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Some folks grow up fast through their consternation at being morally compromised, and some do their sudden growing up in the intuited truth of moral alienation.

Agatha Christie and I grew up in the rarer, latter group. But to the first group belongs the larger mass of humanity. C.S. Lewis would simply say the first group has "turned.��

If you are morally alienated, like Miss Marple and her creator, you know your own kind is an endangered species. You watch your words. Christie has Jane Marple say, in this collection, that “most people are neither bad not good, but just silly.��

Christie became alienated through listening to her grandmother trying out loud to get to the bottom of what a neighbour had said to young Agatha. For her grandmother, too, was morally alienated. Christie's alienation happened in her empathy with her...

Agatha Christie's wise grandmother learned the hard facts of life when her own mother sent her away to stay with her relative. Only that vacation was to be made permanent, for financial reasons.

So moral alienation was the result for both of them.

As it was for my own maternal grandmother.

Snatched by friends and family from the surviving family circle of her siblings after their parents both died, she was purposefully, morally alienated by her new caregiver, her more practical Aunt Stuart.

There was a shared, melancholy disquiet and resignation to Christie's grandmother's anxiety for young Agatha, too, as there was in my own grandmother's - Gagi's - educative anxiety for me.

And then for me, too, when my parents unwillingly though pre-emptively abandoned me to a local hospital. My grandmother's nascent melancholy became permanent that day.

That rupture, though final, has healed for me with my own religious resignation.

Yet for all of us came an important insight.

It was, quite simply, that the morality of our fractured innocence is not held in common with the rest of our peers.

Fight or Flight won't heal that rift. Only the calm resignation of Faith does that.

To be set apart is a blessing in disguise.

Being an old fool is not such a bad thing, either.

And on this Titanic Ship of Fools called planet Earth, Christie and her grandmother, Miss Marple, and I and my Gagi all KNOW we're morally alienated -

And therefore blessed.