finding quotes

I really like finding good quotes.  I think I started ‘collecting’ them, in a sense, while I was in college.  It was the first time in my life where I did a lot of nonfiction reading.  As a naturally fiction-loving reader, this was a bit of a stretch at first; after time, however, I’ve come to love some of my text books as much as my favourite stories.  They remind me of people who I learned with, or of ideas that I can remember wrestling with at a certain point in time.  Most of my favourite nonfiction authors are highly quotable: Eugene-Pete and N.T. Wright among them.

Quotes help to crystallize those moments: focussing our attention on some thought or attitude or comment that moved us or startled us or made us laugh out loud.  Good quotes.

I discovered while reading The Hobbit for my Mythgard class that the Tolkien quote at the top of my blog is actually something Thorin says near the end of the story.  "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world" (Tolkien, The Hobbit).  Since it’s been a while since I’ve actually gotten to the end of the Hobbit (I’ve restarted it twice, I think?  Since first reading it…) I had no idea this was Thorin’s line!  It actually sounded like something Tolkien would say in his day-to-day life (probably was!).

In parting, here’s another great Tolkien excerpt.  This one from The Lord of the Rings:

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Anyone with a favourite quote out there?  Let’s hear it!

at the gallows

Not long after he gives his mansion as a hospital for the sick the Bishop from Les Misérables feels himself called to attend to a criminal in his last moments before facing the death penalty.

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He went instantly to the prison, descended to the cell of the “mountebank,” called him by name, took him by the hand, and spoke to him.  He passed the entire day with him, forgetful of food and sleep, praying to God for the soul of the condemned man, and praying the condemned man for his own.  He told him the best truths, which are also the most simple.  He was father, brother, friend; he was bishop only to bless [not to judge or condemn].  The man was on the point of dying in despair.  Death was an abyss to him.  As he stood trembling on its mournful brink, he recoiled with horror. . . . He gazed incessantly…and beheld only darkness.  The Bishop made him see light.

On the following day, when they came to fetch the unhappy wretch, the Bishop was still there…

He mounted the scaffold with him.  The sufferer, who had been so gloomy and cast down on the preceding day, was radiant.  He felt that his soul was reconciled, and he hoped in God.  The Bishop embraced him…

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Here is love.  Simple.  Elegant.  Powerful.  Changing a life at its most desperate hour, on the  brink of death and the unknown.  Never should we condemn the work of simple folk who sit all night with those bound for death, or walk with them into their punishment, or pray with them at the uttermost end.  For such is the work of love. 

Monseigneur Bienvenu

This past weekend I thought I’d start a new book.  I’d finished Eugene Peterson, and wanted good old fiction.  We have a variety of ‘classics’ (some better than others) on our Kindle.  I started looking through them and found Les Misérables.  Les Mis is Sarah’s favourite play, and one of her favourite stories.  I had first encountered it in the film version with Liam Neeson as Jean Valjean.  The book, of course, is much different and it starts out with a lengthy description of the Bishop Myriel, or, as the people of his mountain diocese call him, Monseigneur Bienvenu.

I think I could take a lesson or two from the good Bishop.  What’s neat about the Kindle is that you can underline things and write comments as you go.  I took note of a few favourite passages—scenes of him giving away all his money, studying away in his room, tilling his garden haphazardly, and so on.  Two scenes in particular stand out: the first occurs early on in the Bishop’s arrival to the new town.  He’s inspecting the hospital which is adjacent to his ‘palace’, and finds that it is overcrowded with the sick.  He and the hospital warden are standing together in the Bishops’ dining room when Bienvenu turns to the hospital director and asks:

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     “Monsieur,” said he, “how many beds do you think this hall alone would hold?”

     “Monseigneur’s dining-room?” exclaimed the stupefied director

     The Bishop cast a glance round the apartment, and seemed to be taking measures and calculations with his eyes.

