if you had asked me during college years where i would end up,
'christian writer' would have fallen last on my list of options.
i would have recounted the lies my church had told me about race and other matters
and poked fun at its smothering legalism.
i would have described an evangelical as a socially stunted wannabe
-a fundamentalist with a better income, a slightly more open mind and a less furrowed brow.
i would have complained about the furloughed missionaries at the bible college i attended
who taught classes in science and philosophy while knowing less about those subjects
than my high school teachers.
that school tended to punish, rather than reward, intellectual curiosity:
one teacher admitted he deliberately lowered my grades in order to teach me humility.
'the greatest barrier to the Holy Spirit is sophistication', he used to warn his classes.
at the same bible college, however, i first encountered the writings of c.s.lewis and g.k.chesterton.
although separated from me by a vast expanse of sea and culture,
they kindled hope that somewhere christians existed
who loosed rather than restrained their minds,
who combined sophisticated taste with a humility that did not demean others,
and above all, who experienced life with God as a source of joy and not repression.
ordering tattered used copies through bookshops in england,
i devoured everything i could find by these men,
one an oxford don and the other a fleet street journalist.
as L himself wrote after discovering Ch while recovering in a hospital during WWI,
'a young man who wishes to remain a strong atheist cannot be too careful of his reading'.
their words sustained me,
a lifeline of faith in a sea of turmoil and doubt...
in his story of the prodigal son, Jesus does not dwell on the prodigal's motive for return.
the younger son feels no sudden remorse nor burst of love for the father he insulted.
rather, he tires of a life of squalor and returns out of selfish motives.
apparently, it matters little to God whether we approach Him
out of desperation or out of longing.
why did i return? i ask myself.
..my career as a journalist gave me the opportunity to investigate people,
such as those i have assembled in this book,
who demonstrate that a connection with God can enlarge, rather than shrink, life.
i began the lifelong process of separating church from God.
though i had emerged from childhood churches badly damaged,
as i began to scrutinize Jesus through the critical eyes of a journalist,
i say that the actualities that so upset me
-legalism, self righteousness, racism, provincialism, hypocrisy-
Jesus had fought against and were probably the very qualities that led to his crucifixion.
getting to know the God revealed in Jesus, i recognized i needed to change in many ways
-yes, even to repent, for i had absorbed the hypocrisy-
Jesus had fought against and were probably the very qualities that led to his crucifixion.
getting to know the God revealed in Jesus, i recognized i needed to change in many ways
-yes, even to repent, for i had absorbed the hypocrisy, racism and self righteousness of my upbringing
and contributed numerous sins of my own.
i began to envision God less as a stern judge shaking his finger at my waywardness
than as a doctor who prescribes behavior in my best interest in order to safeguard my health.
'i am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before,
g.k.chesterton declared triumphantly.
'i did try to found a heresy of my own
and when i had put the last touches to it,
i discovered that it was orthodoxy'.
guided in part by Ch i landed in a similar place after a circuitous journey.
when someone asked Ch what one book he would want to have along if stranded on a desert island,
he paused only an instant before replying,
'why a Practical Guide to Shipbuilding, of course.'
if i were so stranded and could choose one book apart from the bible,
i may well select Ch's own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy.
why anyone would pick up a book with that formidable title eludes me,
but one day i did so and my faith has never recovered...
Ch has sometimes been called 'the master who left no masterpiece',
perhaps the curse of his chosen profession.
for most of his life (1874-1936) he served as editor of a weekly newspaper of ideas,
in the process writing some 4000 essays on topics both trivial and important.
he straddled the turn of the century, from the 19th to the 20th,
when such movements as modernism, communism, fascism, pacifism, determinism, darwinism and eugenics
were coming to the fore.
as he surveyed each one, he found himself pressed further and further toward christianity,
which he saw as the only redoubt (complete enclosure, fort) against such potent forces.
eventually he accepted the christian faith not simply as a bulwark of civilization
but rather as an expression of the deepest truths about the world...
as a thinker, Ch started slowly.
by the age of 9 he could barely read and his parents consulted with a brain specialist
about his mental capacity.
he dropped out of art school
and skipped university entirely.
as it turned out, however,
he had a memory so prodigious that late in life
he could recite the plats of all 10,000 novels he had read and reviewed.
he wrote five novels of his own as well as 200 short stories...
tried his hand at plays, poetry and ballads;
wrote literary biographies of such characters as robert browning and charles dickens;
spun off a history of england
and tackled the lives of francis of assisi, thomas aquinas and Jesus Himself.
writing at breakneck speed, getting many facts wrong,
he nevertheless approached each of his subjects with such discernment, enthusiasm and with
that even his harshest critics had to stand and applaud.
..he stayed at home, read widely and wrote about everything that crossed his mind.
the rollicking adventures took place inside his great shaggy head.
one can hardly overestimate his impact on others, though.
mahatma gandhi got may of his ideas on indian independence from Ch
one of his novels also inspired michael collins's movement for irish indepencence
and c.s.L looked to Ch as his (a?) spiritual father.
..he resuscitated my moribund faith.
albert einstein once articulated the most important question of all:
is the universe a friendly place?
in childhood and adolescence i received mixed messages at best.
like the children of alcoholics-don't talk, don't trust and don't feel- i had responded by flat lining emotionally.
..i turned inward, sealing off one by one any avenue whereby people could bet to me,
either to manipulate me or cause pain.
i read..sartre and camus..i read nietzsche, who described a superman impervious to suffering.
i learned not to laugh or smile and not to cry.
i tried not to care or react: to cold or heat, to good smells or bad..to beauty or ugliness, to love or hate.
in a perverted experiment, i broke my own arm against the metal frame of a bunk bed
to test my mastery of pain.
i see now what i could not see then, that i was erecting a strong stone fortress against love,
for i thought myself unlovable.
in the most unlikely place, the bible college i viewed as a kind of asylum,
that inner fortress began to crumble.
i found solace not in religion, where everyone around me claimed to find it, but in music.
late at night i would steal out of the dormitory and make my way to the chapel and its 9' steinway grand...
then i fell in love.
janet and i drew together for all the wrong reasons
-mainly we sat around and complained about the oppressive atmosphere of the school
-but eventually the most powerful force in the universe, love, won out.
i had found someone who pointed out everything right with me, not everything wrong.
hope aroused.
i wanted to conquer worlds and lay them at her feet.
for her birthday learned beethoven's sonata pathetique
and invited her, trembling, to be the very first audience to hear me play.
it was an offering to new life and to her who had called it forth.
'the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has no one to thank, wrote Ch.
and also, 'joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the christian.'
i know well that worst moment and know too the first stirrings of joy
that flapped fresh air into crevices long sealed off.
great joy carries within it the intimations of immortality.
suddenly i wanted to live, even to live forever.
(..back to the question, is creation friendly?)
another scientist, the naturalist loren eiseley,
tells of an event he calls the most significant learning experience of his long life.
caught on a beach in a sudden rainstorm, he sought shelter under a huge piece of driftwood
where he found a tiny fox kitten, maybe ten weeks old, which as yet had no fear of humans.
within a few minutes it had engaged eiseley in a playful game of tug of war ,
with eiseley holding one end of a chicken bone in his mouth and the baby fox pulling on the other end.
the lesson he learned, said eiseley, is that at the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile...
..gradually, music and romantic love and especially nature softened
the incessant monotone of despair inside that had nagged me like a dull pain.
i came to see the despair as a normal symptom of fallen humanity estranged from its creator.
somehow, i must reconnect.
Ch had pointed to st. francis, who learned his proper state from 'brother sun' and 'sister moon',
and who saw inexhaustible beauty in the humblest weed, like a dandelion.
in a memorable passage,Ch contrasts our state with that of God,
who 'is strong enough to exult in monotony.
it is possible that god says every morning, 'do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'do it again' to the moon
it may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike;
it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
it may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy;
for we have sinned and grown old
and our Father is younger than we'.
bit by bit , nature helped to rejuvenate in me that appetite of infancy.
yancey however saw mixed messages in nature...
Ch viewed this world as a sort of cosmic shipwreck. (see romans 8.19-23)..
..after Orthodoxy i read many of Ch's other works.
(he wrote more than 100 books and as a writer it depressed me for weeks to learn that
he dictated most of them to his secretary and made few changes to the first drafts.).
i was writing on the problem of pain at the time
and found much insight in his fictional treatment of that dark subject, 'the man who was thursday'.
amazingly, considering their differences in style, he wrote it during the same year as Orthodoxy.
he later explained that he had been struggling with despair, evil and the meaning of life
and had even approached mental breakdown.
when he emerged from that melancholy, he sought to make a case for optimism amid the gloom of such a world.
in 'the man who was thursday' Ch does not diminish the incalculable mysteries of suffering and free will.
rather, he transforms them into a minimalist argument for faith.
at its worst, at a bare minimum of goodness, with nature revealing only the back side of God,
the universe offers reasons for belief.
in God's own speech to Job,
God pointed to the fierce wilderness of nature
-the hippopotmus and crocodile, thunderstorms and blizzards, the lioness and mountain goat,
the untamed oxen and ostriches- not its friendly side.
if nothing else, nature reveals God as mysterious, incalculable, 'wholly other', worthy of worship.
we may have limited clues to the secrets of reality, but what wondrous clues they are.
'even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting.
anything was magnificent compared with nothing, Ch testified later.
in his life also, nature and romantic love sounded as loud, reverberating grace notes.
...in addition to the problem of pain, Ch seemed equally fascinated by its opposite, the problem of pleasure.
he found materialism too thin to account for the sense of wonder and delight
that gives an almost magical dimension to such basic human acts as sex, childbirth, play and artistic creation.
why is sex fun?
reproduction surely does not require pleasure:
some animals simply split in half to reproduce
and even humans use methods of artificial insemination that involve no pleasure.
why is eating enjoyable?
plants and the lower animals manage to obtain their quota of nutrients without the luxury of taste buds.
why are there colors?
some people get along fine without the ability to detect color.
why complicate vision for all the rest of us?
it struck me, after reading my umpteenth book on the problem of pain,
that i have never even seen a book on 'the problem of pleasure'.
nor have i met a philosopher who goes around shaking his or her head in perplexity
over the question of why we experience pleasure.
yet it looms as a huge question:
the philosophical equivalent, for atheists,
to the problem of pain for christians.
on the issue of pleasure, christians can breathe easier.
a good and loving God would naturally want his creatures
to experience delight, joy and personal fulfillment.
christians start from that assumption and then look for ways to explain the origin of suffering.
but should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure
in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?
after his long odyssey, Ch returned to faith because only christianity
provided the clues to solve the mystery of PLEASURE.
'i felt in my bones, first that this world does not explain itself...
second, i came to feel as if magic must have a meaning
and meaning must have some one to mean it.
there was something personal in the world, as in a work of art...
third, i though this purpose beautiful in it old design,
in spite of its defects, such as dragons.
fourth, that THE PROPER FORM OF THANKS TO IT
IS SOME FORM OF HUMILITY AND RESTRAIN:
we should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much or them...
and last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression
that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin.
man had saved his good as (robinson) crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck'.
where does pleasure come from?
after searching alternatives, Ch settled on christianity as the only reasonable explanation
for its existence in the world.
moments of pleasure are the remnants washed ashore from a shipwreck,
bits of paradise extended through time.
we must hold these relics lightly and use them with gratitude and restraint,
never seizing them as entitlements.
as Ch saw it, sexual promiscuity is not so much an overvaluing of sex as a devaluing.
'to complain that i could only be married once was like complaining that i had only been born once.
it was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking,
it showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it...
polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex;
it is like a man plucking five pears in a mere absence of mind'.
the churches i attended had stressed the dangers of pleasure so loudly
that i missed any positive message.
guided by Ch, i came to see sex, money, power and sensory pleasures as God's good gifts.
every sunday i can turn on the radio or television and hear preachers
decry the drugs, sexual looseness, greed and crime that are 'running rampant' in the streets of america.
rather than merely wag our fingers at such obvious abuses of God's good gifts,
perhaps we should demonstrate to the world where good gifts actually come from
and why they are good.
evil's greatest triumph may be its success in portraying religion as an enemy of pleasure
when, in fact, religion accounts for its source:
every good and enjoyable thing is the invention of a creator who has lavished gifts on the world.
of course, in a world estranged from God, even good things must be handled with care,
like explosives.
we have lost the untainted innocence of eden, and every good harbors risk as well,
holding within it the potential for abuse.
eating becomes gluttony, love becomes lust.
and along the way we lose sigh of the One who gave us pleasure.
the ancients turned good things into idols;
we moderns call them addictions.
in either case, what ceases to be a servant becomes a tyrant
-a principle i had clearly seen at work in my brother and his flower children friends.
'i am ORDINARY in the correct sense of the term, said Ch
which means THE ACCEPTANCE OF AN ORDER;
a creator and the creation,
THE COMMON SENSE OF GRATITUDE FOR CREATION, LIFE AND LOVE
AS GIFTS PERMANENTLY GOOD,
marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them..'
under his influence i too realized the need to become more 'ordinary'.
i had conceived of faith as a tight lipped, grim exercise of spiritual discipline,
a blending of asceticism and rationalism
in which joy leaked away.
Ch restored to me a thirst for the exuberance
that flows from a link to the God who dreamed up all the things that give me pleasure.
'there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands, said Ch
and he ultimately fell from excess, never achieving the balance he preached so convincingly.
..his weight hovered between three and four hundred pounds...
Ch cheerfully engaged in public debates with agnostics and skeptics of the day,
most notably george bernard shaw
-this at a time when a debate on faith could fill a lecture hall.
Ch usually arrived late, peered through his pince nez at his disorderly scraps of paper
and proceeded to entertain the crowd,
making nervous gestures,
fumbling through his pockets,
laughing heartily in a falsetto voice at his own jokes.
typically he would charm the audience over to his side,
then celebrate by hosting his chastened opponent at the nearest pub.
'shaw is like venus de milo;
all there is of him is admirable', he toasted his friend affectionately.
cosmo hamilton, one of his debating opponents, described the experience:
'to hear Ch's howl of joy...
to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults,
to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a shocked audience
who were won to mirth by his intense and pea hen-like quarks of joy
was a sight and a sound for the gods...
and i carried away from that room a respect and admiration for this tomboy among dictionaries,
this philosophical peter pan,
this humorous dr. johnson,
this kindly and gallant cherub,
this profound student and wise master
which has grown steadily ever since...
it was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious.
nothing like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and felt like it again.
...in Ch's day, sober minded modernists
were seeking anew unified theory to explain the past and give hope to the future...
Ch would cheerfully defend such reactionary concepts as original sin and the Last Judgment.
Ch seemed to sense instinctively that a stern prophet
will rarely break through to a society full of religion's 'cultured despisers'
he preferred the role of jester.
Ch claimed to distrust 'hard, cold, thin people
and perhaps that's why i have grown so fond of the jolly fat apologist.
nowadays in the church sober mindedness has won the day...
i have had to forgive the church, much as a person from a dysfunctional family forgives mistakes made by parents and siblings.
an irrepressible optimist, Ch proved helpful in that process too.
'thee christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
it has been found difficult; and left untried', he said.
the real question is not
'why is christianity so bad when it claims to be so good? but rather
why are all human things so bad when they claim to be so good?
Ch readily admitted that the church had badly failed the gospel.
in fact, he said, one of the strongest arguments in favor of christianity is the failure of christians,
who thereby prove what the bible teaches about the fall and original sin.
as the world goes wrong, it proves that the church is right in this basic doctrine.
when the London times asked a number of writers for essays on the topic,
'What's Wrong with the World?'
Ch sent in the reply shortest and most to the point:
'dear sirs:
I am.
sincerely yours,
g.k. chesterton'
...for all his personal quirkiness, he managed to propound the christian faith
with as much wit, good humor and sheer intellectual force
as anyone in recent times.
with the zeal of a knight defending the last redoubt, he took on, in person and in print,
anyone who dared interpret the world apart from God and incarnation.
Ch himself said that the modern age is characterized by a sadness
that calls for a new kind of prophet,
not like prophets of old who reminded people that they were going to die,
but someone who would remind them they are not dead yet.
the prophet of ample girth and ample mirth filled that role splendidly.
t.s. elliot judged that
'he did more, i think, than any man of his time.. to maintain the existence of the important minority
in the modern world'.
