Essay: “On Myth & Life”, Paper 1 for Tolkien & Lewis Class

As promised, I’ve been able to upload one of my recent essays to the blog—a little later than I’d hoped, but better than never!

Click here to read “On Myth & Life”. 

The following is my first essay for “Lewis & Tolkien: The Making of Myth”, my spring class I’m currently taking with the Mythgard Institute.  Our assignment was to note what we believed to be the most important or significant point of comparison or contrast between C.S. Lewis’ and J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary theories: that is, how they understood the nature of fantasy literature.
  
This is a bit of a workout for a three page paper.  The idea was not so much to come to a definitive conclusion, but to wrestle with the issues, paying close, careful attention to the text and walking alongside the reader to discover together that which you desired to teach through the essay.  The emphasis here is on an inductive reading of the texts.

I chose to focus on the ways myths or fairy-stories orient us to perceive truth, reality, or life in new ways.  In a sense, it’s my bachelor thesis condensed to three pages!  The introduction starts off a bit slow, and I purposefully rerouted some of the best statements from each of the paragraphs to serve better in the conclusion.

So happy reading!  And as always you are more than welcome to leave any questions or comments you might have.

simple

As we were getting ready for bed last night we got talking about how much stuff we have.  We’re reminded of this regularly since our main storage area also has the laundry and a shower in it—so you see these things that you don’t really use very often.  Some of it is definitely important like our winter clothes, my drum cases, and some bins of old papers and/or toys from our childhoods.  Sometimes it feels like the wall of storage is encroaching on the rest of the room!  If we were in a bigger place we’d probably have it tucked away somewhere else.  But in the same breath, we’d also have bought more stuff to fill a larger home!  Endless cycle!

One of the things I love about Sarah is that she’s so good at deciding what is important to keep and what she’ll never really use again.  She goes through her clothes on a regular basis and what she doesn’t think she’ll use anymore she gives away.  When I was a kid and a teenager Mom would do the same with me: sit me down and we’d go through the old cupboard.  Cleanse things out.  Make room for what we actually need for today.

I’m thinking of looking at spiritual disciplines as a series for Sunday school in January.  I’ve been wanting to do something with Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline for some time now, but I’m still not sure this is the best outlet.  The chapters in Celebration are already so well arranged that I think any one of them would be hard to present in a 45-minute segment.  Also Foster highlights 12 disciplines…and I have room for maybe 4-5!  So I’d have to pick some and skip others.  Part me of just wants to hand copies of the book out: “Here.  Read this through and then come back and we’ll talk about it when you’re done.”  I wonder how’d that go over?

The Christian Discipline of simplicity is an inward reorientation which, in turn, transforms the way we go about living life.  Inward to outward, always both.  What begins inside of us will permeate our outward experiences.  Out of the heart the mouth speaks, so I’ve heard. Here’s Foster:

Contemporary culture lacks the inward reality and outward lifestyle of simplicity.  We must live in the modern world, and we are affected by its fractured and fragmented state.  We are trapped in a maze of competing attachments.  One moment we make decisions on the basis of sound reason and the next moment out of fear of what others think of us. We have no unity or focus around which our lives are oriented. …

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic.  We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. … We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are warn out.  The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality.  It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. . . .We should take exception to the modern psychosis that defines people by how much they can produce or what they earn.” (Foster, Celebration of Discipline, 80-81).

Foster paints it pretty bleak, and I’m not saying that everyone is sucked into this 100%.  But it’s hard not to think of real experiences when I read this.  Especially the stuff about mass media.  It’s one of the reasons why Apple drives me nuts.  They redesign their iPods so quickly that once you buy one it’s not long before you feel that they missed out, and then you feel the need to upgrade sooner than you would really need to.  It’s the same now with Amazon’s Kindle e-book readers.  I’m sure the same thing goes for cellphones, but I don’t really know.

Simplicity.  I’d rather ignore all the rubbish of having the newest and the fastest and get my inner life straightened out first. Out of that I know I can be a better husband, a better employee, a better son, a better drummer, a better person.  The fundamental reorientation of the heart and mind, when set aright by God, can really transform our attitudes and the way we go about living day-to-day.  I’m far from this.  But Foster helps to point us in the right direction.  I’m glad for voices like his that can cut through the system and get us thinking again.

If you’re still reading this than kudos to you!  Way longer than I intended for first thing Saturday morning!  Have a great weekend.

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:

---

     “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.

---

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.

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

---

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

---

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)

---

References:

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

it's official: summer studies in vancouver!

When I got home from work today I found a letter sitting on the table with a sticky-note from Sarah: it was my confirmation of registration for Regent this summer!

Pursuing graduate studies has been a dream of mine for a few years now.  I was very encouraged to continue on by my profs while taking my undergrad degree.  Regent offers some of the most prestige programs in Canada for Christian studies, with a lot of their grads going on to do doctoral work at Oxford, St. Andrews, Durham and more.  More than that, though, I really identify with its values and philosophy of education: fostering thoughtful engagement of the world, culture, faith and life as a whole person.

After much prayer and planning we've decided to go to Regent College this summer to take a one-week summer class and scope out the city.  I'm taking  The Fiction of C.S. Lewis, taught by David Downing.  We'll be looking at four of Lewis' books, Pilgrim's Regress, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, and The Silver Chair.  


We are currently looking into securing housing for that week.  Regent has an excellent housing database which we were able to access.  We emailed a few potential locations last night--most are rooms or suites put up by alumni or current students or faculty--and we already got a response from one couple.  It turns out they're on faculty at the College.  So we could be staying with some future professors this summer.

Atrium at Regent

Needless to say, we're pretty excited!

Sarah just came home.  There was dancing.

Head here to check out Regent's official site!
You can also check out Regent on facebook and twitter.