     “It would hold full twenty beds,” said he, as though speaking to himself.  Then, raising his voice:—

     “Hold, Monsieur the director of the hospital, I will tell you something.  There is evidently a mistake here.  There are thirty-six of you, in five or six small rooms.  There are three of us here, and we have room for sixty.  There is some mistake, I tell you; you have my house, and I have yours.  Give me back my house; you are at home here.”

     On the following day the thirty-six patients were installed in the Bishop’s palace, and the Bishop was settled in the hospital.

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This is the first of several ways by which the Bishop sacrifices his own comforts, possessions, even his ‘rights’ (a popular topic in Canada today) for the sake of giving to his community—loving his neighbours.

Sometimes I wonder if we over-think what it might mean to help someone in need.  What do we have before us?  What actually is extra?  There’s so much we can live without, and there is so much that others are without.  It’s not complicated.  I don’t have a palace that I can give to a hospital director, but I can give in other ways.  I just need to be open to thinking about it.  Monseigneur Bienvenu, the good old Bishop, can help us to do just that.

mystery

It’s another reason why I love reading Eugene Peterson…

Having finished my Lewis papers and Regent reading, I’ve returned to a book by Eugene Peterson which I received as a Christmas gift last year from Mom and Dad.  It’s called Practicing Resurrection, the fifth and final book in Peterson’s series on Spiritual Theology.  If you’ve ever been to our Tuesday night hangouts with our Young Adults group, you’ll have probably heard me mention Eugene before.  He’s an incredibly down to earth man, and as a writer he’s entertaining, humorous and deep.

Here’s a snippet from Practicing Resurrection on the mystery:

Verb six: God made known.  “With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will” (Eph. 1:8-9).

We are not in the dark.  We are in on what God des.  We are not intended to be kept in a state of ignorance, asking no questions.  We are not children “to be seen and not heard.”

But—and this catches our attention—what God makes known to us is “the mystery of his will.” … ‘Mystery’ here does not refer to things kept in secret, classified information that is not accessible to people without proper clearance.  ‘Mystery’ here refers to something more like the inside story of the way God does things that bring us into the story.  This is a kind of knowledge that cannot be gained by gathering up information or picking up clues. …The way in which God makes known the mystery is ‘with all wisdom and insight.’  That is, the knowledge that God gives us comes in the form of wisdom and insight.  God does not dump information on us.  He does not ‘home school’ us in mathematics and biology.  ‘Wisdom and insight’ are knowledge lived out.

We have far too little experience of this in American [and, I would add, Canadian] schools.  Education majors in dates and figures, explanation and definitions, how things work… None of this is without usefulness.  But it has little to do with becoming a mature person, with growing up. We know a thing, a truth, a person only in relationship.  There is a great deal of impersonal knowledge available.  There is no impersonal wisdom.

We truly know something only by entering it, knowing from the inside, lovingly embracing it.  That is what wisdom is: truth assimilated and digested (Peterson, Practice Resurrection, 64-65).

Sometimes I think we make matters of faith and God so abstract—so unrelated to everyday life.  Yet Eugene helps us to keep it grounded in everyday language: in fact, the most ordinary language there is—that of relationships, family, real people, real life, real God.

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References:

Eugene Peterson.  Practice Resurrection: a conversation in growing up in Christ.  Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010.

the whole sweep

One of biggest changes that college wrought in me was a new perspective on my faith.  There’s this phrase C.S. Lewis uses where he thinks of our imaginations being “baptized”, that is that our faculties—our hearts, minds, spirits, what have you—are enlarged in order to better experience or understand or take in that which we were before unaware of.  My imagination was enlarged in an attempt to grapple (not fully understand mind you, but to witness and acknowledge) the vastness of God: his transcendence, his immanence, his humanity in Christ, his mystery in Spirit.  That was day 1: Theology I, actually.  And it was onward and upward from there. 