RECOMMEND: ORTHODOXY; biographies, ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI, ST. THOMAS AQUINAS;
THE MAN WHO WAS CALLED THURSDAY and the Rather Brown stories: his AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Monday, December 23, 2013
12.23.2013 SOUL SURVIVOR (SS) - MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. by philip yancey
Chapter 1 - Recovering from church abuse
the book starts..'sometimes in a waiting room or on an airplane i strike up conversations with strangers,
during the course of which they learn that i write books on spiritual themes.
eyebrows arch, barriers spring up and often i hear yet another horror story about church.
my seatmates must expect me to defend the church, because they always act surprised when i respond,
'oh, it's even worse that that.
let me tell you my story'.
i have spent most of my life in recovery from the church.
one church i attended during formative years in georgia of the 1960s
presented a hermetically (airtight) sealed view of the world.
a sign out front proudly proclaimed our identity with words radiating from a many pointed star:
'New Testament, Blood bought, Born again, Premillenial, Dispensational, Fundamental...'
our little group of 200 people had a corner on the truth, God's truth
and everyone who disagreed with us was
surely teetering on the edge of hell...
..'a mystery: if the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it?'...if the gospel comes as a
eucastrophe, j.r.r. tolkien's word for a spectacularly good thing
happening to spectacularly bad people,
why do so few people perceive it as good news?
..i became a writer, i now believe, to sort out words used and misused by the church of my youth...
..i became a writer because of my own encounter with the power of words
and i gained hope that spoiled words, their original meaning wrung out, could be reclaimed.
..unavoidably and by instinct, i question and reevaluate my faith all the time. (II corinthians 13.5?)
..every writer has one main theme, a poor that he or she keeps sniffing around,
tracking, following to its source.
if i had to define my own theme, it would be that of a person who
absorbed some of the worst the church has to offer,
yet still landed in the loving arms of God.
yes, i went through a period of rejection of the church and God,
a conversion experience in reverse that felt like liberation for a time.
i ended up, however, not as an atheist, a refugee from the church,
but as one of its advocates.
what allowed me to ransom a personal faith from the damaging effects of religion?
the people profiled in this book go a long way toward answering that question.
..the glory of God is a person fully alive, said the second century theologian irenaeus.
sadly that description does not reflect the image many people have of modern christians.
rightly or wrongly, they see christians rather as restrained, uptight, repressed
-people less likely to celebrate vitality than to wag our fingers in disapproval.
..the thirteen people you will meet here have one thing in common:
their impact on me.
...i must say, writing these tributes has for me been an exercise of health and even joy.
i did not set out with an agenda,
to convert anyone, to defend the church ..
i merely want to introduce others to a roomful of exceptional people whom i cannot,
and have no wish to, get out of mind.
fred rogers in giving talks asks the audience to pause for a minute of silence
and think about all those who have helped them become who they are...
..i was born in atlanta, georgia, in 1949..
we lived in apartheid (policy of rigid segregation of people based on some criterion) conditions.
MARTIN LUTHER KING's ...appropriation of the christian gospel galled us (white church people) the most
he was, after all, an ordained minister,
and even my fundamentalist church had to acknowledge the integrity of his father, Daddy King,
respected pastor of ebeneezer baptist church.
we had our ways of resolving that cognitive dissonance, of course.
we said that the younger king was a card carrying communist,
a marxist agent who merely posed as a minister.
..george wallace cited FBI sources to accuse K of belonging to
more communist front organizations than any man in the united states.
during K's time, the FBI looked with suspicion on white people
who mixed easily with friends from a variety of races and economic groups.
these were potential communists...
..as for..accusations of K's sexual immorality reflect historical fact..
the FBI taped numerous episodes in K's hotel room,
and thanks to the freedom of information act historians can study the actual transcripts.
ralph abernathy has revealed that K carried on extramarital affairs up until the eve of his death.
one FBI agent (william sullivan)..sent K some of their recordings
along with a note urging him to commit suicide:
'you are done. there is but one way out for you.
you better take it before your filthy abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation'.
(also)..K has been accused of plagiarism as well.
he inserted into his graduate school thesis, his writings and sometimes his speeches,
long sections lifted without credit from other sources. .
frankly, i find it easier to understand K's sexual failings,
a sin in which he has much company, than his plagiarism.
a master of riveting prose, why did he feel the need to steal someone else's?
relentless pressures buffeted K from all sides.
he faced death threats from segregationists as well as the FBI.
a bomb went off in his home.
black churches were burning every week in the South.
his volunteers were being threatened, beaten and jailed and some of them were dying.
often his southern christian leadership conference had to skip payroll,
and his most effecive fund raiser was one of the advisers president kennedy had demanded that he fire.
newspapers from the atlanta journal to the new york times condemned his methods.
the NAACP criticized him for being too radical,
while SNCC (student nonviolent coordinating committee) accused him of timidity.
student demonstrators in a dozen cities pleaded with him to accompany them to jail;
volunteers in mississippi urged him to come risk his life with them.
should he concentrate on voting rights or on segregated restaurants?
what unjust laws should he violate?
what about defying court orders?
should he stick to civil rights or expand his focus to poverty?
what about the war in vietnam?
i better understand now the pressures that K faced his entire adult life,
pressures that surely contributed to his failures.
K's moral weaknesses provide a convenient excuse for anyone who wants to avoid his message
and because of those weaknesses some christians still discount the genuineness of his faith.
(these christians might want to review the list of outstanding people of faith in hebrews 11,
a list which includes such moral deviants as noah, abraham, jacob, rahab, samson and david.
i certainly once dismissed him.
yet now i can hardly read a page from K's life, or a paragraph from his speeches,
without sensing the centrality of his christian conviction.
i won a collection of his sermon tapes, and every time i listen to them
i am swept up in the sheer power of his gospel based message,
delivered with an eloquence that has never been matched.
david garrow builds his book (bearing the cross) around the scene of K's supernatural call, early in his career
'it was the most important night of his life, writes G, the one he always would think back to in future years
when the pressures again seemed to be too great.
king had been thrust into civil rights leadership in montgomery, alabama,
after rosa parks had made her brave decision not to move to the back of the bus.
the black community formed a new organization to lead a bus boycott
and by default chose as a compromise candidate for its leadership the new minister in town, K,
who at age 26 looked 'more like a boy than a man'.
growing up in middle class surroundings, with a kind of inherited religion from his preacher father,
he hardly felt qualified to lead a great moral crusade.
as soon as K's leadership of the movement was announced,
the threats from the Klan began.
not only the klan-within days K was arrested for driving 30 mph in a 25 mph zone
and thrown in the montgomery city jail.
the following night K, shaken by his first jail experience,
sat up in his kitchen wondering if he could take it anymore.
should he resign?
it was around midnight.
he felt agitated and full of fear.
a few minutes before, the phone had rung.
'nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now.
and if you aren't out of this town in three days, we're going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.
K sat staring at an untouched cup of coffee and tried to think of a way out,
a way to quietly surrender leadership
and resume the serene life of scholarship he had planned.
in the next room lay his wife coretta, already asleep,
along with their newborn daughter yolanda.
here is how k remembers it in a sermon he preached:
'and i sat at that table thinking about that little girl
and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute.
and i started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep...
and i got to the point that i couldn't take it anymore.
i was weak..
and i discovered then that religion had to become real to me
and i had to know God for myself.
and i bowed down over that cup of coffee.
i never will forget it..and prayed a prayer,
and i prayed out loud that night,
i said,'Lord, i'm down here trying to do what's right.
i think i'm right.
i think the cause that we represent is right.
but Lord, i must confess that i'm weak now.
i'm faltering.
i'm losing my courage'.
...and it seemed at that moment that i could hear an inner voice saying to me,
'martin luther, stand up for righteousness.
stand up for justice.
stand up for truth.
and lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world'.
i heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.
he promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
no never alone. no never alone.
He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
three night later, as promised, a bomb exploded on the front porch of K's home,
filling the house with smoke and broken glass but injuring no one.
K took it calmly: 'my religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it'.
..in the 1960s, as black students sought to integrate atlanta's churches,
our deacon board mobilized lookout squads who took turns
patrolling the entrances lest any black 'troublemaker'; appear.
i still have one of the cards the deacons printed up
to give to any civil rights demonstrators who might appear:
'believing the motives of your group to be ulterior and foreign to the teaching of God's word,
WE CANNOT EXTEND A WELCOME TO YOU
and respectfully request you to leave the premises quietly.
scripture dose NOT teach
'the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God'.
He is the creator of all, but only the father of those who have been regenerated.
if any one of you is here with a sincere desire to know Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord,
we shall be glad to deal individually with you from the Word of God',
(unanimous statement of pastor and deacons, august 1960)
..the next church i attended was smaller, more fundamentalist and more overtly racist
(the one whose 'burial' i recently attended.
there i learned the theological basis for racism.
the pastor taught that the hebrew word Ham meant 'burnt black',
making noah's son Ham the father of negro races,
and that in a curse noah had consigned him to, likely as a lowly servant (genesis 9).
that is when i hear my pastor explain why black people make such good waiters and household servants.
he acted out their moves on the platform, swiveling his hips..and we all laughed at his antics.
'the colored waiter is good at that job because that's the job
God destined him for in the curse of Ham..
no one bothered to point out that the curse was actually pronounced on noah's grandson canaan, not ham.
around that same time, mississippi's baptist record
published an article arguing that God meant for whites to rule over blacks
because 'a race whose mentality averages on borderline idiocy'
is obviously 'bereft of any divine blessing'.
if anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of
miscegenation, or mixing of the races,
which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in noah's day.
a single question, 'do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?
silenced all arguments about race.
..the word Prophet comes to mind because K, like those old testament figures,
endeavoured to change an entire nation through a straightforward moral appeal.
the passion and intensity of the biblical prophets has long fascinated me,
for most of them faced an audience every bit as
stubborn, prejudiced and cantankerous as i was during my teenage years.
with what moral lever can one move a whole nation?
studying the prophets, i not that virtually all of them followed a two pronged approach.
first, they gave a short range view of what God requires now.
in the old testament, this usually consisted of an exhortation to simple acts of faithfulness.
rebuild the temple.
purify your marriages.
help the poor.
destroy idols and put God first.
the prophets never stopped there, however.
they also gave a long range view to respond to the people's deepest questions.
how can we believe that God loves us in the face of so much suffering?
how can we believe in a just God when the world seems ruled by a conspiracy of evil?
prophets answered such questions by reminding their audience of
who God is and by painting a glowing picture of a future kingdom of righteousness.
in true prophetic tradition, K used that same two pronged approach.
for him, the short range view called for one thing above all else: nonviolence.
(yancey does not mention his long range...a good guess might be:
every individual treat every other individual, no matter how different or evil by obeying Jesus' call to
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES
DO GOOD TO THOSE WHO HATE YOU
BLESS THOSE WHO CURSE YOU
PRAY FOR THOSE WHO SPITEFULLY ABUSE YOU
LAMENT AND REGRET THE MISFORTUNE AND DEATH OF THOSE WHO DON'T DO THIS
DO NOT JUDGE
DO NOT CONDEMN
PARDON
GIVE..GOOD MEASURE, PRESSED DOWN, SHAKEN TOGETHER, RUNNING OVER..
to every person in need..of food...of love..) luke 6.27-8;36-8
when K accepted the nobel peace prize in 1964,
K referred ..to the principles he had learned from the sermon on the mount:
'when the years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live,
men and women will know and children will be taught
that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization,
because these humble children of God WERE willing to 'suffer for righteousness sake'.
(note: sadly things get better only as long as we ARE continually obeying Jesus, to the degree this slips away
to that degree human hatred one for the other grows. basically it has nothing, primarily to do with skin color.
that is most 'unvarnished' and obvious. but continually this goes on at the heart level about which Jesus said:
'out of the heart of man comes..murders...)
...(speaking in the same chapter of spending time with john perkins the author writes..)
white mississippians did not mind the social services,
but the resented the steady influx of northerners,
especially when perkins began to lead a voter registration campaign.
at the time only 50 black voters were registered in simpson county,
though blacks comprised 40% of the population.
such a ratio was typical: only 7000 of mississippi's 450,000 blacks were registered,
due to the many legal barriers
...when i visited mendenhall in1974, a sign welcomed me to town:
'white people unite, defeat jew/communist race mixers'.
i asked john perkins to show me an example of racism in action.
'when i write our story, people are going to tell me everything has changed', i said.
'the civil rights bill was ten years ago. is there still overt discrimination?';
...perkins thought for a minute and suddenly his face brightened:
'i know-let's integrate the revolving table restaurant!' (yancey had his example as they were there.)
...the victories did not come easily and most did not come at all during K's lifetime.
roy wilkins of the NAACP, an uneasy rival of K, kidded him in 1963
that his methods had not achieved a single victory for integration in albany or birmingham,
'in fact, martin, if you have desegregated ANYTHING by your efforts, kindly enlighten me'.
'well, K replied, i guess about the only thing i've desegregated so far is a few human hearts'.
he knew that the ultimate victory must be won there.
laws could prevent white people from lynching blacks,
but no law could require races to forgive or love one another.
the human heart, not the courtroom, was his supreme battleground.
as one of those changed hearts, i would have to agree.
...in 1995 the southern baptist convention,
150 years after forming over the issue of slavery, formally repented of their long term support of racism...
..observers of the South sometimes speak of it as 'Christ haunted'.
perhaps they should speak of it as 'race haunted' as well.
all of us, white or black, who grew up in those days bear scars...
..a few years before his death, k was asked about mistakes he had made.
he replied, 'well, the most pervasive mistake i have made
was in believing that because our cause was just,
we could be sure that the white minsters of the South, once their christian consciences were challenged,
would rise to our aid.
i felt that white minsters would take our cause to the white power structures.
i ended up , or course, chastened and disillusioned.
as our movement unfolded and direct appeals were made to white ministers,
most folded their hands-and some even took stands against us.'
..(yancey speaks)..'only one thing haunts me more than the sins of my past:
what sins am i blind to today?'
RECOMMEND:
*the autobiographey of martin luther king, jr., an audiobook produced by time warner....
the tapes include actual sermons and speeches delivered by K himself in his stirring, inimitable style,
along with fine segues of gospel music.
*a testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of martin luther king, jr.
*david garrow's 'bearing the cross' is best single volume biography of K
*taylor branch's exhaustive 'parting the waters +pillar of fire, expand the view to
encompass other events going on in the civil rights movement.
the book starts..'sometimes in a waiting room or on an airplane i strike up conversations with strangers,
during the course of which they learn that i write books on spiritual themes.
eyebrows arch, barriers spring up and often i hear yet another horror story about church.
my seatmates must expect me to defend the church, because they always act surprised when i respond,
'oh, it's even worse that that.
let me tell you my story'.
i have spent most of my life in recovery from the church.
one church i attended during formative years in georgia of the 1960s
presented a hermetically (airtight) sealed view of the world.
a sign out front proudly proclaimed our identity with words radiating from a many pointed star:
'New Testament, Blood bought, Born again, Premillenial, Dispensational, Fundamental...'
our little group of 200 people had a corner on the truth, God's truth
and everyone who disagreed with us was
surely teetering on the edge of hell...
..'a mystery: if the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it?'...if the gospel comes as a
eucastrophe, j.r.r. tolkien's word for a spectacularly good thing
happening to spectacularly bad people,
why do so few people perceive it as good news?
..i became a writer, i now believe, to sort out words used and misused by the church of my youth...
..i became a writer because of my own encounter with the power of words
and i gained hope that spoiled words, their original meaning wrung out, could be reclaimed.
..unavoidably and by instinct, i question and reevaluate my faith all the time. (II corinthians 13.5?)
..every writer has one main theme, a poor that he or she keeps sniffing around,
tracking, following to its source.
if i had to define my own theme, it would be that of a person who
absorbed some of the worst the church has to offer,
yet still landed in the loving arms of God.
yes, i went through a period of rejection of the church and God,
a conversion experience in reverse that felt like liberation for a time.
i ended up, however, not as an atheist, a refugee from the church,
but as one of its advocates.
what allowed me to ransom a personal faith from the damaging effects of religion?
the people profiled in this book go a long way toward answering that question.
