Books in Brief: The Eternal You

The Eternal You, by Carroll E. Simcox (Crossroad, 192 pp., $7.95)

The Rev. Carroll Simcox’s books have a way of flowing one from another. In this, his 17th published volume, he picks up one of the threads from Prayer, the Divine Dialogue (1985), and spins it out in quite a different way. He calls the new book a “theme with variations,” and true to the musical form he has borrowed, he begins with a statement of the theme in full brass: “. . . a conviction, a passionate intuition . . . [that] you, I, all human beings, indeed all things animate and inanimate, visible and invisible, are eternal.” His clue comes from a Wordsworth poem that speaks of belief “ripening into faith, and faith become a passionate intuition.” Since matters like resurrection, eternity, and infinity do not fall into the provable-fact category, Simcox believes the proper place to go for guidance is the inspired intuition of the poets, rather than the arguments and guesses of theologians. Each of the 17 brief chapters is a variation on the theme of existence in the eternal mind of God. His chapter on “Musements” is a short, poetic (and illuminating) restatement of the final deduction he arrives at in the book on prayer. In “Relaxing about Antinomies” he handles the problem of roadblocks, the reconciliation of seeming contradictions that have bothered us all, in typical Simcox fashion: “There came a point in my life when I could hear God saying to me something that came through in our primitive tellurian vernacular as this: ‘I wish you’d leave all this reconciling of things to me, since you are so hopelessly unequipped for it, and that you would use whatever influence you have with your fellow fussers and worriers to persuade them to do likewise. I know what I’m doing. I’ll go over it all with you when you get Home . . .’”

HK

About the Author

H. N. Kelley

Featured Tags

The Eternal You, by Carroll E. Simcox (Crossroad, 192 pp., $7.95)

The Rev. Carroll Simcox’s books have a way of flowing one from another. In this, his 17th published volume, he picks up one of the threads from Prayer, the Divine Dialogue (1985), and spins it out in quite a different way. He calls the new book a “theme with variations,” and true to the musical form he has borrowed, he begins with a statement of the theme in full brass: “. . . a conviction, a passionate intuition . . . [that] you, I, all human beings, indeed all things animate and inanimate, visible and invisible, are eternal.” His clue comes from a Wordsworth poem that speaks of belief “ripening into faith, and faith become a passionate intuition.” Since matters like resurrection, eternity, and infinity do not fall into the provable-fact category, Simcox believes the proper place to go for guidance is the inspired intuition of the poets, rather than the arguments and guesses of theologians. Each of the 17 brief chapters is a variation on the theme of existence in the eternal mind of God. His chapter on “Musements” is a short, poetic (and illuminating) restatement of the final deduction he arrives at in the book on prayer. In “Relaxing about Antinomies” he handles the problem of roadblocks, the reconciliation of seeming contradictions that have bothered us all, in typical Simcox fashion: “There came a point in my life when I could hear God saying to me something that came through in our primitive tellurian vernacular as this: ‘I wish you’d leave all this reconciling of things to me, since you are so hopelessly unequipped for it, and that you would use whatever influence you have with your fellow fussers and worriers to persuade them to do likewise. I know what I’m doing. I’ll go over it all with you when you get Home . . .’”