into the Catholic Church in October 2023. Our sponsors were my Well-Read Mom leader, Sarah, and her husband, John.
“With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” There have been many beginnings and some necessary endings. There were novels, ambition, solitude, marriage, and motherhood. There was a christening cap and a group of friends holding books, waiting for me to find them. They are my friends to this day. Then there was, and always was, The Church—into which I was called, and into which all times and all experience are, to use Eliot’s term, in-folded.
About Elena Sorensen
Elena Sorensen lives, reads, writes, and mothers in Aurora, CO. Elena freelances as a writer and editor for individuals and organizations. She holds an MA in comparative literature from the University of Connecticut and endeavors to write a novel in her spare time.
About Well-Read Mom
In Well-Read Mom, women read more and read well. Our hope is to deepen the awareness of meaning hidden in each woman’s daily life, elevate the cultural conversation, and revitalize reading literature from books. If you would like to have us help you select worthy reading material, we invite you to join and read along with us. We are better together! For information on how to start or join a Well-Read Mom group visit our website wellreadmom.com