..the glory of God is a person fully alive, said the second century theologian irenaeus.
sadly that description does not reflect the image many people have of modern christians.
rightly or wrongly, they see christians rather as restrained, uptight, repressed
-people less likely to celebrate vitality than to wag our fingers in disapproval.
..the thirteen people you will meet here have one thing in common:
their impact on me.
...i must say, writing these tributes has for me been an exercise of health and even joy.
i did not set out with an agenda,
to convert anyone, to defend the church ..
i merely want to introduce others to a roomful of exceptional people whom i cannot,
and have no wish to, get out of mind.
fred rogers in giving talks asks the audience to pause for a minute of silence
and think about all those who have helped them become who they are...
..i was born in atlanta, georgia, in 1949..
we lived in apartheid (policy of rigid segregation of people based on some criterion) conditions.
MARTIN LUTHER KING's ...appropriation of the christian gospel galled us (white church people) the most
he was, after all, an ordained minister,
and even my fundamentalist church had to acknowledge the integrity of his father, Daddy King,
respected pastor of ebeneezer baptist church.
we had our ways of resolving that cognitive dissonance, of course.
we said that the younger king was a card carrying communist,
a marxist agent who merely posed as a minister.
..george wallace cited FBI sources to accuse K of belonging to
more communist front organizations than any man in the united states.
during K's time, the FBI looked with suspicion on white people
who mixed easily with friends from a variety of races and economic groups.
these were potential communists...
..as for..accusations of K's sexual immorality reflect historical fact..
the FBI taped numerous episodes in K's hotel room,
and thanks to the freedom of information act historians can study the actual transcripts.
ralph abernathy has revealed that K carried on extramarital affairs up until the eve of his death.
one FBI agent (william sullivan)..sent K some of their recordings
along with a note urging him to commit suicide:
'you are done. there is but one way out for you.
you better take it before your filthy abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation'.
(also)..K has been accused of plagiarism as well.
he inserted into his graduate school thesis, his writings and sometimes his speeches,
long sections lifted without credit from other sources. .
frankly, i find it easier to understand K's sexual failings,
a sin in which he has much company, than his plagiarism.
a master of riveting prose, why did he feel the need to steal someone else's?
relentless pressures buffeted K from all sides.
he faced death threats from segregationists as well as the FBI.
a bomb went off in his home.
black churches were burning every week in the South.
his volunteers were being threatened, beaten and jailed and some of them were dying.
often his southern christian leadership conference had to skip payroll,
and his most effecive fund raiser was one of the advisers president kennedy had demanded that he fire.
newspapers from the atlanta journal to the new york times condemned his methods.
the NAACP criticized him for being too radical,
while SNCC (student nonviolent coordinating committee) accused him of timidity.
student demonstrators in a dozen cities pleaded with him to accompany them to jail;
volunteers in mississippi urged him to come risk his life with them.
should he concentrate on voting rights or on segregated restaurants?
what unjust laws should he violate?
what about defying court orders?
should he stick to civil rights or expand his focus to poverty?
what about the war in vietnam?
i better understand now the pressures that K faced his entire adult life,
pressures that surely contributed to his failures.
K's moral weaknesses provide a convenient excuse for anyone who wants to avoid his message
and because of those weaknesses some christians still discount the genuineness of his faith.
(these christians might want to review the list of outstanding people of faith in hebrews 11,
a list which includes such moral deviants as noah, abraham, jacob, rahab, samson and david.
i certainly once dismissed him.
yet now i can hardly read a page from K's life, or a paragraph from his speeches,
without sensing the centrality of his christian conviction.
i won a collection of his sermon tapes, and every time i listen to them
i am swept up in the sheer power of his gospel based message,
delivered with an eloquence that has never been matched.
david garrow builds his book (bearing the cross) around the scene of K's supernatural call, early in his career
'it was the most important night of his life, writes G, the one he always would think back to in future years
when the pressures again seemed to be too great.
king had been thrust into civil rights leadership in montgomery, alabama,
after rosa parks had made her brave decision not to move to the back of the bus.
the black community formed a new organization to lead a bus boycott
and by default chose as a compromise candidate for its leadership the new minister in town, K,
who at age 26 looked 'more like a boy than a man'.
growing up in middle class surroundings, with a kind of inherited religion from his preacher father,
he hardly felt qualified to lead a great moral crusade.
as soon as K's leadership of the movement was announced,
the threats from the Klan began.
not only the klan-within days K was arrested for driving 30 mph in a 25 mph zone
and thrown in the montgomery city jail.
the following night K, shaken by his first jail experience,
sat up in his kitchen wondering if he could take it anymore.
should he resign?
it was around midnight.
he felt agitated and full of fear.
a few minutes before, the phone had rung.
'nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now.
and if you aren't out of this town in three days, we're going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.
K sat staring at an untouched cup of coffee and tried to think of a way out,
a way to quietly surrender leadership
and resume the serene life of scholarship he had planned.
in the next room lay his wife coretta, already asleep,
along with their newborn daughter yolanda.
here is how k remembers it in a sermon he preached:
'and i sat at that table thinking about that little girl
and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute.
and i started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep...
and i got to the point that i couldn't take it anymore.
i was weak..
and i discovered then that religion had to become real to me
and i had to know God for myself.
and i bowed down over that cup of coffee.
i never will forget it..and prayed a prayer,
and i prayed out loud that night,
i said,'Lord, i'm down here trying to do what's right.
i think i'm right.
i think the cause that we represent is right.
but Lord, i must confess that i'm weak now.
i'm faltering.
i'm losing my courage'.
...and it seemed at that moment that i could hear an inner voice saying to me,
'martin luther, stand up for righteousness.
stand up for justice.
stand up for truth.
and lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world'.
i heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.
he promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
no never alone. no never alone.
He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
three night later, as promised, a bomb exploded on the front porch of K's home,
filling the house with smoke and broken glass but injuring no one.
K took it calmly: 'my religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it'.
..in the 1960s, as black students sought to integrate atlanta's churches,
our deacon board mobilized lookout squads who took turns
patrolling the entrances lest any black 'troublemaker'; appear.
i still have one of the cards the deacons printed up
to give to any civil rights demonstrators who might appear:
'believing the motives of your group to be ulterior and foreign to the teaching of God's word,
WE CANNOT EXTEND A WELCOME TO YOU
and respectfully request you to leave the premises quietly.
scripture dose NOT teach
'the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God'.
He is the creator of all, but only the father of those who have been regenerated.
if any one of you is here with a sincere desire to know Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord,
we shall be glad to deal individually with you from the Word of God',
(unanimous statement of pastor and deacons, august 1960)
..the next church i attended was smaller, more fundamentalist and more overtly racist
(the one whose 'burial' i recently attended.
there i learned the theological basis for racism.
the pastor taught that the hebrew word Ham meant 'burnt black',
making noah's son Ham the father of negro races,
and that in a curse noah had consigned him to, likely as a lowly servant (genesis 9).
that is when i hear my pastor explain why black people make such good waiters and household servants.
he acted out their moves on the platform, swiveling his hips..and we all laughed at his antics.
'the colored waiter is good at that job because that's the job
God destined him for in the curse of Ham..
no one bothered to point out that the curse was actually pronounced on noah's grandson canaan, not ham.
around that same time, mississippi's baptist record
published an article arguing that God meant for whites to rule over blacks
because 'a race whose mentality averages on borderline idiocy'
is obviously 'bereft of any divine blessing'.
if anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of
miscegenation, or mixing of the races,
which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in noah's day.
a single question, 'do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?
silenced all arguments about race.
..the word Prophet comes to mind because K, like those old testament figures,
endeavoured to change an entire nation through a straightforward moral appeal.
the passion and intensity of the biblical prophets has long fascinated me,
for most of them faced an audience every bit as
stubborn, prejudiced and cantankerous as i was during my teenage years.
with what moral lever can one move a whole nation?
studying the prophets, i not that virtually all of them followed a two pronged approach.
first, they gave a short range view of what God requires now.
in the old testament, this usually consisted of an exhortation to simple acts of faithfulness.
rebuild the temple.
purify your marriages.
help the poor.
destroy idols and put God first.
the prophets never stopped there, however.
they also gave a long range view to respond to the people's deepest questions.
how can we believe that God loves us in the face of so much suffering?
how can we believe in a just God when the world seems ruled by a conspiracy of evil?
prophets answered such questions by reminding their audience of
who God is and by painting a glowing picture of a future kingdom of righteousness.
in true prophetic tradition, K used that same two pronged approach.
for him, the short range view called for one thing above all else: nonviolence.
(yancey does not mention his long range...a good guess might be:
every individual treat every other individual, no matter how different or evil by obeying Jesus' call to
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES
DO GOOD TO THOSE WHO HATE YOU
BLESS THOSE WHO CURSE YOU
PRAY FOR THOSE WHO SPITEFULLY ABUSE YOU
LAMENT AND REGRET THE MISFORTUNE AND DEATH OF THOSE WHO DON'T DO THIS
DO NOT JUDGE
DO NOT CONDEMN
PARDON
GIVE..GOOD MEASURE, PRESSED DOWN, SHAKEN TOGETHER, RUNNING OVER..
to every person in need..of food...of love..) luke 6.27-8;36-8
when K accepted the nobel peace prize in 1964,
K referred ..to the principles he had learned from the sermon on the mount:
'when the years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live,
men and women will know and children will be taught
that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization,
because these humble children of God WERE willing to 'suffer for righteousness sake'.
(note: sadly things get better only as long as we ARE continually obeying Jesus, to the degree this slips away
to that degree human hatred one for the other grows. basically it has nothing, primarily to do with skin color.
that is most 'unvarnished' and obvious. but continually this goes on at the heart level about which Jesus said:
'out of the heart of man comes..murders...)
...(speaking in the same chapter of spending time with john perkins the author writes..)
white mississippians did not mind the social services,
but the resented the steady influx of northerners,
especially when perkins began to lead a voter registration campaign.
at the time only 50 black voters were registered in simpson county,
though blacks comprised 40% of the population.
such a ratio was typical: only 7000 of mississippi's 450,000 blacks were registered,
due to the many legal barriers
...when i visited mendenhall in1974, a sign welcomed me to town:
'white people unite, defeat jew/communist race mixers'.
i asked john perkins to show me an example of racism in action.
'when i write our story, people are going to tell me everything has changed', i said.
'the civil rights bill was ten years ago. is there still overt discrimination?';
...perkins thought for a minute and suddenly his face brightened:
'i know-let's integrate the revolving table restaurant!' (yancey had his example as they were there.)
...the victories did not come easily and most did not come at all during K's lifetime.
roy wilkins of the NAACP, an uneasy rival of K, kidded him in 1963
that his methods had not achieved a single victory for integration in albany or birmingham,
'in fact, martin, if you have desegregated ANYTHING by your efforts, kindly enlighten me'.
'well, K replied, i guess about the only thing i've desegregated so far is a few human hearts'.
he knew that the ultimate victory must be won there.
laws could prevent white people from lynching blacks,
but no law could require races to forgive or love one another.
the human heart, not the courtroom, was his supreme battleground.
as one of those changed hearts, i would have to agree.
...in 1995 the southern baptist convention,
150 years after forming over the issue of slavery, formally repented of their long term support of racism...
..observers of the South sometimes speak of it as 'Christ haunted'.
perhaps they should speak of it as 'race haunted' as well.
all of us, white or black, who grew up in those days bear scars...
..a few years before his death, k was asked about mistakes he had made.
he replied, 'well, the most pervasive mistake i have made
was in believing that because our cause was just,
we could be sure that the white minsters of the South, once their christian consciences were challenged,
would rise to our aid.
i felt that white minsters would take our cause to the white power structures.
i ended up , or course, chastened and disillusioned.
as our movement unfolded and direct appeals were made to white ministers,
most folded their hands-and some even took stands against us.'
..(yancey speaks)..'only one thing haunts me more than the sins of my past:
what sins am i blind to today?'
RECOMMEND:
*the autobiographey of martin luther king, jr., an audiobook produced by time warner....
the tapes include actual sermons and speeches delivered by K himself in his stirring, inimitable style,
along with fine segues of gospel music.
*a testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of martin luther king, jr.
*david garrow's 'bearing the cross' is best single volume biography of K
*taylor branch's exhaustive 'parting the waters +pillar of fire, expand the view to
encompass other events going on in the civil rights movement.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
12.22.2013 ONCE SAVED ALWAYS SAVED? matthew 13.18-23
compare the parallel in luke 8.11-5 and hebrews 6.4-6
hear then the parable of the sower.
when anyone hears the word of the kingdom
and does not understand it,
the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.
this is the one on whom seed was sown beside the road.
and the one on whom seed was sown on the rocky places,
this is the man who hears the word
and immediately receives it with joy'
yet he has no firm root in himself,
but is only temporary
and when AFFLICTION or PERSECUTION arises because of the word, (TIME OF TEMPTATION,
immediately he falls away. luke 8.13)
and the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns,
this is the man who hears the word
and the WORRY OF THE WORLD (WORRIES and RICHES and PLEASURES OF THIS LIFE,
and the DECEITFULNESS OF RICHES luke 8.14)
choke the word and it becomes unfruitful.
and the one on whom seed was sown on the good soil,
this is the man who hears the word and understands it;
who indeed BEARS FRUIT* (WITH PERSEVERANCE, luke 8.15)
and brings forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty and some thirty.'
the question to be asked, in light of the fact that 5 things: pleasure, pain, riches, lack of enough to
sustain life and persecution because of faithfulness to Jesus, can be the causes of a lack of bearing fruit-
are only those who bear fruit (with perseverance, luke), in the end, saved?
what is FRUIT?
consider Jesus' word in matthew 7.15-21,
'beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing,
but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
you will know them by their fruits. (Jesus, without defining 'fruits', goes on..)
grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes,
nor figs from thistles, are they?
even so, every good tree bears good fruit;
but the bad tree bears bad fruit.
a good tree cannot produce bad fruit
nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.
every tree that does not bear good fruit
is cut down and thrown into the fire.
so then, you will know them by their fruits. (still no 'good/bad fruit is...)
not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord'
shall enter the kingdom of heaven;
but HE WHO DOES THE WILL OF THE FATHER who is in heaven'.
it would seem likely that good fruit would be anything God commands which is done out of a heart
of love for Him. what do you think?
for most of my life i have believed that my MENTAL ASSENT TO THE DOCTRINES OF CHRIST
AND THE IDEA THAT THE BIBLE IS GOD'S WORD = SALVATION.
it seems that these things must be believed to be saved,
but that they alone are not enough.
it would seem that there must be an ongoing, deep, even agonizing concern about lack of obedience.
in luke 13.24 Jesus says to His disciplers,
'AGONIZE to enter the narrow door,
for many will seek to enter and will not be able'.
in matthew 24.10-3, Jesus, speaking of the last days of human history says,
'and at that time many will fall away
and will deliver up one another
and hate one another.
and many false prophets will arise, and will mislead many.
and because lawlessness is increased, most people's love
(John 14.15- Jesus says, 'if you love Me, keep my commandments')
will grow cold.
but the one who ENDURES to the end, he shall be saved'.
the following from matthew henry on matthew 13...
let us therefore compare the parable and the exposition.
the seed sown if the word of God, here called 'the word of the kingdom' v19
..it is the In corruptible seed (I peter 1.23)
..because of the hope laid up for you,
just as in all the world also it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing,
even as it has been doing in you also since the day you heard of it
and understood the grace of God in truth..
the sower that scatters the seed is our Lord Jesus Christ, either by Himself or by His ministers v37
the ground in which this seed is sown is the hearts of the children of men...
the highway ground...they had pathways through their cornfields (12.1)
and the seed that fell on them never entered and the birds picked it up.
..like those who 'go to church'..they take no heed to it, take no hold of it..
they do not come with any design to get good,
as the highway was never intended to be sown.
'they come before God as his people come
and sit before Him as His people sit'
but it is merely for fashion sake, to see and be seen.
they mind not what is said, it comes in at one ear and goes out at the other
and makes no impression.
"the wicked one..the devil, cometh and catcheth away that which was sown.
such mindless, careless, trifling hearers are an easy prey to satan.
who, as he is the great murderer of souls,
so he is the great thief of sermons
...if we break not up the fallow ground by preparing our hearts for the word
and humbling them to it
and engaging our own attention..
and if we cover not the seed afterwards, by meditation and prayer;
if we give not more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, we are as highway ground.
