Article November 12, 1990 Issue

Animation and zeal

We need enthusiasm. But what should we do when enthusiasm drives, instead of just animates, our activities?

Muriel E. Clawson

As a little boy, Theodore Roosevelt regularly attended church with his family. But during one period, he was actually afraid to enter the church. His mother naturally wanted to know why. "He was terrified, she discovered, of something called the 'zeal.' It was crouched in the dark corners of the church, ready to jump at him, he said. When she asked what a zeal might be, he said he was not sure, but thought it was probably a large animal like an alligator or a dragon. He had heard the minister read about it from the Bible" (David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback).

Using a concordance, they found the passage in the Bible that had caused the boy such concern: "And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up."

A student of Christian Science thought of this story one day when she had some household chores to do. Do is not the correct verb; she was "attacking" those chores, determined to accomplish them at one fell swoop. That swoop led to several small disasters. Within the first fifteen minutes of working, she had overturned a table, broken a crystal and silver vase, and knocked a lamp off a chest, breaking a beautiful hand-painted globe. That "zeal" was certainly in her thinking and in her house—and it seemed to be an animal!

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