I mentioned once before that I’ve been reading Luci Shaw’s Breath for the Bones.  At one point she’s talking about journal-keeping, and how when we re-read our journals it’s like taking a helicopter ride back over a landscape where before we had only walked or hiked.  At the time we saw only the particulars, the individual ups and downs of the experience.  In reflective hindsight we see the whole scope of the thing, be it a year or a decade; and we can get a sense of the lay of the land, so to speak.  Spiritually this can be really helpful, for so often in the day to day we miss out on the overall theme.  We can’t see the forest through the trees.

This idea of looking at life by the small blips or by the vast panorama can come into play in how we read the Bible.  I know for myself, one of the things which Eston encouraged in me was to read whole books in one sitting.  I seldom actually did this, but the value was not lost on me: in reading the whole of say, Ephesians, or John, we can see how the whole thing works.  Now we might not dissect and analyse the thing as we’re doing so…and that’s perfectly alright!  For that tendency to study the text should not, I think, come before first reading the text: hearing it as a Story.  Getting into the lives of the characters, seeing how they went about working out their relationships to God…how God was working out making himself known to them.  We let the text work on us.

I like how Eugene Peterson puts it in his introduction to 1 & 2 Samuel in The Message: 

The biblical way is not so much to present us with a moral code and tell us “Live up to this”; nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, “Think like this and you will live well.”  The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, “Live into this.  This is what it looks like to be human; this is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings.”  We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives.  That results in a kind of “boutique spirituality”—God as decoration, God as enhancement.  The Samuel narrative will not allow that.  In the reading, as we submit our lives to what we read, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but to see our stories in God’s.  God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

Such reading will necessarily be a prayerful reading—a God-listening, God-answering reading.

I love that.  And I feel drawn back into that world that I discovered in those years at Eston.  For they encouraged us in that same way…not to see God as an object to be studied, but as the Subject within whom we find love and forgiveness and wholeness again.

So, I’m on a mission to read in wholes.  And what I love is that this requires imagination-living.  Not that we’re making things up!  But we need our imaginations baptized if we’re to be able to see our day to day lives, and our day to day reading of Scripture as part of something bigger.

This morning I happened upon a video which is what first enticed me to write some of these thoughts down:

N.T.Wright "The whole sweep of Scripture" from Rodica on Vimeo.

Favourite line:  “Frequently and thoroughly!”

So may you see whatever is on your plate today as a part of the bigger story of your life.  May you know that no matter how difficult things might seem, that there is One who knows you, who feels your pain, and wants to guide you through it.  And may you read not with the intention of mining out some small particular for personal pleasure, but may you find yourself immersed in God’s goodness as you are “swept along” by the Story.

out of the silent planet

The second book I’m reading for my Regent class is Out of the Silent Planet.  I’ve read this one before, or, rather, it was read to a group of us in college when a small band of curious listeners would converge on Larry and Lorraine’s living room for Beth’s weekly literary reading.  The group, fittingly enough, was called Inklings.

So it’s been a good refresher to return to this first book in Lewis’ science fiction trilogy.  What strikes me the most thus far is Lewis’ ability to present fascinating ideas about reality through the mind of his main character, Dr. Elwin Ransom (a philologist whom he designed partially off of his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien!)  What Ransom experiences through his voyages to Malacandra (what we call Mars) and his experiences thereon are nothing short of fantastic.  Along the way Lewis shares some fascinating ideas.

Here’s an example of how Lewis reimagines Space itself.  Ransom is sailing along in his space-ship and discovers that one side of the ship is always night and the other is always at “noon.”  He finds himself continually drawn to the light, for while he bathes in the glow he feels himself being changed:

There, totally immersed in a bath of pure ethereal colour and of unrelenting though unwounding brightness, stretched his full length and with eyes half closed in the strange chariot that bore them, faintly quivering, through depth after depth of tranquillity far above the reach of night, he felt his body and mind daily rubbed and scoured and filled with new vitality.…

[He] became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart.  A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind…that follows in the wake of science, was falling off of him.  He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds.  He had not known how much it affected him till now – no that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam.  He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment…  No: Space was the wrong name.  Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens… (Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 34-35).