..stony ground..
those who receive some good impressions of the word, but they are not lasting.
note, it is possible we may be a great deal better than some others,
and yet not be so good as we should be;
may go beyond our neighbours and yet come short of heaven.
..they are quick in hearing, swift to hear,
'immediately' it sprung up
hypocrites often get the start of true christians in the shows of profession,
and are often too hot to hold.
he receiveth it straightway, without trying it;
swallows it without chewing
and then there can never e a good digestion.
those are most likely to hold fast that which is good, that prove all things, I thess. 5.21
they receive it with joy.
there are many that are very glad to hear a good sermon,
that yet do not profit by it;
they may be pleased with the word and yet not changed and ruled by it.
the heart may melt under the word and yet not be melted down by the word, much less into it, as into a mould.
many taste the good word of God (heb. 6.5) and say they find sweetness in it,
but some beloved lust is rolled under the tongue,
which it would not agree with
and so they spit it out again.
they endure for awhile, like a violent motion, which continues as long as the impression of the force remains,
but ceases when that has spent itself.
many endure for a while, that do not endure to the end
ans do come short of the happiness which is promised to them only that persevere.
they did run well, but something hindered them, gal. 5.7.
they have no root in themselves, no settled, fixed principles in their judgments,
no firm resolution in their wills nor any rooted habits in their affections.
nothing firm that will be either the sap or the strength of their profession.
1. it is possible there may be the green blade of a profession,
where yet there is not the root of grace.
hardness prevails in the heart
and what there is of soil and softness is only in the surface.
inwardly they are no more affected than a stone.
they have no root, they are not by faith united to Christ who is our Root.
they derive not from Him, they depend not on Him.
2. where there is not a principle, though there be a profession, we cannot expect perseverance.
those who have no root will endure but awhile.
a ship without ballast, though she may at first out sail the laden vessel,
yet will certainly fail in stress of weather and never make her port.
..after a fair gale of opportunity usually follows a storm of persecution,
to try who have received the word in sincerity and who have not.
when the word of Christ's kingdom comes to be the word of Christ's patience (rev. 3.10),
then is the trial, who keeps it, and who does not, (rev. 1.9).
it is wisdom to prepare for such a day.
when trying times come, those who have no root are soon offended.
they first quarrel with their profession and then quit it.
first find fault with it and then throw it off.
hence we read of 'the offence of the cross' gal. 5.11.
observe, persecution is represented ..by 'the scorching sun.
the same sun which warms and cherishes
that which was well rooted, withers and burns up that which wanted root.
as the word of Christ,
so the cross of Christ, is to some a savour of life unto life,
to others a savour of death unto death.
the same tribulation which drives some to apostasy and ruin,
works for others a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.
trials which shake some, confirm others Phil. 1.12
observe how soon they fall away, by and by;
as soon rotten as they were ripe.
a profession taken up without consideration is commonly let fall without it.
'lightly come, lightly go'.
the thorny ground..
some fell among thorns (which are a good guard to the corn when they are in the hedge,
but a bad inmate when they are in the field)
and the thorns sprung up, which intimates that they did not appear
,or but little, when the corn was sown, but afterwards they proved choking to it.
this went further than the former, for it had root
and it represents the condition of those who do not quite cast off their profession
and yet come short of any saving benefit by it;
the good they gain by the word, being insensibly overcome and overborne by the things of this world.
prosperity destroys the word in the heart, as much as persecution does
and more dangerously, because more silently:
the stones spoiled the root, the thorns spoil the fruit.
now what are these choking thorns:
first, the cares of this world.
care for another world would quicken the springing of this seed,
but care for this world chokes it.
worldly cares are fitly compared to thorns, for they came in with sin and are a fruit of the curse.
they are good in their place to stop a gap, but a man must be well armed that deals much in them
II samuel 23.6-7
they are entangling, vexing, scratching and their end is to be burned. heb 6.8
these thorns choke the good seed.
worldly cares are great hindrances to our profiting by the word of God and our proficiency in religion.
they eat up that vigour of soul which should be spent in divine things,
divert us from duty, distract us in duty, and do us most mischief of all afterwards.
wrenching the sparks of good affections and bursting the cords of good resolutions.
those who are careful and cumbered about many things, commonly neglect the one thing needful.
secondly, the deceitfulness of riches.
those who, by their care and industry, have raised estates
and so the danger that arises from care seems to be over and they continue hearers of the word,
yet still in a snare jeremiah 5.4,5.
it is hard for them to enter into the kingdom of heaven.
they are apt to promise themselves that in riches which is not in them (the riches),
to rely upon them and to take an inordinate complacency in them
and this chokes the word as much as care did.
observe, it is not so much riches, as the deceitfulness of riches,
that does the mischief.
now they cannot be said to be deceitful to us unless we put our confidence in them
and raise our expectations from them
and then it is that they choke the good seed.
luke 8.14...the pleasures of this life are as dangerous and mischievous thorns to choke
the good seed of the word as any other.
this is added here, which was not in the other evangelists.
those that are not entangled in the cares of this life,
nor inveigled with the deceitfulness of riches,
but boast that they are dead to them,
may yet be kept from heaven by an affected indolence
and the love of ease and pleasure.
the delights of sense may ruin the soul,
even lawful delights, indulged and too much delighted in.
hear then the parable of the sower.
when anyone hears the word of the kingdom
and does not understand it,
the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.
this is the one on whom seed was sown beside the road.
and the one on whom seed was sown on the rocky places,
this is the man who hears the word
and immediately receives it with joy'
yet he has no firm root in himself,
but is only temporary
and when AFFLICTION or PERSECUTION arises because of the word, (TIME OF TEMPTATION,
immediately he falls away. luke 8.13)
and the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns,
this is the man who hears the word
and the WORRY OF THE WORLD (WORRIES and RICHES and PLEASURES OF THIS LIFE,
and the DECEITFULNESS OF RICHES luke 8.14)
choke the word and it becomes unfruitful.
and the one on whom seed was sown on the good soil,
this is the man who hears the word and understands it;
who indeed BEARS FRUIT* (WITH PERSEVERANCE, luke 8.15)
and brings forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty and some thirty.'
the question to be asked, in light of the fact that 5 things: pleasure, pain, riches, lack of enough to
sustain life and persecution because of faithfulness to Jesus, can be the causes of a lack of bearing fruit-
are only those who bear fruit (with perseverance, luke), in the end, saved?
what is FRUIT?
consider Jesus' word in matthew 7.15-21,
'beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing,
but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
you will know them by their fruits. (Jesus, without defining 'fruits', goes on..)
grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes,
nor figs from thistles, are they?
even so, every good tree bears good fruit;
but the bad tree bears bad fruit.
a good tree cannot produce bad fruit
nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.
every tree that does not bear good fruit
is cut down and thrown into the fire.
so then, you will know them by their fruits. (still no 'good/bad fruit is...)
not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord'
shall enter the kingdom of heaven;
but HE WHO DOES THE WILL OF THE FATHER who is in heaven'.
it would seem likely that good fruit would be anything God commands which is done out of a heart
of love for Him. what do you think?
for most of my life i have believed that my MENTAL ASSENT TO THE DOCTRINES OF CHRIST
AND THE IDEA THAT THE BIBLE IS GOD'S WORD = SALVATION.
it seems that these things must be believed to be saved,
but that they alone are not enough.
it would seem that there must be an ongoing, deep, even agonizing concern about lack of obedience.
in luke 13.24 Jesus says to His disciplers,
'AGONIZE to enter the narrow door,
for many will seek to enter and will not be able'.
in matthew 24.10-3, Jesus, speaking of the last days of human history says,
'and at that time many will fall away
and will deliver up one another
and hate one another.
and many false prophets will arise, and will mislead many.
and because lawlessness is increased, most people's love
(John 14.15- Jesus says, 'if you love Me, keep my commandments')
will grow cold.
but the one who ENDURES to the end, he shall be saved'.
the following from matthew henry on matthew 13...
let us therefore compare the parable and the exposition.
the seed sown if the word of God, here called 'the word of the kingdom' v19
..it is the In corruptible seed (I peter 1.23)
..because of the hope laid up for you,
just as in all the world also it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing,
even as it has been doing in you also since the day you heard of it
and understood the grace of God in truth..
the sower that scatters the seed is our Lord Jesus Christ, either by Himself or by His ministers v37
the ground in which this seed is sown is the hearts of the children of men...
the highway ground...they had pathways through their cornfields (12.1)
and the seed that fell on them never entered and the birds picked it up.
..like those who 'go to church'..they take no heed to it, take no hold of it..
they do not come with any design to get good,
as the highway was never intended to be sown.
'they come before God as his people come
and sit before Him as His people sit'
but it is merely for fashion sake, to see and be seen.
they mind not what is said, it comes in at one ear and goes out at the other
and makes no impression.
"the wicked one..the devil, cometh and catcheth away that which was sown.
such mindless, careless, trifling hearers are an easy prey to satan.
who, as he is the great murderer of souls,
so he is the great thief of sermons
...if we break not up the fallow ground by preparing our hearts for the word
and humbling them to it
and engaging our own attention..
and if we cover not the seed afterwards, by meditation and prayer;
if we give not more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, we are as highway ground.
..stony ground..
those who receive some good impressions of the word, but they are not lasting.
note, it is possible we may be a great deal better than some others,
and yet not be so good as we should be;
may go beyond our neighbours and yet come short of heaven.
..they are quick in hearing, swift to hear,
'immediately' it sprung up
hypocrites often get the start of true christians in the shows of profession,
and are often too hot to hold.
he receiveth it straightway, without trying it;
swallows it without chewing
and then there can never e a good digestion.
those are most likely to hold fast that which is good, that prove all things, I thess. 5.21
they receive it with joy.
there are many that are very glad to hear a good sermon,
that yet do not profit by it;
they may be pleased with the word and yet not changed and ruled by it.
the heart may melt under the word and yet not be melted down by the word, much less into it, as into a mould.
many taste the good word of God (heb. 6.5) and say they find sweetness in it,
but some beloved lust is rolled under the tongue,
which it would not agree with
and so they spit it out again.
they endure for awhile, like a violent motion, which continues as long as the impression of the force remains,
but ceases when that has spent itself.
many endure for a while, that do not endure to the end
ans do come short of the happiness which is promised to them only that persevere.
they did run well, but something hindered them, gal. 5.7.
they have no root in themselves, no settled, fixed principles in their judgments,
no firm resolution in their wills nor any rooted habits in their affections.
nothing firm that will be either the sap or the strength of their profession.
1. it is possible there may be the green blade of a profession,
where yet there is not the root of grace.
hardness prevails in the heart
and what there is of soil and softness is only in the surface.
inwardly they are no more affected than a stone.
they have no root, they are not by faith united to Christ who is our Root.
they derive not from Him, they depend not on Him.
2. where there is not a principle, though there be a profession, we cannot expect perseverance.
those who have no root will endure but awhile.
a ship without ballast, though she may at first out sail the laden vessel,
yet will certainly fail in stress of weather and never make her port.
..after a fair gale of opportunity usually follows a storm of persecution,
to try who have received the word in sincerity and who have not.
when the word of Christ's kingdom comes to be the word of Christ's patience (rev. 3.10),
then is the trial, who keeps it, and who does not, (rev. 1.9).
it is wisdom to prepare for such a day.
when trying times come, those who have no root are soon offended.
they first quarrel with their profession and then quit it.
first find fault with it and then throw it off.
hence we read of 'the offence of the cross' gal. 5.11.
observe, persecution is represented ..by 'the scorching sun.
the same sun which warms and cherishes
that which was well rooted, withers and burns up that which wanted root.
as the word of Christ,
so the cross of Christ, is to some a savour of life unto life,
to others a savour of death unto death.
the same tribulation which drives some to apostasy and ruin,
works for others a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.
trials which shake some, confirm others Phil. 1.12
observe how soon they fall away, by and by;
as soon rotten as they were ripe.
a profession taken up without consideration is commonly let fall without it.
'lightly come, lightly go'.
the thorny ground..
some fell among thorns (which are a good guard to the corn when they are in the hedge,
but a bad inmate when they are in the field)
and the thorns sprung up, which intimates that they did not appear
,or but little, when the corn was sown, but afterwards they proved choking to it.
this went further than the former, for it had root
and it represents the condition of those who do not quite cast off their profession
and yet come short of any saving benefit by it;
the good they gain by the word, being insensibly overcome and overborne by the things of this world.
prosperity destroys the word in the heart, as much as persecution does
and more dangerously, because more silently:
the stones spoiled the root, the thorns spoil the fruit.
now what are these choking thorns:
first, the cares of this world.
care for another world would quicken the springing of this seed,
but care for this world chokes it.
worldly cares are fitly compared to thorns, for they came in with sin and are a fruit of the curse.
they are good in their place to stop a gap, but a man must be well armed that deals much in them
II samuel 23.6-7
they are entangling, vexing, scratching and their end is to be burned. heb 6.8
these thorns choke the good seed.
worldly cares are great hindrances to our profiting by the word of God and our proficiency in religion.
they eat up that vigour of soul which should be spent in divine things,
divert us from duty, distract us in duty, and do us most mischief of all afterwards.
wrenching the sparks of good affections and bursting the cords of good resolutions.
those who are careful and cumbered about many things, commonly neglect the one thing needful.
secondly, the deceitfulness of riches.
those who, by their care and industry, have raised estates
and so the danger that arises from care seems to be over and they continue hearers of the word,
yet still in a snare jeremiah 5.4,5.
it is hard for them to enter into the kingdom of heaven.
they are apt to promise themselves that in riches which is not in them (the riches),
to rely upon them and to take an inordinate complacency in them
and this chokes the word as much as care did.
observe, it is not so much riches, as the deceitfulness of riches,
that does the mischief.
now they cannot be said to be deceitful to us unless we put our confidence in them
and raise our expectations from them
and then it is that they choke the good seed.
luke 8.14...the pleasures of this life are as dangerous and mischievous thorns to choke
the good seed of the word as any other.
this is added here, which was not in the other evangelists.
those that are not entangled in the cares of this life,
nor inveigled with the deceitfulness of riches,
but boast that they are dead to them,
may yet be kept from heaven by an affected indolence
and the love of ease and pleasure.
the delights of sense may ruin the soul,
even lawful delights, indulged and too much delighted in.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
12.21.2013 EVAN ROBERTS
on 31 october 1904 evan rovberts, brought up in the moreah calvinistic methodist church in wales,
came home his church in loughor to begin the work of renewal among the congregation's youth.
the four conditions of blessing that R claimed the Spirit had revealed, namely
1.separation from all known sin
2. renunciation of all things that wer morally dubious
3. immediate obedience to the promptings of the holy Spirity
4. public confession of Christ,
became the basis for his mission
and by the end of the week dramatic scenes of quite exceptional emotional power
were drawing unprecedented congrfegations.
..invitations soon came for him to lead missions throughout wales.
..his verve, youthfuloness, attractive personality and patent sincerity
were effective means of popularizing the revival cause.
...he left for liverpool on 28 march 1905
to lead his next (fourth) mission, which had been organized by tghe city's welsh churches.
it was here that the near clairvoyant tendency that had already become
such a marked feature of his minsitry was given full rein.
he would claim regularly during the next fornight
that he knew by divine intuition of particular individuals' specific sins
and of their need to repent openly in order for his meetings to continue.
these claims cause some consternation,
though there was ample evidence of scores of people professing conversion or renewed consecration.
the physical manifestations of R's deepening agonies of spirit
caused his hosts to become seriously worried about his psychological health
and following medical advice he took a month's rest..to recuperate and plan ahead...
..by the summer of 1905 R had become more wary of overt emotionalism
and no longer spoke of the four 'conditions' of revival;
in fact his theological emphasis was moving from the subjective workings of the Holy Spirit
to the objective content of the atoning work of Christ.
..his 8th and final mission between 4-18 january 1906..
note: i am told that there were 100,000 conversions reported from this revival...have to check more..
came home his church in loughor to begin the work of renewal among the congregation's youth.
the four conditions of blessing that R claimed the Spirit had revealed, namely
1.separation from all known sin
2. renunciation of all things that wer morally dubious
3. immediate obedience to the promptings of the holy Spirity
4. public confession of Christ,
became the basis for his mission
and by the end of the week dramatic scenes of quite exceptional emotional power
were drawing unprecedented congrfegations.
