Mr Lewis on Love

I found some tapes in the library that has CS Lewis talking about the four different loves that he likes to talk about. At least I think it is him. He has a nice deep voice and you can still hear certain words where his N. Irish accent creeps in. I thought he would have had a much lighter, South Brittish accent. Nope.
I have found two quotes that moved me, or that I thought worth quoting. I might listen to the lectures again and post my notes, but for now his thoughts will have to suffice... ;)

Every listener who has had a good parent or wife or husband may be sure that at times he is the recipient of Agape. Not because he is loveable, but because love itself is in the other party. This we must learn: first to believe, then to endure, and then to delight in. And without guessing about it either. Such I conceive is the world of Agape, a world of unbounded giving and unashamed receiving. Where all blessed creatures need, and know that they need nothing but God, and are therefore set free to love one another disinterestedly. And so your love shall be like His, born neither of your need nor of my deserving, but of plain bounty. I think those are drawing near to Heaven who in this life find that they need men less and love men more and delight more in being loved than in being needed.

He quotes Agustine:

"All creatures are temporary...to give one heart to a created being is therefore to court disaster. If love is to mean in the long run to mean in the long run happiness not misery, it must be love for the only beloved that does not pass away."

Now of course this is very good sense... Of all arguments against excessive love for a fellow creature, none make so strong a natural appeal to me as “Be careful, this may mean suffering “ but when I respond to this natural appeal I feel myself to be a thousand miles away from the spirit of Christianity. ...And who could conceivably begin to love God on the grounds that he is a “safer investment”?...One has to be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates. Such a view does not raise us above the natural affections, it sinks us below them. Eros himself, lawless and rebellious, when he prefers the beloved to happiness, is nearer love itself than this... For our master is one who shed tears at the grave of Lazarus; who mourned over the approaching ruin of his earthly country... And even if it were true that precautions against heart break were our highest wisdom, even if it were possible for that reason to choose the love of God, would that choice be a precaution? That God offers us security I well may believe, but not security from sorrow. His love too may break the heart. ..For Christ himself that road leads to “My God why hast thou forsaken me?” To love is to be vulnerable.

Love anything and your heart will certainly be rung, and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it in tact you must give it to no one and nothing, not even an animal. You must carefully wrap it round with hobbies, and little luxuries and routines, and avoidance's of entanglement. And then lock it up in the casket or coffin of your own selfishness. And this means that the alternative to tragedy, or at least to the threat of tragedy, is damnation. For in that casket, safe, still, and unventilated in the darkness, it will go dead. Not broken but finally unbreakable: resistant to all good and joy

``In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland, starving and outnumbered, charged the fields of Bannockburn. They fought like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom.''


Yes, today is the day in which Scotland won their freedom under Robert the Bruce. If you are interested in the story, you can follow the ling below:
The Story of Bob the Bruce

Scots Wha' Hae
by Robert Burns
Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie!
Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour;
See approach proud Edward's power -
Chains and slaverie!
Wha will be a traitor-knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave?
Wha sae base as be a Slave?
Let him turn and flie!
Wha for Scotland's king and law
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fa'
Let him follow me!
By Oppression's woes and pains!
By your Sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud Usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in ev'ry foe!
Liberty's in ev'ry blow! -
Let us do — or die!

Dimensions and the Trinity

Dear Readers,

Do you ever find that you have ignored a particular bit of theology because you feel that you do not even understand what you don’t understand? The concept of the Trinity is like that to me. I have wondered why people defend it so closely when I can not see what is so mysterious about it. I do not feel any wonder when people talk about what a mystery it is. It is like someone saying, “She just inherited 1,000,000,000,000$” ...I do not even know what that amount of 0’s means, let alone what it would take me to earn that at 7.60 an hour.

I have inherited several things from my parents. oddities, almost. One thing I have inherited from my dad is a fascination for little ponders. They will perhaps never be solved in this life, nevertheless they are very interesting. Like for example the names of the two thieves who hung next to Jesus, or whether Mars had an ancient route different from its present course... And of course, the infamous concept of dimensions. I It is infamous because in my younger days, when I was affectionately known as the Small-mass-of-confiusion, I would incoherently mumble about “truth...” and “The fourth dimension...” and demand that people listen.

But I was looking for a quote which I wanted to blog about in Mere Christianity. It was about how God makes us into a Castle, but I was distracted when I was skimming a place where he begins to talk about dimensions. He compared the Trinity to the third dimension, which I had never connected, but now it seems so obvious!


My dear reader, if you have any interest in dimensions and any confusion about the trinity, here is a passage From Lewis to perhaps shed some light on the matter...



I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes I must ask you to follow rather carefully.

You know that in space you can move in three ways--to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a combination between them. They are called the three dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure, say a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body: say a cube--a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.

Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world you still get straight lines, but many lines make on figure. In a three-dimensional world you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you di not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.

Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any wo persons are two separate beings--just as in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level cannot imagine. In God’s diminution, so to speak, you fins a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a being like that: just as if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. but we can get sort of a faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea however faint, of something super-personal--something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once one has been told one feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already.