Soon after the crew descends upon Malacandra, and Ransom has another revelation and his earlier thoughts come to conclusion:

They were falling out of heaven, into a world.  Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom’s mind as this.  He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void.  Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets – the ‘earths’ he called them in his thought – as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven – excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.

Things do not always happen as a man would expect.  The moment of his arrival in an unknown world found Ransom wholly absorbed in a philosophical speculation. (Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 45).

What is love is how Lewis’ imagination finds it way onto the page.  It’s like he has his characters moving along and then has this idea about space and finds this way to have Ransom think it through in a believable way and even giving us as readers an opportunity to share in his epiphany.  Also, it’s just such a neat thought… that space is more alive than the worlds are.

Have a good one!

Nik

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References:

C.S. Lewis.  Out of the Silent Planet.  London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.

the great divorce pt.2

Back to work today.  Working straight through for eight days until we leave for Vancouver.  Can’t believe we’re actually going.  Feels very surreal.

Onward to more reading!!

Here’s another excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.

We pick up where the shade of the intellectual man is deep in conversation with his old friend and fellow thinker; the latter has been sent to offer the invitation of the journey toward heaven to the other.

Near the end of their conversation the intellectual gets frustrated by the prospect of losing the forum for free inquiry—that is the sort of plays we make in asking questions indefinitely: challenging one another, entertaining new thoughts and philosophies; and yet ultimately coming to no real conclusions (or perhaps believing that no true conclusions can be made at all).  He is repelled by the idea that in God there are the final answers.  Check it out:

“But you must feel yourself that there is something stifling about the idea of finality?  Stagnation, my dear boy, what is more soul-destroying than stagnation?”

“You think that, because hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect.  I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom.  Your thirst shall be quenched. . . .
Listen! . . . Once you were a child.  You knew what inquiry was for.  There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them.  Become that child again: even now.”

“Ah, but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

“You have gone far wrong.  Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 40-41).

This reminded me so much of my freshman worldview class with Brian Tysdal.  Brian was (and still is, I’m sure) incredibly passionate about the nature of truth. 

We usually think of truth as those objective, empirical facts.  But what if there is more to knowing truth than intellectual understanding?  It’s hard to comprehend.  And maybe that’s the point here: that by severing our intellect, our reasoning faculties, from our imagination we’ve also lost the ability to understand truth as something more than a scientific laying-bare of facts or figures.  Perhaps capital “T”, Truth, as Lewis suggests here, is something that God intends to be tasted and embraced.  Perhaps when we come to see Him face to face, tasting and embracing will better describe our experience of knowing the Truth.  This sounds like relationship language doesn’t it?

Jesus describes himself as the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6)  If a person is Truth, then that means that as I enter into relationship I enter into Truth.  Relationships involve the engagement of the whole person—including, but not limited to, the mind.  I feel that in this moment, Lewis is on to something very special: not only does he hit the nail on the head in terms of our adult understanding of truth as only abstract intellect, but he points to a deeper reality, a poetic, reality which invites the heart as well.  I want to know the One who is Truth. 

One down three to go!

Jesus said, "I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him. You've even seen him!"  The Message, John 14:6-7

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References:

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York, Harper Collins, 1973).

the great divorce

I’ve begun my reading for my upcoming Fiction of C.S. Lewis class, and decided to start with one of the two books that I hadn’t read before which is The Great Divorce.  It’s a short “theological fantasy” in which Lewis, as himself, boards a bus which takes its passengers to the outskirts of heaven. 