..invitations soon came for him to lead missions throughout wales.
..his verve, youthfuloness, attractive personality and patent sincerity
were effective means of popularizing the revival cause.
...he left for liverpool on 28 march 1905
to lead his next (fourth) mission, which had been organized by tghe city's welsh churches.
it was here that the near clairvoyant tendency that had already become
such a marked feature of his minsitry was given full rein.
he would claim regularly during the next fornight
that he knew by divine intuition of particular individuals' specific sins
and of their need to repent openly in order for his meetings to continue.
these claims cause some consternation,
though there was ample evidence of scores of people professing conversion or renewed consecration.
the physical manifestations of R's deepening agonies of spirit
caused his hosts to become seriously worried about his psychological health
and following medical advice he took a month's rest..to recuperate and plan ahead...
..by the summer of 1905 R had become more wary of overt emotionalism
and no longer spoke of the four 'conditions' of revival;
in fact his theological emphasis was moving from the subjective workings of the Holy Spirit
to the objective content of the atoning work of Christ.
..his 8th and final mission between 4-18 january 1906..
note: i am told that there were 100,000 conversions reported from this revival...have to check more..
12.21.2013 XMAS 2013
do you have a relationship with Him?
listen carefully to what he is saying to you
and respond positively?
do you ask Him about all the things that concern you?
...seek only to please Him?
are you confidently trusting that He knows best
what He is doing
...even in your hardest and most difficult
matters of concern and trouble?
are you resting in
and totally satisfied with Him..alone
..needing nothing other?
are you praising Him for His goodness,
even in the time of your deepest sorrow and pain?
if so...
then you must wonder
with joy unspeakable...
that He loves you enough
to choose to become a helpless baby
so he could be despised, mocked and murdered
to take away every one of your sins.
then 'tis a MERRY CHRISTMAS in DEED!
Hallelujah, what a saviour.
may He become our master
in all that concerns us
on this and every day of the year.
listen carefully to what he is saying to you
and respond positively?
do you ask Him about all the things that concern you?
...seek only to please Him?
are you confidently trusting that He knows best
what He is doing
...even in your hardest and most difficult
matters of concern and trouble?
are you resting in
and totally satisfied with Him..alone
..needing nothing other?
are you praising Him for His goodness,
even in the time of your deepest sorrow and pain?
if so...
then you must wonder
with joy unspeakable...
that He loves you enough
to choose to become a helpless baby
so he could be despised, mocked and murdered
to take away every one of your sins.
then 'tis a MERRY CHRISTMAS in DEED!
Hallelujah, what a saviour.
may He become our master
in all that concerns us
on this and every day of the year.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
12.17.2013 LEWIS 2
continuing the biography by a.n. wilson
204 (charles williams dies suddenly)
as one would expect of Wil, for whom the Other Side was quite as real as this world,
he did not o away immediately after he had shuffled off this mortal coil.
at the funeral, in the beautiful cemetery of st cross where so many great oxford figures lie,
Dy remarked, 'it is not blasphemous to believe that what was true of Our Lord
is, in its lesser degree, true of all who are in Him.
they do away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before'.
L discovered that 'all that talk about 'feeling that he is closer to us than before'
isn't just talk.
it is just what it does feel like
-i can't put it into words.
one seems at moments to be living in a new world.
lots, lots of pain, but not a particle of depression or resentment'.
(regarding L's book 'miracles')
...any dispassionate reader can at once see many flaws in L's arguments here.
for a start, if his distinction between naturalists and supernaturalists held good
it would have to be demonstrable that the supernaturalists had some specific means of
acquiring their superior knowledge and of explaining it to the naturalist.
much more seriously, there is no need whatsoever to posit a dualistic theory
such as L's in order to 'prove' the existence of God.
theism was not a matter to which ludwig wittgenstein was prepared to devote thought.
'whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must be silent'.
nearly all the philosophers of his generation took as their starting point
the opening sentence of Witt's 'tractatus: 'the world is everything that is the case'.
like all Witt's gnomic sayings, this is open to many interpretations and much reflection,
but it must include the sense that for rational conversations to take place
there must be an agreed set of terms, acceptable to both speakers.
but l failed to see this in chapter three of 'miracles',
and the arguments he proceeds to construct about the existence of God
actually depend on a non christian, dualistic concept of the world
in which Spirit and Matter are separate , and religious truth
-this is the ultimate conclusion of such gnostic argument-only available to initiates.
elizabeth anscombe read 'miracles' when it came out and chose to reply to L's argument in chapter 3
when she was invited to read a paper at the socratic club in early 1948.
the resulting debate instantaneously became legend.
anscombe was a match for l not only in mind but also in personality.
she shared his taste for fisticuffs, for brutality as well as finesse in argument.
she is, as countless stories about her attest, deeply exhibitionistic.
like L, she is a massive physical type.
she was quite equal to the bullying and the exploitation of the audience
to which L restored when he was boxed into a corner.
she could employ analogous techniques herself.
that evening at the socratic club was the first in the society's history
that L was thoroughly trounced in argument.
because A was herself a christian (a catholic convert),
the pious audience could not have the satisfaction of feeling
that L was a defender o the faith against the infidel.
he was merely shown up as a man
who had not come to terms with the way that philosophers since Witt thought.
as a result of his encounter at the socratic club,
L wrote a completely new chapter 3 to 'miracles' for subsequent editions,
dropping a considerable part of his argument, building a new case
and changing the name of the chapter from 'the self contradiction of the naturalist' to
'the cardinal difficulty of naturalism'.
in his willingness not just to revise his thinking but to recast i in writing
he demonstrated a virtue rare among academics.
but there is evidence - discounted by anscombe herself -
that if he found the debate intellectually stimulating
he also found it emotionally depleting.
he told george sayer that 'his argument for the existence of God had been demolished'.
a few days after the debate, dining with a group of male cronies, he was in a state of near despair.
Dy said, 'very well -now (he had) lost everything and come to the foot of the cross'.
seen from a purely academic perspective this hyperbole makes no sense.
all that had happened, humiliating as it had been at the time,
was that L had been shown to have no competence to debate with a professional philosopher
on her own terms.
an exactly analogous situation would have arisen if a member of the english faculty
had challenged him to conduct a debate about james joyce, of whom he knew next to nothing.
indeed, very similar evidences of L's breezy refusal
to follow what was going on outside his own imaginative world
and his own range of old fashioned reading tastes
were apparent even at the kilns dinner table.
('last night at dinner i mentioned tito's volte face in yugoslavia
where there is a state fostered return to christianity.
i thought J very stupid about thee whole affair and we had talked for a minute or two
before i found out that he was under the impression that tito was the king of greece'.)
what had happened at the socratic club was no mere intellectual brawl, however.
it awakened all sorts of deeply seated fears in L, not leas his fear of women.
once the bullying hero of the hour had been cut down to size,
he became a child, a little boy who was being degraded and shaken
by a figure who, in his imagination, took on witch like dimensions.
he felt that he was arguing so coherently for the existence of that other world
because he had been there himself.
and now here was a grown up who was not convinced by his explanations
of those inner adventures beyond the discernible surface of things.
it was all a little like what had happened to his mother, when as a child in rome,
she had believed she saw a statue moving and none of the grown ups had credited her tale.
ever since his mother had died, L had been in search of her
and the journey which had begun when he first read george macdonald's 'phantastes'
and which had continued through his discovery of great christian literature and wise christian friends,
now chillingly felt as it perhaps it had been a game of make believe.
unless, unless...unless, that is,
tolkien and dyson had been right during their great conversation in addison's walk in 1931;
unless make believe was really another way of talking about the reality of things;
unless the brutal and cerebral way in which grown ups
tried to come to conclusions about the world was not the only way;
unless he could explore the way of 'phantastes'-
in which another world opens up to the dreamer through a piece of bedroom furniture.
the seeds of the firs narnia story were dawning in his mind.
L never attempted to write another work of christian apologetics after 'miracles'.
even though this book and the argumentative works which precede it
-the problem of pain, mere christianity-
remain so vastly popular in the christian world
and continue to sell in christian bookshops,
he came to feel that their method and manner were spurious.
there must be another way 'further up and further in'.
...regarding the chronicles of narnia...'not all his friends liked them.
Tol hated 'th lion, the witch and the wardrobe'.
he regarded it as scrappily put together and not in his sense a 'sub creation';
that is, a coherently made imaginative world.
moreover it was an allegory, a literary form which he never enjoyed.
but presumably, since he was only human, he also felt an element of resentment at L's fluency,
his ability to get a thing done and his increasing attractiveness to publishers.
Tod himself managed to finish 'the lord of the rings' in 1949, after 12 difficult years' work.
it had first been submitted, together with 'the silmarillion',
to the publishers collins, and whether or not it would be published
still remained a matter of great uncertainty.
he showed the completed typescript to L, who, undeterred by Tol's view that narnia 'just won't do',
happily reabsorbed himself in his friend's great work.
when he had finished it, he was effusive in his genuinely felt praise.
but as far as the thursday evenings went, it was the end of the story.
by october 1949 War's diary was recording, 'no one showed up after dinner.
there was still a regular assembly of L's friends on tuesdays at the eagle and child in st giles's' (but that's all).
....
..the hellish responsibility of looking after an alcoholic brother and a furiously senile old woman were to remain with him for another ten months...
...referring to some of the main characters of the chronicles of narnia..
in 'the silver chair', puddleglum, the heroically melancholy marshwiggle,
is a direct portrait, as L acknowledged, of his gardener at the kilns, paxford.
the moment when the witch traps the children underground
and tries to persuade them that there is no world above the ground as they supposed..
characteristically, L places the best speech of reply on the lips of puddleglum himself:
'one word, ma'am...one word.
all you've been saying is quite right, i shouldn't wonder.
i'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face i can see on it.
so i won't deny any of what you said.
but there's one thing more to be said, even so.
suppose we have only dreamed or make up all those things
-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and aslan himself.
suppose we have.
then all i can say is that, in that case, the made up things
seem a good deal more important than the real ones.
suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.
well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.
and that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it.
we're just babies making up a game, if you're right.
but four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow.
that's why i'm going to stand by the play world.
i'm on aslan's side even if there isn't any aslan to lead it.
i'm going to live as like a narnian as i can even if there isn't any narnia...
'only one of the children from the original quartet is excluded from heaven. this is susan.
she has committed the unforgivable sin of growing up...
and again, referring to susan....'yes, said eustace, and whenever you've t4ied to get her to
come and talk about narnia or do anything about narnia, she says,
'what wonderful memories you have!
fancy you s5till thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
'oh, susan! said jill, she's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.
she always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown up'.
...speaking post mortem concerning mrs. moore...
'the real strain of living with minto had not been what War or L's friends thought it was...
the 'cursed fate' was that his relationship with minto forced him into the position, from the very beginning,
of living a lie.
as an undergraduate he had had to conceal his actual living arrangements from his college,
or he would certainly have been sent down from the university.
he also felt hi had to lie to his father, and pretended that he was not living with mrs. moore.
it was during these years that the formula emerged of her being his 'mother' of 'adopted mother'.
but this in itself was artificial, because she was not his mother,
and the relations he had with her were far more intense than those which most men have with their mothers.
whatever the relationship was, it was a closed book to War.
now that she was dead, J was ready to start his life all over again.
the children's books written at this period were more than an imaginative return to his own childhood.
they were a sort of sluicing of the system which,
together with his regular confessions and communions, represented a conversion every bit as deep as
the conversion to a belief in the supernatural and the divinity of Jesus Christ which occurred in 1929-31.
then, it will be remembered, he had no real interest in the traditional teachings or concerns of christianity.
the teachings of st paul, about the cross, about grace, about the forgiveness of sins, meant nothing to him:
he could 'get nothing out of them'. (evidence from his life?)
the only doctrine of st paul's which seemed to have 'stuck' at this period
was the rather esoteric one that a man and a woman, having once made love,
whether or not they are married, have become one flesh,
and are therefore bound to one another forever afterwards, through thick or thin.
after he had 'become a christian', the tension of his life with minto therefore became all the more pronounced.
he was having to live with her in a way which would conceal, even from War,
whatever had once been 'sinful' in the relationship.
no wonder all his friends found that relationship totally baffling.
no wonder, too, that he developed the habit of never discussing personal matters,
never seeming, when in the company of male friends, even to have a personal life.
shuffling off the guilt and relief which came at the time of his father's death,
L had felt (in his mystical experience on the bus on headington hill)
as though 'some stiff clothing, like corsets or even a suit of armour, as if i were a lobster'
were being removed from him.
in his second and more radical, phase of conversion, twenty and more years after the first,
L began to feel for the first time that he knew what was meant by the grace and forgiveness of God.
in june 1951, he wrote to sister penelope at wantage:
'i specially need your prayers because i am (like the pilgrim in bunyan)
travelling across 'a plain called Ease'.
everything without and many things within, are marvellously well at present.
indeed (i do not know whether to be more ashamed or joyful in confessing it)
i realise that until about a month ago i never really believed (tho' i thought i did) in God's forgiveness.
regarding his thinking about marriage before and coming into the time of his own with joy gresham...
'my own view, he had said in his broadcast talk, is that the church should frankly recognise
that the majority of british people are not christians and therefore cannot be expected to live christian lives.
there ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage:
one governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members.
the distinction ought to be sharp, so that a man knows which couples are
married in a christian sense and which are not'. (note: why don't we do that in america?!...and the world!!!)
this is a wildly unhistorical, untheological and impractical suggestion.
by what possible criterion could 'a man' - or, come to that, a woman -distinguish between such marriages?
for most of the history of the church, marriages did not happen within the church building.
they were civil contracts sealed at the church door.
one thinks of the wife of bath with her 'housbondes at chirche doore i hadde five'.
even when marriage was raised to the dignity of a sacrament
by the medieval western church (largely to make up the number of the sacraments to the magical seven),
it was never suggested that the church or the priest made the marriage.
the ministers of this particular 'sacrament' are the man and the woman who perform it;
and in this sense any marriage, in catholic teaching, is a marriage.
a marriage between a pair of hindus or a pair of modern secular agnostics is still,
in orthodox christian thinking, a marriage.
by L's argument, agnostic married couples who subsequently became christians
would presumably have to get 'remarried' in a church.
this suggests a profound spit in his thinking,
not only about the relationship between flesh and spirit, but also about
the relationship between christianity and what he called the Tao.
Tol,in a lengthy and excellently argued critique of L's 'Christian Marriage' idea,
goes to the heart of the matter when he pounces on L's analogy
'i should be very angry if the mahommedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine'.
so, l concludes by extension, christians should not make it difficult for non christians to divorce
(note: the position reflected in I corinthians 7.12-15)
this is, as Tol says, 'a most stinking red herring:
(something intended to divert attention from the real problem or issue at hand)
'no item of compulsory christian morals is valid only for christians...
toleration of divorce-if a christina does tolerate it-is toleration of a human abuse
...and wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always:
it never stops at being 'not very good', 'second best'
-it either reforms or goes on to third rate, bad, abominable.'
on the question of divorce, when he was considering it on a purely cerebral level,
L had failed to face up to the dilemma.
either Christ, in condemning it (as the gospels say He did),
was uttering a universal moral law, binding for everybody
-in which case a christian cannot believe in 'divorce for non christians'
any more than he can believe in theft for non-christians.
(note: hogwash...unless the people have all previously decided to be bound in a theocracy..
all other systems are gradations away from a uniform application of God's law to all people)
-or it is not a universal law that divorce is in all circumstances wrong.
this is the view that, over the years, various christian denominations have worked towards..
not so for L, with his two tier view of marriage.
he, in any case, belonged to a church which, in spit of being famed for its
wishy washy laodicean approach to the faith, has historically
some of the strictest marriage laws of any denomination in christendom...
(author notes current to time of writing...this standard is changing)...
L must have discussed the matter with his friend austin farrer,
whose views would, roughly speaking, have coincided with those of Tol.
farrer, in all his moral thinking..would have no truck
either with the idea of two tier marriages or with the legality of christian divorce.
but both as a friend and as a priest..(served as a witness to his marriage to joy.)..
