Although, because these ‘transcendentals’ are a unity (and do not exist one without the others), wherever you find one you will also find the others. And wherever you do not find one you will find neither of the other two.

And so that, as well, if one is to make a statement about God, or about godly things, one should be mindful not only of how true and how good one’s statement is, but also how beautiful.

So that one can say with confidence, if one is asked to describe God, “God is truth, and goodness, and beauty.”

Those two other ‘transcendentals’ are, I should say, truth and goodness.

Though even that statement gives me pause, because here is another thing about aesthetics that I should not forget. They are the basis for (or manifestation of) beauty, which Catholics recognize as one of three ‘transcendentals’ belonging to God.

Which isn’t to say that aesthetics are an afterthought for me, but that I would rather my work fail aesthetically than theologically, or philosophically.

In other words, if my loyalties are, on the one hand, to my subject, and, on the other hand, to the spontaneous or virtuosic meandering away from my subject, then I want to err on the side of the former, at least in this case, where my subject is more important to me than the aesthetics by which that subject is rendered.

Let me say then that this book wishes to be about both Our Lady and whatever subjects happen to emerge from thoughts that lead away from Our Lady, though I care more for the former than the latter, and will happily dispense with the latter (or disavow them if I can’t dispense with them), if I find that they have too tenuous a connection to the former, or are insufficiently noble to share a platform with the former.

Meaning, there is more going on in a writer’s mind than that writer is able to reconcile, or synthesize, even when that writer is working on a thing that will submit itself, eventually, to such specificities as a title, and a beginning and an end.

Possibly, yes, though I don’t know if by saying yes I’m giving enough credence to the less definable qualities of the impulse to write, to the vagaries of the subconscious, and that aspect of creativity which is moved primarily by an image that the writer wants to approach, and remain in the vicinity of for a time.

Would I say then that my decision to focus on Our Lady (once the notion to begin this work had entered my head) was to some extent arbitrary?

Or Thérèse of Lisieux, or Mary Magdalene, or any other of a number of men and women who I’ve learned about, or heard about, in the course of my life.

I could see myself having tried to write, for instance, about Bernadette Soubirous, who is the saint associated with Lourdes, in France, and the apparitions of Our Lady that she experienced there.

Of course, I could’ve particularized it in some other way (as a meditation on some other saint, say). And I might well have done so, had I not felt drawn to Our Lady when the notion for a book of this sort began to occur to me.

My point being, I suppose, that if this writing of mine is a gesture, it is a Christian gesture, and that as a Christian gesture it particularizes itself in terms of Our Lady because it needs to be particularized in order to function.

As is, I’m still not sure where those boundaries are, but at least I know that I have before me, in my mind, someone with whom I share a human nature, even if her sanctity is such, compared with mine, that I do not feel the same as her in any other way.

If I’d chosen to write about Christ himself, say, or the Holy Spirit, or God the Father (in all of whom Our Lady finds her purpose), I likely would’ve been overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject, and not known where to find the boundaries by which my thinking on the subject might take shape.

I could’ve tried to write about Christianity more broadly, but one needs constraints when one sets out to write something, one needs to be able to see or to sense the peripheries which should bound one, so that one will be able to gauge how far one might wander in a particular direction before one will become lost, or find oneself dwelling on irrelevancies.

One might ask, of course, why write about Our Lady at all? Why decide that she will be the subject in whom all one’s thoughts (at least for a time) will originate? And I suppose I have no answer for that, except that I feel a devotion to her, and would like to honor her and remember her, in an age that seems to have forgotten her, or to have not even known her.

Which isn’t to say that Our Lady will not direct me in some way, but that the faults or shortcomings in the writing itself, and the inexpert use of my talent (where there are instances of it), are attributable to me.