He and his fellow passengers arrive in a forested meadow-land at the foot of a great mountain range where the promise of dawn continually teases.  From there Lewis watches as the other travellers encounter friends and family from their past who have come to guide them up into the mountain and into the Dawn.  It gives Lewis the opportunity to explore some really interesting scenarios: like a mother being upset that her son who died as a child was not sent to welcome her when her brother comes instead; or a man who is so intellectually astute that he is incapable of putting aside his curiosity in order to recognize God as Truth.  A lot of it is about how we need to put away our preoccupation with Self and instead choose to seek after God.  When we do this, we actually find ourselves, for He begins to show us how to recognize ourselves in the larger context of His love and forgiveness.

This was one of my favourite scenes.  One of the Bright Ones offers one of the Ghosts of hell to take the journey toward Heaven:

“Will you come with me to the mountains?…”

… “I am perfectly ready to consider it.  Of course I should require some assurances… I should want a guarantee that you are taking me to a place where I shall find a wider sphere of usefulness—and scope for the talents that God has given me—and an atmosphere of free inquiry—in short, all that one means by civilisation and—er—the spiritual life.”

“No,” said the other.  “I can promise you none of these things.  No sphere of usefulness: you are not needed there at al.  No scope for your talents: only forgiveness for having perverted them.  No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to a land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.”

“Ah, but we must all interpret those beautiful words in our own way!…” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 39-40).

He really doesn’t get it.  What I love about this is how Lewis reveals how self-absorbed we can be.  The man still wants to be known, respected, and worth something—but he wants it based on what he thinks he can accomplish.  It’s inherently self-pleasing.  It’s not that the desire to be understood or useful is wrong.  It’s how we seek to satisfy those longings that is often misguided: who do we look to tell us we’re useful, valuable, or correct?  This man looks to his own accomplishments and his ability to contribute to society to find his worth.  God doesn’t want that: He wants us to recognize our worth in Him.  For He truly knows us: intimately and deeply; and in Him we find our worth, for in Him we are whole, healed, and restored.  Loved.

I want to learn again how to be curious for finding the good answers, not as something that I use in order to try and make myself look good.

"Show me how you work, God; School me in your ways. Take me by the hand; lead me down the path of truth." Psalm 25:4-5a (The Message)

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References:

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York, Harper Collins, 1973).

talking tolkien

When I was 11 I was invited to travel with my Aunt Jo-Anne, Uncle Jim and cousin Mike to Oliver, B.C.  It was a pretty crazy adventure for an eleven year-old, and was definitely the longest time I’d been away from home before.  I recall the long drives through golden prairies (Mike’s favourite at the time, which he decided were much better than “ugly rock cuts!”), camping in Drumheller and again in Banff, before arriving in Oliver where we made whips out of willow wands and ate from the plum trees to our heart’s content!

Though we saw some amazing country, my favourite moments were those spent in the evenings.  We’d all gather around while Aunt Jo-Anne read aloud from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien.  I had encountered nothing like it before: hobbits on the road, Black Riders who feared fire, a ranger named Strider, and an evil Ring.

When I got home I told Dad all about this story: the first of a trilogy.

“I think I’ve got those somewhere,” he said.  And as Dad often does, he withdrew to the basement and returned with the perfect solution.  He came back carrying a hardcover edition of The Lord of the Rings.

Since then, I’ve been a really big fan of Tolkien and his work.  When I went to College I realized that there was a large scholarly community who also deeply appreciated Tolkien and through books and classes I began to discover others who wanted to engage deeply with all things Middle-Earth.

So when I discovered Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor, and his podcasts I was instantly hooked!  Corey has recorded seminar sessions with himself and his students (he teaches English at Washington College) on all of Tolkien major works as well as his essays and letters.  They’re so great, and he’s hilarious! Josh Chalmers, if you’re reading this, go have a listen: http://tolkienprofessor.com/

Anyway, my love for all things Tolkien is going strong, and I’m pretty good with that.  Now I just need to get on my reading for my summer class: C.S. Lewis, where are you!?