...L was by now in a tremendous muddle.
at some stage he had been to see havard (his doctor)-
and ..to ask whether he would be well advised to undertake conjugal duties.
after due examination and consideration, Hav decided that his patient,
though at 58 a little heavy and rather prone to high blood pressure,
could risk the excitements of an erotic life if he took things gently.
but with another part of himself, L was reassuring War
that the marriage was simply a matter of convenience,
to get joy a permit to stay in england.
'there were never two people alive in the history of the world', douglas gresham has said
about his mother and step father, 'more in love than J and joy'.
what was L to do?
his belief in the status of these second tier marriages by the state was now put to the test.
were he and Jo married in the eyes of God or were they not?
if God had joined them together, then there was no reason why they sould be put asunder
and his enquiries in Hav's consulting room could cease to be of purely academic concern.
but there was a lingering doubt.
though he continued to see her every day and though joy confided in her brother
that J was a wonderful lover,
the fiction was maintained that she was mrs gresham and he was merely an ami de la maison
calling each afternoon or evening and often not getting home until after 11.
only a very few of his friends, like the farrers, were even let into the secret that he was married;
this reticence caused bewilderment and resentment among old friends like Tol and Dy when
-as inevitably happened - the news leaked out.
what on earth did J think he was playing at?
his behaviour during that summer was exuberant and strange
'the most precious gift that marriage gave me, he wrote when it was all over,
was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant -
in a word, real.
this sense of reality, which involved not only a sense of self discovery, but also a readjustment
o what he thought about god and hence about everything else,
was something which had been developing through all the previous year
and is reflected in the novel he wrote now and dedicated to joy:
'till we have faces'.
with a large part of himself L did not want things to go any further.
for the first time in his life, he was enjoying a unique combination of pleasures.
he was happy in his academic work and enjoying the company of his colleagues.
at home,all was peace.
in september he had a very happy holiday on his own in ireland.
he told Gre about Jo and about the civil marriage...
he did not take Jo's aches and pains, reported at intervals over the summer,
any more seriously than he took his own.
when (havard) was consulted,
he gave it as his opinion that she was suffering from fibrositis.
he went back to cambridge at the beginning of october,
ready for another happy round of lectures punctuated by long delicious days in his college rooms.
no undergraduate here would knock at his door or read him an essay beginning 'jonathan swift was born...
but on 19 october he received a telephone call to say
that Jo's rheumatic pains had been investigated at the wingfield orthopedic hospital in headington.
the call was from havard, whom he went to see as soon as he could get back to oxford.
preliminary x rays had revealed that Jo had broken her left thigh bone
and that she had a lump on her breast.
he went to see her.
she was plucky and good humoured.
jokes were inevitably made about (havard)
but there was a problem of much more practical concern.
she had entered the hospital as mrs gresham, an american citizen.
as mrs c.s. L, of course, she could have claimed free treatment on the National Health,
but her true marital status was still a secret.
L was prepared to pay the bill - but that was not the point.
what was now at issue was whether he was prepared to acknowledge as his wife
the woman he loved and who might, for all they knew, be suffering from a mortal illness.
they did not have to wait long.
she was moved half a mile down the road to the churchill hospital...
used ever since (world war II) as a cancer hospital for oxford's residents.
the biopsy revealed that her tumour was indeed malignant and her chances of survival were
as War said, 'put at evens'.
'i have never loved her more than since she was struck down', he added.
'her pluck and her cheerfulness are beyond praise, and she talks of her disease and its fluctuations
as if she were describing the experiences of a friend of hers'.
on 14 november, J wrote to one of the many correspondents whom he had never met,
'i wish you would pray very hard for a lady called Jo ..and me...
i am shortly to be both a bridegoom and a widower, for she has cancer.
you need not mention this till the marriage
(which will be at the hospital bedside if it occurs).
this positively wagnerian blend of love and death could not, however,
be accomplished without L's flying in the face of his own church.
he went to see harry carpenter, the bishop of oxford....(who) was a fairly old fashioned high churchman
(who was) quite as clear in his mind as archbishop fisher and princess margaret
had been in theirs when faced with a parallel dilemma.
'mindful of the church's teachings',
as they then stood, he said that there was no possibility
of allowing mrs gresham, a divorced woman, to be given a church marriage.
the fact that her bridegroom was a famous christian apologist made the case all the more impossible,
for the marriage would undoubtedly attract publicity
and if it should be known that it had received the bishop's sanction,
he would have been flooded with requests by couples in similar positions,
anxious to bend the rules to fit their own particular cases.
L left the bishop's house in a state of very great anger.
austin farrer, as an obedient priest in carpenter's diocese,
could not oblige his friend by performing the ceremony.
it was not a matter of charity;
it was a matter of canon law.
such a marriage would simply be illegal.
but L was by now desperate that Jo should be able to come home - that is, to the kilns -to die,
and he wanted her to do so 'without scandal'.
the irony is that if they had been roman catholics, it would almost certainly have been possible
by roman canon law for them to be united in the eyes of the church.
in his near despair, he looked to the church to fulfill a higher law, the law of love,
and he felt that he was having the door slammed in his face.
several months went by and Jo's condition was visibly deteriorating.
since no help was at hand from any of his normal circle of friends,
L turned to an acquaintance of 20 years' standing called peter bide...
L asked him to intercede for Jo and to lay hands on her.
he also put to bide their dilemma about the illegality of a marriage service.
'joy's first marriage (had been) to an already divorced man
and therefore in the eyes of the church, no marriage was possible'...
for the church to deny their request for marriage was now
'to try to have your cake and eat it'.
father bide agreed.
'Jo desperately wanted to solemnize her marriage before God
and to claim the grace of the sacrament before she died', he wrote afterwards:
a statement which more than implies that Jo, since her register office marriage,
had dutifully excommunicated herself.
'it did not seem to me in the circumstances possible to refuse her
the outward and visible sign of grace which she so ardently desired
and which might lead to a peaceful end to a fairly desperate situation'.
on 21 march, the doctors pronounced the death sentence
and said that Jo's condition was beyond hope of recovery.
at 11 a.m. War accompanied J to Jo's ward at the churchill.
there was only one other witness - the ward sister.
bide said mass and gave holy communion to those present.
War knew that 'to feel pity for anyone so magnificently brave as Jo is almost an insult',
but her eagerness for 'the pitiable consolation of dying under the same roof as J (was ) heartrending'.
the two of them made their vows,'as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement
when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed'...
...interlaced with such strange ideas, there are sentences in 'the four loves'
of memorable wisdom and calm common sense.
'say your prayers in the garden early, ignoring steadfastly
the dew, the birds and the flowers and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy;
go there to be overwhelmed and after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you
...affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives.
it lives with humble, un dress, private things: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes,
the thump of a sleepy dog's tail on the kitchen floor,
the sound of a sewing machine, a golliwog left on the lawn'.
it is for paragraphs such as this that one remembers the book with gratitude...
'if we cannot 'practise the presence of God',
it is something to be able to practise the absence of God,
to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like
a man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise
or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there,
or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch.
...L did indeed have a wide range;
his examples in 'studies in words' are chosen from all over the library
and, as so often in his writings, he makes us long to read the books he quotes..
there is, in all his paragraphs, the stimulating sense of a lively intelligence at work,
prepared to look up from his books and talk in an intelligible way to anyone who will listen.
and there is such common sense in what he writes...
above all from the idea that language is always to be mixed up with the thing it attempts to signify.
'statements about crime are not criminal language;
nor are statements about emotions necessarily emotional language
...';it is not cancer after all'
'the germans have surrendered'
'i love you' - may all be true statements about matter of fact.
and of course it is the facts, not the language, that arouse the emotion'.
282... L's natural reaction to any experience was to write it up or down.
as he had discovered, with a mixture of joyful shock and embarrassment
('what an ass i have been'),
this often led to a curious effect of unreality, as in the case of his over eager desire to defend
religious positions which he had really only fallen in love with from the outside,
before learning what it was like to LIVE them.
'a grief observed', in its shooting stabs of pain, its yelps of despair, its tear
its emotional zig zagging, bears testimony to just such a shattering.
there can be no doubt that it was written from the heart.
in its very scrappiness, it is far truer than the apparently cohesive 'surprised y joy' of 5 years earlier.
he confronts, in the experience of grief, some of the most fundamental questions a man can ever ask.
he does so, not without flinching, for one of the endlessly appealing things about the book
is its admission of hear,
its willingness to lay hurt bare, but without fudging.
in marriage he recognized that
he had been 'forced out of (his) shell'.
was he now doomed to crawl back, or to be sucked back into it?
one of the reasons for keeping the notebooks
was to keep alive that newborn self that Jo had nursed into being,
a tender and more vulnerable self.
but how could he do so, without either indulging in morbid displays of emotion
or making Jo into a sanctified figure which she was not?
he recognized quite truthfully that she was 'rather a battle axe'.
it had been more than he had ever dared to admit about minto (or about his own mother?)
but the truth telling was excruciatingly painful.
the boys, as he realized,m found him embarrassing.
he saw in their faces the same feelings as he and War had had about the P'daytabird
in the weeks after his own mother died.
he seemed, according to douglas gresham,
'incapable of understanding that if he kept on talking about my mother,
i was going to burst into tears - what embarrassed me was that fear'.
presumably one of the things which makes 'a grief observed' such a consoling and helpful book to
thousands of bereaved people is that L knew by instinct
what is now a commonplace of bereavement counselling,
that grief must be expressed and lived through.
his whole life had been warped by his failure to express grief for his mother.
ever since that disastrous day in august 1908, he had been buttoned up.
perhaps even the release caused by loving Jo was not enough to melt him;
it was in losing here that the essential work of healing mysteriously began.
he had to weep.
sometimes, if a person mentioned Jo in his presence, he would burst into uncontrollable tears.
only once, even so, could he bring himself to comfort the boys physically.
one day when douglas was crying, L came and hugged him
and they stood there for some moments crying together.
thereafter they found it easier to talk to each other....
..now beaten down into a position of absolute honesty, he faced a much more terrible thought
than the facile idea that God was really a projection of his father.
what, instead, if the reactions of irritation and disgust
which he had foisted on the unfortunate Albert lewis
were really emotions more properly reserved for his heavenly Father?
total unbelief flickered across his consciousness
-'go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain
and what do you find?
a door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.
after that, silence."
but his imagination could not absorb the idea of no-God.
instead, with promethean courage, he faced a more dreadful alternative.
'fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it.
beethoven went deaf.
by our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful imbecile.'.
if God is all powerful and if He made the world in which we suffer,
what other alternative can there be?
in his beethoven example, the crucial phrase is BY OUR STANDARDS...
..concerning L's book 'an experiment in criticism'...
the Experiment was not to replace one sort of literary evaluation with another
but to abandon evaluative literary criticism altogether.
'can i honestly and strictly speaking, say with any confidence that my appreciation
of any scene, chapter, stanza or line
has been improved by my reading of aristotle, dryden, johnson, lessing, coleridge, arnold..pater or bradley?
i am not sure that i can...
it is always better to read chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.
this seems like common sense today,
but in the cambridge of 1960 it was explosive stuff.
l proposed that instead of dividing books and authors into 'good' and 'bad' on the say so of critics,
we should judge literature by the way we read it.
the duty of reading, as well as its pleasure,
was, he believed, in submission to what the author actually intended.
'we seek an enlargement of our being.
we want to be more than ourselves'.
books which compel us to re read them frequently,
to be attentive to their exact wording and style,
books which CANNOT be read as non literary people read trash,
will always emerge and remain as the great books.
the advantage of L's approach is that it need not give way
either to snobbery (pretending we like books which happen to be fashionable)
or to inverted snobbery (in the way that L's temptation was to see more merit in captain marryat
than in t.s. eliot).
it does not really matter what judgement we pass on a book.
what matters is not what we do to the book
but what the book does to us.
the Experiment ends with one of the finest paragraphs in the whole L oeuvre:
'literary experience heals the wound,
without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
there are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.
in them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub individuality.
but IN READING GREAT LITERATURE I BECOME A THOUSAND MEN
AND YET REMAIN MYSELF.
like a night sky in the greek poen, i see with a myriad eyes,
but it is still i who see.
here, as in worship, in love, in moral action and in knowing,
i transcend myself;
and am never more myself than when i do'.
when it appeared posthumouly, j.r.r. Tol was repelled by 'letters to malcolm',
finding in it precisely the attitude which L professed to find distasteful in his grandparents
-'cosily at ease in zion'.
among a lot of criticisms which seem wide of the mark, To managed to score some very palpable hits,
most notably when he said that the Letters were not 'about prayer' but 'about L praying'.
in the same way it could be said the 'An Experiment..is not about literature
but about L reading,
and 'A Grief..is candidly, though anonymously, what its title says it is.
doubtless if 'Letters..were being offered to us as a manual of prayer,
a substitute for st francois de sales or william law,
Tol's objection would be only proper.
but a taste for L is, in large part, a taste for reading about him. (?)
though it was denied him to become a great poet,
he shares with 'the last Romantics'
a vivid awareness of his ow consciousness,
a sense that the chief end of writing is to communicate sensation and experience.
a high proportion of L's oeuvre when properly considered
can be found to be of the same kind as wordsworth's 'Prelude', a book which was always very dear to him.
what the catholic Tol found distasteful
-in particular the inference drawn from Malcolm that
an 'unqualified' protestant layman might take upon himself a teaching office
in a matter so delicate as to how we should pray
-was precisely what l would have felt justified his position as a writer.
he disclaimed the role of directeur,
which was why he framed his book in the form of fictitious letters to the invented figure of malcolm,
who has apparently (his letters are not attempted) been hitting back, barfield style,
at chinks in L's armour.
at the same time, he was not frightened of soliloquy, either as a literary mode
or as a means of discovering or conveying religious truth,
as he made plain by quoting one of his own poems, pretending that the identity of the author was unknown..
'they tell me, Lord, that when i seem
to be in speech with You,
since but one voice is heard, its all a dream,
one talker aping two.
sometimes it is, yet not as they
conceive it. rather, i
seek in myself the things i hoped to say,
but lo! my wells are dry.
the, seeing me empty, You forsake
the listener's role and through
my dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake
the thoughts i never knew.
and thus You neither need reply
nor can; thus, while we seem
two talkers, Thou art one forever, and i
no dreamer, but Thy dream.
'Dream, adds L the critic, makes it too like pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the rhyme.
but is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy?
(utterance or discourse by a person who is talking to himself)
if the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God.
but the human petitioner does not therefore become a'dream'.
maybe not a dream.
but there remains a sense in which all ROMANTIC writers (..in the sense of POST WORDWORTHIANs
who make themselves and their own sensations the subject of their work)
are difficult to pin down.
there are those who, discerning that L, like yeats, worked by assuming a number of masks,
have come to the conclusion that there was something bogus about him;
that either in his literary attitudes or his bluff conservatism or his religious faith
he was 'putting it on'.
this misjudgement of l surely stems from a mistaken view of how anything comes o be written
or possibly even perceived.
just as, all those years ago, Tol and Dy drew L into christianity
by making him see that it was truth told by means of story,
so himself as a writer is so constantly accessible and interesting
because he is unashamed of the story telling element in all literary modes.
it is not a Lie to recognize that literature itself is unnatural.
so, having tried to write a straight book on prayer and found in the early 1950s that he had to abandon it.
in Malcolm he found the perfect mode.
it was almost certainly suggested by reading rose macaulay's 'real' 'letters to a friend'
a correspondence with her former confessor
and largely taken up with spiritual matters.
but the fact that the mode is only a mode does not mean that the content of Malcolm is bogus,
any more than the semifictionalized pattern of A grief observed should make us suppose
that he did not really go through the experience of bereavement.
a failure to understand the kind of writer L was
-a Romantic egoist in the tradition of wordsworth and yeats-
has led to two of the grosser extreme among those expressing views about him since his death.
