Sometime in my college days I went to visit my mother, she spied a bookmarked copy of The Fountainhead on my bedside table.
This distressed her. She took it as a tangible sign that my faith was under attack. I didn’t see it as occupying the same mental or spiritual arena and told her so, but to her that only made it all the more insidious.
An old friend and I discussed faith a bit over lunch last week, and she and I agreed that the most authentic faith tends to be tested faith. That discussion has made me, 35+ years later, reconsider my mother’s reaction to The Fountainhead and wonder how her faith developed and was nurtured. (No such discussion at the time that I can recall; typical for my age, I was probably just defensive and not intellectually curious.)
It also amuses me to consider how my mother would have reacted to her eight- or nine-year-old son, always up for receiving mail (especially packages!), requesting and receiving a free copy of The Book of Mormon using an ad in Reader’s Digest.