A dream come true...

I had a dream come true on Sunday. It was so beautiful that I had to excuse myself to the bathroom afterwards to get a good little cry because I was so happy. I also received a hug from Juanita.

I went to a church service that I have been hoping, longing, waiting etc to go to for …. So long I can not remember when I began hoping. In all honesty, it was better than the services at L’Abri. It was a dream come true. I did not pretend to enjoy the worship or the sermon. I have learned from this experience, however, that what I thought I wanted in a church is not necessarily what I actually want. In other words, my idea church was much different than this experience. In fact I walked into the building knowing I was going to hate the service.

The reason has to do with my little idea that everything pre-WWI was better. That is one of the things I love about the Catholic service: it has been the same though many ages. This church was all about engaging the media and modern forms of worship. Anything modern means impersonal concern for progress at the expense of all that is human. Anything in church vaguely having to do with media engagement is merely a desire to manipulate people by giving off a message “hey, we are cool too. So be a Christian.”

Instead of engaging with the media that is all about image and portraying the lie that everything is perfect, this church engaged in it as a means to reach the people who live in this culture. It was not a means to attract them, it was a means to communicate with them. This means the sermon was relevant! Oh my goodness. What a difference. I was not pretending to enjoy it, I was starving eating every concept. I was not trying to rephrase it to put it into real language, I did not even notice that it was a sermon till the end. As far as trying to understand the theological concepts and apply them to the everyday life, they were already translated, and I know anyone listening could grow from such words.

I was shocked that I enjoyed the service so much. I am beginning to wonder now what a good service is all about. … I don’t know, but now I have a new experience to confirm that my desire to be involved in a church in the twentieth century is not impossible.

Don’t wish the restless water still
When heaven breaks from pleasant disposition
Don’t ask of rising waves their peace
But let this vessel ride them
--let me weep

Abba and Peef

“Abba, as a way of addressing God, is an ipsissima vox, an authentic original utterance of Jesus. We are confronted with something new and astounding. Herein lies the great novelty of the Gospel.”

I suppose that “abba” has the same significance as “daddy” in my mind. But even then I am not sure that that really captures the dynamic. As I was trying to think of what in my experience is comparable to this, I read a verse which reminded me of my own dad.

“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”

“Children of God”. While to be a Child is a very beautiful and noble thing, it still has the effect of being more proper and less affectionate, which I think is the whole point of this Abba thing.

I was trying to see if I knew what it was like to have an Abba for a father. I began to recall long hikes with my dad in Flagstaff and being a “peefer”. I think that is the best way to explain this concept to any Smith:

For God to be Abba, that means we are his peefs.

To be a peef is to be small and very muted loved. A peefer automatically implies a daddy who takes long walks (at peefer pace, of course) and plays his recorder. I have tried to walk and play the recorder and it is not an easy task. But I never took in the consideration that small short legs present the perfect pace for music.


“My dignity as Abba;s child is my most coherent sense of self.” Manning

I was thinking about this and this new concept of being a “peefer of God”, when I read this and wondered if it was really true. Is being a child really the most important thing Christ has given us?

I remembered my dream of the water and the old man and then the child. How strange that the old man vanished and there was that little child, the girl. She was so beautiful, bright. I knew I could trust her, and yet, she was so vulnerable and innocent. Perhaps that is what made her wise.

From this dream and from all that the bible says about being a child of God I think I am beginning to understand how we are to see ourselves. The identity of child. “The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

How sad that we think it is a great thing when a child behaves “sophisticatedly” like a “real” person. Of course, I do not think children should not therefore mature. (Childish vs childlike.)

hmm... it is too bad people don’t loose their childishness but they do loose their child likeness. I suppose they loose their child-like-ness because they learn how to hide their child-ish-ness. So we should not grow out of being a child, but we should be a child and no less. We should be a child and more.

Wonder and Romance

The other day I saw this film called “The importance of being Earnest” and it was a very typical chick flick. Not very remarkable, in fact I would not recommend it to anyone I can think of. However, there was a little line that caught my attention for some reason. One of the men stated they were going to propose to a girl, to which his friend said he would end all romance. He added that “mystery is the essence of romance”, or something to that effect.

It is a common idea: marriage kills romance, like study kills the love of the subject. We humans seem to be very fond and good at this. But I am thinking that true love can never stop being in awe of another. I suspect so because we are made in God’s image, therefore we are dynamic. Is it when we box another in that we loose our wonder of them? And what then is it to “box” someone in?

Anyway, regardless of what it means to box another in, I will continue to believe that marriage can be romantic, because I believe in a very romantic God. In fact, I will put forth that marriage is the one place where the deepest human romance has the possibility to be full. It is probably comparable to a well loved place, like the Cabin. It is as if everyone is claiming that the best vacations are the ones where people visit new places and where the senses are overwhelmed with novelty. But this is not true at all. The cabin in Flagstaff is by far the most mysterious and best place to vacation because I have been going there since I was a child. Romance must be the same way: the more you know the more wonder-full the person becomes.