(and similar extremes are noticeable among those who love or loathe Words and Y).
on the one hand there are those who would dismiss all three..as mere poseurs,
shallow men pretending to be deep, mortals putting on immortal masks.
this view must be false
-in L's case-
because every single piece of biographical evidence which exists supports the opposite point of view.
in love, in friendship and above all in religion
there can be no doubt of his passionate sincerity.
on the other hand there are those readers
who are so uplifted by the sublimity of L at his best as a writer
that they assume that he was himself a sublime being, devoid of blemishes.
readers of this kind either ignore L's faults altogether
and attribute any mention of them to some ulterior motive (possibly anti religious)
on behalf of the speaker,
or-oddest of all to neutral observers who perhaps haven't read much L
of made up their minds about him
-they acknowledge the faults but wish to make them into virtues.
we suddenly find ourselves in an uncongenial world where a bullying, hectoring technique in public debate
is held up as a courageous defence of the faith,
or spells of club room misogyny are taken as evidence of holy celibacy.
all this seems a pity because it dehumanizes a man who was not posing
when he described his wife and himself
as 'a sinful woman married to a sinful man;
two of God's patients, not yet cured'.
if we ignore the kind of man l was, in our anxiety
to dismiss him as a fraud or canonize him as a plaster saint,
we miss the unmistakable and remarkable evidence of something like sanctification
which occurred in him towards the end of his days.
the suffering which smashed him up and made him so vulnerable did not destroy his faith.
now did it destroy the kind of man he was.
he went on being a red faced ulsterman,
he continued to smoke and drink heavily,
his aesthetic tastes remained much the same
-that is to say broad.
he never did see the point in Gre's fondness for proust;
but nor could you ever classify L as a man who 'only liked' fantasy,or epic poems, or e. nesbit,
much as he liked all three.
a fortnight before his death, he was reading 'les liaisons dangereuses'
and writing to a colleague at magdalene, cambridge -'Wow what a book!
come to lunch of friday (fish) and tell me about it'.
204 (charles williams dies suddenly)
as one would expect of Wil, for whom the Other Side was quite as real as this world,
he did not o away immediately after he had shuffled off this mortal coil.
at the funeral, in the beautiful cemetery of st cross where so many great oxford figures lie,
Dy remarked, 'it is not blasphemous to believe that what was true of Our Lord
is, in its lesser degree, true of all who are in Him.
they do away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before'.
L discovered that 'all that talk about 'feeling that he is closer to us than before'
isn't just talk.
it is just what it does feel like
-i can't put it into words.
one seems at moments to be living in a new world.
lots, lots of pain, but not a particle of depression or resentment'.
(regarding L's book 'miracles')
...any dispassionate reader can at once see many flaws in L's arguments here.
for a start, if his distinction between naturalists and supernaturalists held good
it would have to be demonstrable that the supernaturalists had some specific means of
acquiring their superior knowledge and of explaining it to the naturalist.
much more seriously, there is no need whatsoever to posit a dualistic theory
such as L's in order to 'prove' the existence of God.
theism was not a matter to which ludwig wittgenstein was prepared to devote thought.
'whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must be silent'.
nearly all the philosophers of his generation took as their starting point
the opening sentence of Witt's 'tractatus: 'the world is everything that is the case'.
like all Witt's gnomic sayings, this is open to many interpretations and much reflection,
but it must include the sense that for rational conversations to take place
there must be an agreed set of terms, acceptable to both speakers.
but l failed to see this in chapter three of 'miracles',
and the arguments he proceeds to construct about the existence of God
actually depend on a non christian, dualistic concept of the world
in which Spirit and Matter are separate , and religious truth
-this is the ultimate conclusion of such gnostic argument-only available to initiates.
elizabeth anscombe read 'miracles' when it came out and chose to reply to L's argument in chapter 3
when she was invited to read a paper at the socratic club in early 1948.
the resulting debate instantaneously became legend.
anscombe was a match for l not only in mind but also in personality.
she shared his taste for fisticuffs, for brutality as well as finesse in argument.
she is, as countless stories about her attest, deeply exhibitionistic.
like L, she is a massive physical type.
she was quite equal to the bullying and the exploitation of the audience
to which L restored when he was boxed into a corner.
she could employ analogous techniques herself.
that evening at the socratic club was the first in the society's history
that L was thoroughly trounced in argument.
because A was herself a christian (a catholic convert),
the pious audience could not have the satisfaction of feeling
that L was a defender o the faith against the infidel.
he was merely shown up as a man
who had not come to terms with the way that philosophers since Witt thought.
as a result of his encounter at the socratic club,
L wrote a completely new chapter 3 to 'miracles' for subsequent editions,
dropping a considerable part of his argument, building a new case
and changing the name of the chapter from 'the self contradiction of the naturalist' to
'the cardinal difficulty of naturalism'.
in his willingness not just to revise his thinking but to recast i in writing
he demonstrated a virtue rare among academics.
but there is evidence - discounted by anscombe herself -
that if he found the debate intellectually stimulating
he also found it emotionally depleting.
he told george sayer that 'his argument for the existence of God had been demolished'.
a few days after the debate, dining with a group of male cronies, he was in a state of near despair.
Dy said, 'very well -now (he had) lost everything and come to the foot of the cross'.
seen from a purely academic perspective this hyperbole makes no sense.
all that had happened, humiliating as it had been at the time,
was that L had been shown to have no competence to debate with a professional philosopher
on her own terms.
an exactly analogous situation would have arisen if a member of the english faculty
had challenged him to conduct a debate about james joyce, of whom he knew next to nothing.
indeed, very similar evidences of L's breezy refusal
to follow what was going on outside his own imaginative world
and his own range of old fashioned reading tastes
were apparent even at the kilns dinner table.
('last night at dinner i mentioned tito's volte face in yugoslavia
where there is a state fostered return to christianity.
i thought J very stupid about thee whole affair and we had talked for a minute or two
before i found out that he was under the impression that tito was the king of greece'.)
what had happened at the socratic club was no mere intellectual brawl, however.
it awakened all sorts of deeply seated fears in L, not leas his fear of women.
once the bullying hero of the hour had been cut down to size,
he became a child, a little boy who was being degraded and shaken
by a figure who, in his imagination, took on witch like dimensions.
he felt that he was arguing so coherently for the existence of that other world
because he had been there himself.
and now here was a grown up who was not convinced by his explanations
of those inner adventures beyond the discernible surface of things.
it was all a little like what had happened to his mother, when as a child in rome,
she had believed she saw a statue moving and none of the grown ups had credited her tale.
ever since his mother had died, L had been in search of her
and the journey which had begun when he first read george macdonald's 'phantastes'
and which had continued through his discovery of great christian literature and wise christian friends,
now chillingly felt as it perhaps it had been a game of make believe.
unless, unless...unless, that is,
tolkien and dyson had been right during their great conversation in addison's walk in 1931;
unless make believe was really another way of talking about the reality of things;
unless the brutal and cerebral way in which grown ups
tried to come to conclusions about the world was not the only way;
unless he could explore the way of 'phantastes'-
in which another world opens up to the dreamer through a piece of bedroom furniture.
the seeds of the firs narnia story were dawning in his mind.
L never attempted to write another work of christian apologetics after 'miracles'.
even though this book and the argumentative works which precede it
-the problem of pain, mere christianity-
remain so vastly popular in the christian world
and continue to sell in christian bookshops,
he came to feel that their method and manner were spurious.
there must be another way 'further up and further in'.
...regarding the chronicles of narnia...'not all his friends liked them.
Tol hated 'th lion, the witch and the wardrobe'.
he regarded it as scrappily put together and not in his sense a 'sub creation';
that is, a coherently made imaginative world.
moreover it was an allegory, a literary form which he never enjoyed.
but presumably, since he was only human, he also felt an element of resentment at L's fluency,
his ability to get a thing done and his increasing attractiveness to publishers.
Tod himself managed to finish 'the lord of the rings' in 1949, after 12 difficult years' work.
it had first been submitted, together with 'the silmarillion',
to the publishers collins, and whether or not it would be published
still remained a matter of great uncertainty.
he showed the completed typescript to L, who, undeterred by Tol's view that narnia 'just won't do',
happily reabsorbed himself in his friend's great work.
when he had finished it, he was effusive in his genuinely felt praise.
but as far as the thursday evenings went, it was the end of the story.
by october 1949 War's diary was recording, 'no one showed up after dinner.
there was still a regular assembly of L's friends on tuesdays at the eagle and child in st giles's' (but that's all).
....
..the hellish responsibility of looking after an alcoholic brother and a furiously senile old woman were to remain with him for another ten months...
...referring to some of the main characters of the chronicles of narnia..
in 'the silver chair', puddleglum, the heroically melancholy marshwiggle,
is a direct portrait, as L acknowledged, of his gardener at the kilns, paxford.
the moment when the witch traps the children underground
and tries to persuade them that there is no world above the ground as they supposed..
characteristically, L places the best speech of reply on the lips of puddleglum himself:
'one word, ma'am...one word.
all you've been saying is quite right, i shouldn't wonder.
i'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face i can see on it.
so i won't deny any of what you said.
but there's one thing more to be said, even so.
suppose we have only dreamed or make up all those things
-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and aslan himself.
suppose we have.
then all i can say is that, in that case, the made up things
seem a good deal more important than the real ones.
suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.
well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.
and that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it.
we're just babies making up a game, if you're right.
but four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow.
that's why i'm going to stand by the play world.
i'm on aslan's side even if there isn't any aslan to lead it.
i'm going to live as like a narnian as i can even if there isn't any narnia...
'only one of the children from the original quartet is excluded from heaven. this is susan.
she has committed the unforgivable sin of growing up...
and again, referring to susan....'yes, said eustace, and whenever you've t4ied to get her to
come and talk about narnia or do anything about narnia, she says,
'what wonderful memories you have!
fancy you s5till thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
'oh, susan! said jill, she's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.
she always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown up'.
...speaking post mortem concerning mrs. moore...
'the real strain of living with minto had not been what War or L's friends thought it was...
the 'cursed fate' was that his relationship with minto forced him into the position, from the very beginning,
of living a lie.
as an undergraduate he had had to conceal his actual living arrangements from his college,
or he would certainly have been sent down from the university.
he also felt hi had to lie to his father, and pretended that he was not living with mrs. moore.
it was during these years that the formula emerged of her being his 'mother' of 'adopted mother'.
but this in itself was artificial, because she was not his mother,
and the relations he had with her were far more intense than those which most men have with their mothers.
whatever the relationship was, it was a closed book to War.
now that she was dead, J was ready to start his life all over again.
the children's books written at this period were more than an imaginative return to his own childhood.
they were a sort of sluicing of the system which,
together with his regular confessions and communions, represented a conversion every bit as deep as
the conversion to a belief in the supernatural and the divinity of Jesus Christ which occurred in 1929-31.
then, it will be remembered, he had no real interest in the traditional teachings or concerns of christianity.
the teachings of st paul, about the cross, about grace, about the forgiveness of sins, meant nothing to him:
he could 'get nothing out of them'. (evidence from his life?)
the only doctrine of st paul's which seemed to have 'stuck' at this period
was the rather esoteric one that a man and a woman, having once made love,
whether or not they are married, have become one flesh,
and are therefore bound to one another forever afterwards, through thick or thin.
after he had 'become a christian', the tension of his life with minto therefore became all the more pronounced.
he was having to live with her in a way which would conceal, even from War,
whatever had once been 'sinful' in the relationship.
no wonder all his friends found that relationship totally baffling.
no wonder, too, that he developed the habit of never discussing personal matters,
never seeming, when in the company of male friends, even to have a personal life.
shuffling off the guilt and relief which came at the time of his father's death,
L had felt (in his mystical experience on the bus on headington hill)
as though 'some stiff clothing, like corsets or even a suit of armour, as if i were a lobster'
were being removed from him.
in his second and more radical, phase of conversion, twenty and more years after the first,
L began to feel for the first time that he knew what was meant by the grace and forgiveness of God.
in june 1951, he wrote to sister penelope at wantage:
'i specially need your prayers because i am (like the pilgrim in bunyan)
travelling across 'a plain called Ease'.
everything without and many things within, are marvellously well at present.
indeed (i do not know whether to be more ashamed or joyful in confessing it)
i realise that until about a month ago i never really believed (tho' i thought i did) in God's forgiveness.
regarding his thinking about marriage before and coming into the time of his own with joy gresham...
'my own view, he had said in his broadcast talk, is that the church should frankly recognise
that the majority of british people are not christians and therefore cannot be expected to live christian lives.
there ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage:
one governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members.
the distinction ought to be sharp, so that a man knows which couples are
married in a christian sense and which are not'. (note: why don't we do that in america?!...and the world!!!)
this is a wildly unhistorical, untheological and impractical suggestion.
by what possible criterion could 'a man' - or, come to that, a woman -distinguish between such marriages?
for most of the history of the church, marriages did not happen within the church building.
they were civil contracts sealed at the church door.
one thinks of the wife of bath with her 'housbondes at chirche doore i hadde five'.
even when marriage was raised to the dignity of a sacrament
by the medieval western church (largely to make up the number of the sacraments to the magical seven),
it was never suggested that the church or the priest made the marriage.
the ministers of this particular 'sacrament' are the man and the woman who perform it;
and in this sense any marriage, in catholic teaching, is a marriage.
a marriage between a pair of hindus or a pair of modern secular agnostics is still,
in orthodox christian thinking, a marriage.
by L's argument, agnostic married couples who subsequently became christians
would presumably have to get 'remarried' in a church.
this suggests a profound spit in his thinking,
not only about the relationship between flesh and spirit, but also about
the relationship between christianity and what he called the Tao.
Tol,in a lengthy and excellently argued critique of L's 'Christian Marriage' idea,
goes to the heart of the matter when he pounces on L's analogy
'i should be very angry if the mahommedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine'.
so, l concludes by extension, christians should not make it difficult for non christians to divorce
(note: the position reflected in I corinthians 7.12-15)
this is, as Tol says, 'a most stinking red herring:
(something intended to divert attention from the real problem or issue at hand)
'no item of compulsory christian morals is valid only for christians...
toleration of divorce-if a christina does tolerate it-is toleration of a human abuse
...and wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always:
it never stops at being 'not very good', 'second best'
-it either reforms or goes on to third rate, bad, abominable.'
on the question of divorce, when he was considering it on a purely cerebral level,
L had failed to face up to the dilemma.
either Christ, in condemning it (as the gospels say He did),
was uttering a universal moral law, binding for everybody
-in which case a christian cannot believe in 'divorce for non christians'
any more than he can believe in theft for non-christians.
(note: hogwash...unless the people have all previously decided to be bound in a theocracy..
all other systems are gradations away from a uniform application of God's law to all people)
-or it is not a universal law that divorce is in all circumstances wrong.
this is the view that, over the years, various christian denominations have worked towards..
not so for L, with his two tier view of marriage.
he, in any case, belonged to a church which, in spit of being famed for its
wishy washy laodicean approach to the faith, has historically
some of the strictest marriage laws of any denomination in christendom...
(author notes current to time of writing...this standard is changing)...
L must have discussed the matter with his friend austin farrer,
whose views would, roughly speaking, have coincided with those of Tol.
farrer, in all his moral thinking..would have no truck
either with the idea of two tier marriages or with the legality of christian divorce.
but both as a friend and as a priest..(served as a witness to his marriage to joy.)..
...L was by now in a tremendous muddle.
at some stage he had been to see havard (his doctor)-
and ..to ask whether he would be well advised to undertake conjugal duties.
after due examination and consideration, Hav decided that his patient,
though at 58 a little heavy and rather prone to high blood pressure,
could risk the excitements of an erotic life if he took things gently.
but with another part of himself, L was reassuring War
that the marriage was simply a matter of convenience,
to get joy a permit to stay in england.
