The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

The reverend’s eyes found me—I can’t explain it. Nor did he look away as he spoke. “Are you not sick of the frivolous being you have become? Are you not mortified at your own folly, weary of the ballroom and its gilded toys? Will you not give up the vanities and gaieties of this life for the sake of your soul?” I felt utterly spoken to, and in the most direct and supernatural way. How could he know what lay inside me? How did he know what I was only that moment able to see myself? “God calls you,” he bellowed. “God, your beloved, begs you to answer.” The words ravished me. They seemed to break down some great artifice. I sat on the pew quietly shaken while Reverend Kollack looked at me now without focus or interest, and perhaps it had been so all along, but it didn’t matter. He’d been God’s mouthpiece. He’d delivered me to the precipice where one’s only choice was between paralysis or abandon. With the reverend praying a long, earnest prayer for our souls, I took my leap. I vowed I would not return to society. I would not marry, I would never marry. Let them say what they would, I would give myself to God.

Ew?