Otherwise I sincerely doubt that God would be fond of marriage.

Narative Poetry

I have always been ashamed of my taste in poetry because I have a tendency to prefer narrative to ... whatever the other is. I like to understand it and want to see a good story. This means that I prefer “Beowulf” to “The Hollow Men”, and the poems found in Tolkien’s Trilogy about stories to queer seemingly disconnected fragments of thought that I am somehow supposed to listen to and relate to in some way.
(I have the same taste in art, preferring artists like Parish and Pre-Raphaelites to abstract “masterpieces”) Lewis addresses the concept of epic in A Preface to Paradise Lost. And it has justified my love for this form of poetry:

The Technique of Primary Epic

And the words of his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory
Embroidered with names of the Djinns--a miraculous weaving--
But the cool and perspicuous eye overbore unbelieving.
--Kipping

The most obvious characteristic of an oral technique is its continual use of stock words, phrases, or even whole lines. It is Important to realise at the outset that these are not a second-best on which the poets fall back when inspiration fails them: they are as frequent in the great passages as in the low ones. ...

It is a prime necessity of oral poetry that the hearers should not be surprised
too often or too much.

The unexpected tires us... You can not ponder over single lines and let them dissolve on the mind like lozenges. That is the wrong way of using this sort of poetry. It is not built up for isolated effects; the poetry is in the paragraph, or the whole episode. To look for single, “good” lines is like looking for single “good” stones in a cathedral.
The language, therefore, must be familiar in the sense of being expected. But in Epic which is the highest species of oral court poetry, it must not be familiar in the sense of being colloquial or common place. The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors idd not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts which no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry. ..this absolutely necessitate a Poetic Diction; that is, a language which is familiar because it is used in every part of every poem, but unfamiliar because it is not used outside poetry. A parallel, from a different sphere, would be turkey and plum pudding on Christmas Day; no one is surprised by the menu, but everyone recognises that it is not an ordinary fare.

So it is not pretension and lack of wit which makes poems like this, but it is just a different form of art which is not longer commonly understood or used. Of course I will allow that there is good and bad epic. But I am so excited that I am not shallow for enjoying this. In celebration of this here is a good Pome, nya.

..He was silent for some time, and then he began not to speak but to chant softly:

The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinuviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her rainment glimmering.

There Beren came from mountains cold.
And lost he wandered under leaves,
And where the Elven-river rolled
He walked alone and sorrowing.
He peered between the hemlock-leaves
And saw in wonder flowers of gold
Upon her mantle and her sleeves,
And her hair like shadow following.

Enchantment healed his weary feet
That over hills were doomed to roam;
And forth he hastened, strong and fleet,
And grasped at moonbeams glistening.
Through woven woods in Elvenhome
She lightly fled on dancing feet,
And left him lonely still to roam
In the silent forest listening.

He heard there oft the flying sound
Of feet as light as linden-leaves,
Or music welling underground,
In hidden hollows quavering.
Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves,
And one by one with sighing sound
Whispering fell the beachen leaves
In wintry woodland wavering.

He sought her ever, wandering far
Where leaves of years were thickly strewn,
By light of moon and ray of star
In frosty heavens shivering.
Her mantle glinted in the moon,
As on a hill-top high and far
She danced, and at her feet was strewn
A mist of silver quivering.

When winter passed, she came again,
And her song released the sudden spring,
Like rising lark, and falling rain,
And melting water bubbling.
He saw the elven-flowers spring
About her feet, and healed again
He longed by her to dance and sing
Upon the grass untroubling.

Again she fled, but swift he came,
Tinuviel! Tinuviel!
He called her by her elvish name;
And there she halted listening.
One moment stood she, and a spell
His voice laid on her: Beren came,
And doom fell on Tinuviel
That in his arms lay glistening.

As Beren looked into her eyes
Within the shadows of her hair,
The trembling starlight of the skies
He saw there mirrored shimmering.
Tinuviel the elven-fair,
Immortal maiden elven-wise,
About him cast her shadowy hair
And arms like silver glimmering.

Long was the way that fate them bore,
O'er stony mountains cold and grey,
Through halls of iron and darkling door,
And woods of nightshade morrowless.
The Sundering Seas between them lay,
And yet at last they met once more,
And long ago they passed away
In the forest singing sorrowless."

-- J R R Tolkien

Image of God: female?

I am wondering how confused I might be about being a woman and a Christian. It is quite possible that I am more confused than I know. It dawned on me today that we are to identify ourselves in God, and specifically in Jesus, but does that effect at all the fact of male and female? What does it mean, not just what do select fundamentalists and feminists want it to mean, to be a woman? Is there really a difference in how males and females identify themselves in Jesus? We are told that “There is neither … male nor female in Christ Jesus”… But what does that mean? I am really kinda tired of making my own identity, but I am also not wanting to wear head coverings and think that I can’t be as spiritual as a guy…