'there were never two people alive in the history of the world', douglas gresham has said
about his mother and step father, 'more in love than J and joy'.
what was L to do?
his belief in the status of these second tier marriages by the state was now put to the test.
were he and Jo married in the eyes of God or were they not?
if God had joined them together, then there was no reason why they sould be put asunder
and his enquiries in Hav's consulting room could cease to be of purely academic concern.
but there was a lingering doubt.
though he continued to see her every day and though joy confided in her brother
that J was a wonderful lover,
the fiction was maintained that she was mrs gresham and he was merely an ami de la maison
calling each afternoon or evening and often not getting home until after 11.
only a very few of his friends, like the farrers, were even let into the secret that he was married;
this reticence caused bewilderment and resentment among old friends like Tol and Dy when
-as inevitably happened - the news leaked out.
what on earth did J think he was playing at?
his behaviour during that summer was exuberant and strange
'the most precious gift that marriage gave me, he wrote when it was all over,
was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant -
in a word, real.
this sense of reality, which involved not only a sense of self discovery, but also a readjustment
o what he thought about god and hence about everything else,
was something which had been developing through all the previous year
and is reflected in the novel he wrote now and dedicated to joy:
'till we have faces'.
with a large part of himself L did not want things to go any further.
for the first time in his life, he was enjoying a unique combination of pleasures.
he was happy in his academic work and enjoying the company of his colleagues.
at home,all was peace.
in september he had a very happy holiday on his own in ireland.
he told Gre about Jo and about the civil marriage...
he did not take Jo's aches and pains, reported at intervals over the summer,
any more seriously than he took his own.
when (havard) was consulted,
he gave it as his opinion that she was suffering from fibrositis.
he went back to cambridge at the beginning of october,
ready for another happy round of lectures punctuated by long delicious days in his college rooms.
no undergraduate here would knock at his door or read him an essay beginning 'jonathan swift was born...
but on 19 october he received a telephone call to say
that Jo's rheumatic pains had been investigated at the wingfield orthopedic hospital in headington.
the call was from havard, whom he went to see as soon as he could get back to oxford.
preliminary x rays had revealed that Jo had broken her left thigh bone
and that she had a lump on her breast.
he went to see her.
she was plucky and good humoured.
jokes were inevitably made about (havard)
but there was a problem of much more practical concern.
she had entered the hospital as mrs gresham, an american citizen.
as mrs c.s. L, of course, she could have claimed free treatment on the National Health,
but her true marital status was still a secret.
L was prepared to pay the bill - but that was not the point.
what was now at issue was whether he was prepared to acknowledge as his wife
the woman he loved and who might, for all they knew, be suffering from a mortal illness.
they did not have to wait long.
she was moved half a mile down the road to the churchill hospital...
used ever since (world war II) as a cancer hospital for oxford's residents.
the biopsy revealed that her tumour was indeed malignant and her chances of survival were
as War said, 'put at evens'.
'i have never loved her more than since she was struck down', he added.
'her pluck and her cheerfulness are beyond praise, and she talks of her disease and its fluctuations
as if she were describing the experiences of a friend of hers'.
on 14 november, J wrote to one of the many correspondents whom he had never met,
'i wish you would pray very hard for a lady called Jo ..and me...
i am shortly to be both a bridegoom and a widower, for she has cancer.
you need not mention this till the marriage
(which will be at the hospital bedside if it occurs).
this positively wagnerian blend of love and death could not, however,
be accomplished without L's flying in the face of his own church.
he went to see harry carpenter, the bishop of oxford....(who) was a fairly old fashioned high churchman
(who was) quite as clear in his mind as archbishop fisher and princess margaret
had been in theirs when faced with a parallel dilemma.
'mindful of the church's teachings',
as they then stood, he said that there was no possibility
of allowing mrs gresham, a divorced woman, to be given a church marriage.
the fact that her bridegroom was a famous christian apologist made the case all the more impossible,
for the marriage would undoubtedly attract publicity
and if it should be known that it had received the bishop's sanction,
he would have been flooded with requests by couples in similar positions,
anxious to bend the rules to fit their own particular cases.
L left the bishop's house in a state of very great anger.
austin farrer, as an obedient priest in carpenter's diocese,
could not oblige his friend by performing the ceremony.
it was not a matter of charity;
it was a matter of canon law.
such a marriage would simply be illegal.
but L was by now desperate that Jo should be able to come home - that is, to the kilns -to die,
and he wanted her to do so 'without scandal'.
the irony is that if they had been roman catholics, it would almost certainly have been possible
by roman canon law for them to be united in the eyes of the church.
in his near despair, he looked to the church to fulfill a higher law, the law of love,
and he felt that he was having the door slammed in his face.
several months went by and Jo's condition was visibly deteriorating.
since no help was at hand from any of his normal circle of friends,
L turned to an acquaintance of 20 years' standing called peter bide...
L asked him to intercede for Jo and to lay hands on her.
he also put to bide their dilemma about the illegality of a marriage service.
'joy's first marriage (had been) to an already divorced man
and therefore in the eyes of the church, no marriage was possible'...
for the church to deny their request for marriage was now
'to try to have your cake and eat it'.
father bide agreed.
'Jo desperately wanted to solemnize her marriage before God
and to claim the grace of the sacrament before she died', he wrote afterwards:
a statement which more than implies that Jo, since her register office marriage,
had dutifully excommunicated herself.
'it did not seem to me in the circumstances possible to refuse her
the outward and visible sign of grace which she so ardently desired
and which might lead to a peaceful end to a fairly desperate situation'.
on 21 march, the doctors pronounced the death sentence
and said that Jo's condition was beyond hope of recovery.
at 11 a.m. War accompanied J to Jo's ward at the churchill.
there was only one other witness - the ward sister.
bide said mass and gave holy communion to those present.
War knew that 'to feel pity for anyone so magnificently brave as Jo is almost an insult',
but her eagerness for 'the pitiable consolation of dying under the same roof as J (was ) heartrending'.
the two of them made their vows,'as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement
when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed'...
...interlaced with such strange ideas, there are sentences in 'the four loves'
of memorable wisdom and calm common sense.
'say your prayers in the garden early, ignoring steadfastly
the dew, the birds and the flowers and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy;
go there to be overwhelmed and after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you
...affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives.
it lives with humble, un dress, private things: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes,
the thump of a sleepy dog's tail on the kitchen floor,
the sound of a sewing machine, a golliwog left on the lawn'.
it is for paragraphs such as this that one remembers the book with gratitude...
'if we cannot 'practise the presence of God',
it is something to be able to practise the absence of God,
to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like
a man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise
or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there,
or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch.
...L did indeed have a wide range;
his examples in 'studies in words' are chosen from all over the library
and, as so often in his writings, he makes us long to read the books he quotes..
there is, in all his paragraphs, the stimulating sense of a lively intelligence at work,
prepared to look up from his books and talk in an intelligible way to anyone who will listen.
and there is such common sense in what he writes...
above all from the idea that language is always to be mixed up with the thing it attempts to signify.
'statements about crime are not criminal language;
nor are statements about emotions necessarily emotional language
...';it is not cancer after all'
'the germans have surrendered'
'i love you' - may all be true statements about matter of fact.
and of course it is the facts, not the language, that arouse the emotion'.
282... L's natural reaction to any experience was to write it up or down.
as he had discovered, with a mixture of joyful shock and embarrassment
('what an ass i have been'),
this often led to a curious effect of unreality, as in the case of his over eager desire to defend
religious positions which he had really only fallen in love with from the outside,
before learning what it was like to LIVE them.
'a grief observed', in its shooting stabs of pain, its yelps of despair, its tear
its emotional zig zagging, bears testimony to just such a shattering.
there can be no doubt that it was written from the heart.
in its very scrappiness, it is far truer than the apparently cohesive 'surprised y joy' of 5 years earlier.
he confronts, in the experience of grief, some of the most fundamental questions a man can ever ask.
he does so, not without flinching, for one of the endlessly appealing things about the book
is its admission of hear,
its willingness to lay hurt bare, but without fudging.
in marriage he recognized that
he had been 'forced out of (his) shell'.
was he now doomed to crawl back, or to be sucked back into it?
one of the reasons for keeping the notebooks
was to keep alive that newborn self that Jo had nursed into being,
a tender and more vulnerable self.
but how could he do so, without either indulging in morbid displays of emotion
or making Jo into a sanctified figure which she was not?
he recognized quite truthfully that she was 'rather a battle axe'.
it had been more than he had ever dared to admit about minto (or about his own mother?)
but the truth telling was excruciatingly painful.
the boys, as he realized,m found him embarrassing.
he saw in their faces the same feelings as he and War had had about the P'daytabird
in the weeks after his own mother died.
he seemed, according to douglas gresham,
'incapable of understanding that if he kept on talking about my mother,
i was going to burst into tears - what embarrassed me was that fear'.
presumably one of the things which makes 'a grief observed' such a consoling and helpful book to
thousands of bereaved people is that L knew by instinct
what is now a commonplace of bereavement counselling,
that grief must be expressed and lived through.
his whole life had been warped by his failure to express grief for his mother.
ever since that disastrous day in august 1908, he had been buttoned up.
perhaps even the release caused by loving Jo was not enough to melt him;
it was in losing here that the essential work of healing mysteriously began.
he had to weep.
sometimes, if a person mentioned Jo in his presence, he would burst into uncontrollable tears.
only once, even so, could he bring himself to comfort the boys physically.
one day when douglas was crying, L came and hugged him
and they stood there for some moments crying together.
thereafter they found it easier to talk to each other....
..now beaten down into a position of absolute honesty, he faced a much more terrible thought
than the facile idea that God was really a projection of his father.
what, instead, if the reactions of irritation and disgust
which he had foisted on the unfortunate Albert lewis
were really emotions more properly reserved for his heavenly Father?
total unbelief flickered across his consciousness
-'go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain
and what do you find?
a door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.
after that, silence."
but his imagination could not absorb the idea of no-God.
instead, with promethean courage, he faced a more dreadful alternative.
'fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it.
beethoven went deaf.
by our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful imbecile.'.
if God is all powerful and if He made the world in which we suffer,
what other alternative can there be?
in his beethoven example, the crucial phrase is BY OUR STANDARDS...
..concerning L's book 'an experiment in criticism'...
the Experiment was not to replace one sort of literary evaluation with another
but to abandon evaluative literary criticism altogether.
'can i honestly and strictly speaking, say with any confidence that my appreciation
of any scene, chapter, stanza or line
has been improved by my reading of aristotle, dryden, johnson, lessing, coleridge, arnold..pater or bradley?
i am not sure that i can...
it is always better to read chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.
this seems like common sense today,
but in the cambridge of 1960 it was explosive stuff.
l proposed that instead of dividing books and authors into 'good' and 'bad' on the say so of critics,
we should judge literature by the way we read it.
the duty of reading, as well as its pleasure,
was, he believed, in submission to what the author actually intended.
'we seek an enlargement of our being.
we want to be more than ourselves'.
books which compel us to re read them frequently,
to be attentive to their exact wording and style,
books which CANNOT be read as non literary people read trash,
will always emerge and remain as the great books.
the advantage of L's approach is that it need not give way
either to snobbery (pretending we like books which happen to be fashionable)
or to inverted snobbery (in the way that L's temptation was to see more merit in captain marryat
than in t.s. eliot).
it does not really matter what judgement we pass on a book.
what matters is not what we do to the book
but what the book does to us.
the Experiment ends with one of the finest paragraphs in the whole L oeuvre:
'literary experience heals the wound,
without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
there are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.
in them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub individuality.
but IN READING GREAT LITERATURE I BECOME A THOUSAND MEN
AND YET REMAIN MYSELF.
like a night sky in the greek poen, i see with a myriad eyes,
but it is still i who see.
here, as in worship, in love, in moral action and in knowing,
i transcend myself;
and am never more myself than when i do'.
when it appeared posthumouly, j.r.r. Tol was repelled by 'letters to malcolm',
finding in it precisely the attitude which L professed to find distasteful in his grandparents
-'cosily at ease in zion'.
among a lot of criticisms which seem wide of the mark, To managed to score some very palpable hits,
most notably when he said that the Letters were not 'about prayer' but 'about L praying'.
in the same way it could be said the 'An Experiment..is not about literature
but about L reading,
and 'A Grief..is candidly, though anonymously, what its title says it is.
doubtless if 'Letters..were being offered to us as a manual of prayer,
a substitute for st francois de sales or william law,
Tol's objection would be only proper.
but a taste for L is, in large part, a taste for reading about him. (?)
though it was denied him to become a great poet,
he shares with 'the last Romantics'
a vivid awareness of his ow consciousness,
a sense that the chief end of writing is to communicate sensation and experience.
a high proportion of L's oeuvre when properly considered
can be found to be of the same kind as wordsworth's 'Prelude', a book which was always very dear to him.
what the catholic Tol found distasteful
-in particular the inference drawn from Malcolm that
an 'unqualified' protestant layman might take upon himself a teaching office
in a matter so delicate as to how we should pray
-was precisely what l would have felt justified his position as a writer.
he disclaimed the role of directeur,
which was why he framed his book in the form of fictitious letters to the invented figure of malcolm,
who has apparently (his letters are not attempted) been hitting back, barfield style,
at chinks in L's armour.
at the same time, he was not frightened of soliloquy, either as a literary mode
or as a means of discovering or conveying religious truth,
as he made plain by quoting one of his own poems, pretending that the identity of the author was unknown..
'they tell me, Lord, that when i seem
to be in speech with You,
since but one voice is heard, its all a dream,
one talker aping two.
sometimes it is, yet not as they
conceive it. rather, i
seek in myself the things i hoped to say,
but lo! my wells are dry.
the, seeing me empty, You forsake
the listener's role and through
my dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake
the thoughts i never knew.
and thus You neither need reply
nor can; thus, while we seem
two talkers, Thou art one forever, and i
no dreamer, but Thy dream.
'Dream, adds L the critic, makes it too like pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the rhyme.
but is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy?
(utterance or discourse by a person who is talking to himself)
if the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God.
but the human petitioner does not therefore become a'dream'.
maybe not a dream.
but there remains a sense in which all ROMANTIC writers (..in the sense of POST WORDWORTHIANs
who make themselves and their own sensations the subject of their work)
are difficult to pin down.
there are those who, discerning that L, like yeats, worked by assuming a number of masks,
have come to the conclusion that there was something bogus about him;
that either in his literary attitudes or his bluff conservatism or his religious faith
he was 'putting it on'.
this misjudgement of l surely stems from a mistaken view of how anything comes o be written
or possibly even perceived.
just as, all those years ago, Tol and Dy drew L into christianity
by making him see that it was truth told by means of story,
so himself as a writer is so constantly accessible and interesting
because he is unashamed of the story telling element in all literary modes.
it is not a Lie to recognize that literature itself is unnatural.
so, having tried to write a straight book on prayer and found in the early 1950s that he had to abandon it.
in Malcolm he found the perfect mode.
it was almost certainly suggested by reading rose macaulay's 'real' 'letters to a friend'
a correspondence with her former confessor
and largely taken up with spiritual matters.
but the fact that the mode is only a mode does not mean that the content of Malcolm is bogus,
any more than the semifictionalized pattern of A grief observed should make us suppose
that he did not really go through the experience of bereavement.
a failure to understand the kind of writer L was
-a Romantic egoist in the tradition of wordsworth and yeats-
has led to two of the grosser extreme among those expressing views about him since his death.
(and similar extremes are noticeable among those who love or loathe Words and Y).
on the one hand there are those who would dismiss all three..as mere poseurs,
shallow men pretending to be deep, mortals putting on immortal masks.
this view must be false
-in L's case-
because every single piece of biographical evidence which exists supports the opposite point of view.
in love, in friendship and above all in religion
there can be no doubt of his passionate sincerity.
on the other hand there are those readers
who are so uplifted by the sublimity of L at his best as a writer
that they assume that he was himself a sublime being, devoid of blemishes.
readers of this kind either ignore L's faults altogether
and attribute any mention of them to some ulterior motive (possibly anti religious)
on behalf of the speaker,
or-oddest of all to neutral observers who perhaps haven't read much L
of made up their minds about him
-they acknowledge the faults but wish to make them into virtues.
we suddenly find ourselves in an uncongenial world where a bullying, hectoring technique in public debate
is held up as a courageous defence of the faith,
or spells of club room misogyny are taken as evidence of holy celibacy.
all this seems a pity because it dehumanizes a man who was not posing
when he described his wife and himself
as 'a sinful woman married to a sinful man;
two of God's patients, not yet cured'.
if we ignore the kind of man l was, in our anxiety
to dismiss him as a fraud or canonize him as a plaster saint,
we miss the unmistakable and remarkable evidence of something like sanctification
which occurred in him towards the end of his days.
the suffering which smashed him up and made him so vulnerable did not destroy his faith.
now did it destroy the kind of man he was.
he went on being a red faced ulsterman,
he continued to smoke and drink heavily,
his aesthetic tastes remained much the same
-that is to say broad.
he never did see the point in Gre's fondness for proust;
but nor could you ever classify L as a man who 'only liked' fantasy,or epic poems, or e. nesbit,
much as he liked all three.
a fortnight before his death, he was reading 'les liaisons dangereuses'
and writing to a colleague at magdalene, cambridge -'Wow what a book!
come to lunch of friday (fish) and tell me about it'.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)