I got hooked on history before I could read. In an upstairs closet which served as our attic I found several shelves of books. Among them were some old history text books. Being an avid picture reader I studied them carefully and found them intriguing.

There were portraits of men whose main purpose seemed to be to raise whiskers. There were battle scenes blazing with smoke and fire. Great ships were in the pocess of sinking and buildings in the process of rising up. I wondered, what were the stories that went with those pictures?

The time came when I could read the stories that lay behind the pictures and, indeed, they were fascinating. In spite of a history teacher or two who did their best, or worst, to make history a crushing bore I still find it to be an inviting door to insight and understanding of the human scene.

Recently through the suggestion of a friend I have jumped into the world of the Middle Ages, an era I have rarely explored. Through the pen of Barbara Tuckman I have gone through A Distant Mirror, which like Through the Look Glass, takes one into a an incredible place of intrigue and complex characters.

It is "thick" history. Far from the superficial, surface readings of events it exposes the layers, connections and interconnections of people, places and systems that form the events that as, myriads of threads, get woven into the complex patterns we call history. It is all told with the pathos and hilarity of real people dealing with life with all the courage, blindness, confusion, hopefulness, desperation, faith that we may observe among us six centures later.

That was followed by The Spanish Armada by Mattingly and then The Guns of August, also by Tuchman. Both equally well written and interesting. Now I am about to plunge into The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga and then into Out of Control by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The Apostle Paul was once warned, "Too much learning is driving you insane." The warning was issued by a bureaucrat who I suspect was fearing that Paul just might catch on to the secret and lift the heavy curtain of complex human machinations behind which power is exercised. In reality what Paul found and I catch a glimpse of is the way in which the affairs of the human race forms the backdrop or even the setting where God brings new life and transformation. Although, I must admit that much of the story is so sordid that one might decide that it is all beyond reclaimation and all that is left is the firey conclusion of the second epistle of Peter.

But, what a story! More than once one finds oneself pausing to say, "so that's what was really happening."