... with crooked lines

I have always loved the aphorism, God can draw straight with crooked lines, (how could I not? I'm a crooked line myself!)
I think I first came across it in a Chesterton story, but I'm not sure. I have tried to track down its origins, and someone told me once that it was a variation on something Luther wrote, but I have not been able confirm that.
I have been thinking about how we ourselves do not always have the ability to discern what is crooked, and what is straight; and that we often lack the faith, when confronted with the truly dire, the incontrovertibly crooked, to remember that the Lord can nevertheless convey us to our destination.
So I apply the aphorism to events in an individual's life, to our incompetence to distinguish between good luck and misfortune.
But I'm wondering if it doesn't have a larger application.
Without being quite a universalist, (I can't know that hell is empty, but I can hope and pray that it is....,) and without embracing indifferentism in the least, I am thinking that while we do right to decry relativism, there is a certain irony in that even if people insist on setting off on crooked paths, even though they do not know the Way, God, Who is Himself the Way manages to bring them home safe and sound at last.
It is not part of His plan that we make things difficult for ourselves, that we wander, that we get lost, when He has gone to the trouble of providing humanity with a roadmap -- His very Self.
But when we, through ignorance, or through pride masquerading itself as adventurousness, set off in the wrong direction.... well, He may use those crooked lines of our inferior human cartography to bring us to where we would have gone had we just trod the straight path He took such pains to provide us.
Does that make sense?
For He is utterly and exclusively The Way: we can travel successfully without knowing the name of the street on which we find ourselves; we might be forced by circumstances onto a noisy, scary, confusing, badly paved detour temporarily, there is always another entrance ramp; we may have slept in the backseat and been unaware of either perils or delights along the trip, yet we end up at the same destination as the parents who planned the trip and drove the car.
I'm thinking of all the sad splintering of the community of believers, all the divisions, schisms... no, He didn't will them, but mightn't He have found a purpose for them? Mightn't He have drawn straight with the crooked lines of dissent?
There are some striking pictures on TNLM http://www.thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com/
of medieval rood screens.
http://thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com/2008/05/painted-english-rood-screens-o-what-was.html
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.
Is it too far-fetched to think that had a king not sulked for being thwarted in his priapic and dynastic ambitions and begun his own "church", had the Anglican communion not scuppered off taking their toys with them, had a more "vibrant" faith community been worshipping there now, had prosperity allowed expenditures for "improvements" in certain aesthetically unfortunate eras -- these glories might have been swapped out for burlap nasties and empty spaces?
And is it too remote, too, idealized to imagine that the catechetical power of such depictions of our forbears in the Faith, as well as their beauty, could draw people to a better understanding of the Body of Christ stretching across time and space, draw them to the Way?
I also think of the disparate 1/2 empty, 1/2 full reactions to the disheartening musical activity that intruded itself on a recent widely-televised Mass.
Yes, it may be used a justification for similar badly chosen, badly rendered music, during other liturgies -- but it may also be the evidence needed, the impetus needed to finally wakes up TPTB to the necessity for real concrete change in liturgical musical praxis in this country.
An old story, Buddhist, I think -- but who's to say?
There once was a poor farmer who owned but a single horse, on which he depended for his family's livelihood.
One day the horse ran away into the mountains. The farmer searched for him in vain.
His neighbors tried to commiserate, "We are sorry for this calamity!"
But the complacent farmer replied, "Bad luck, good luck -- who's to say?"A week later his horse came back, accompanied by a dozen wild horses, which the farmer was able to corral all.
News spread throughout the village, and his neighbors again came and said, "Congratulations on this great good fortune!"
To which the farmer once again shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck -- who's to say?"The farmer's only son decided to break the wild horses so they could be put to use.
But as he attempted to do this, he was thrown from one of the horses, and his leg was broken in three places.
When word of this accident spread through the village, again the neighbors came saying, "We are sorry about your misfortune."
The old man shrugged and said, "Bad luck, good luck -- who's to say?"Two weeks later a war broke out, and the army conscripted every able-bodied man in the village.
Because the son was injured, they could not take him, but everyone from the village who was drafted was killed in the battle.
I also read a story recently about a woman who was dying of cancer.
For her agnostic husband, this is pure tragedy.
For her, a great blessing, the answer to her prayers, in fact, as the crises has brought her long estranged children back to them.
Can't i just run on and on and on? How's that for packing the least meaning into the most words possible....?