I am a woman of ludicrous ambitions. Ambitions to me are windy things, wild and moving; ideas that blow through the stifling heat of my closed up, inward-eyed soul with the cool air of a world – a bigger world! – a world of so much more than just myself.

But do you know what I want to be, what I want to be most of all? I want to be one of what C.S. Lewis called “the great ones:”

It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on Earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green. …Aye. She is one of the great ones. …Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter. …There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives. …Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows into them. …already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life. – C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

I want to be extraordinary – I want to be the Mary that sat at Jesus’ feet when she had SO much to do. I want to be the Mary who cried, “RABBONI!” when she saw him walking in the garden and recognized him just by the sound of his voice – and believed, even though she knew he had died. I want Him to have to tell me to let go. I want to be the one who bursts in, breathless and sweating and shouting, “He’s ALIVE, and I’ve seen Him! I’VE SEEN HIM!”

But oh! How far I am from that. I am so very ordinary – but what I am not, He is; He is extraordinary. So this, then, is my prayer: that I will look at Him, and not myself; that in these pages, I will tell you all that I can see; that you will look at Him, too, and see more, so much more, and find Love – “Love Himself.” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce)

That – would be extraordinary!

(P.S. Oh, and I wouldn’t *mind* being someone who cooks good and cleans good and wifes good and mothers good and does other stuff good too…but those are periphery perfections, right? But still. Oh, Martha, Martha!)