no need to say goodbye.

listen to this.

this will be my last post as a formal Lewis scholar (which term i use with the greatest of liberties). 

and i'm at a loss as to what on earth i am here to discuss.

i don't mean this to be sentimental drivel, but, if i'm honest, this semester, these last few months of my life, have been extraordinary in every way. Not extraordinary in the "oh my goodness! that was so great!" way, but the "these months will always stand out because they have tried me in every which way. nothing about them has been normal" sort of way.

What has all of this transformation done to me (or rather, for me?)? I've found that analyzing it too much does no good. All i know is that i've learned this:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” 

Once again, Lewis has touched a piece of humanity that i couldn't possibly put into words. I like to think i've learned something about life from this class. i've learned about existence, truth, and, most importantly, the value of a soul. To love another soul is the greatest beauty existence has to offer.

{photo credit to the talented e. rhondeau}

in which i attempt to connect two seemingly unrelated works of literature.

"Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny."

--Uncle Andrew, The Magician's Nephew

“In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, Kepler's or Newton's discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty... to remove those ten or a hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to mankind. It by no means follows from this, incidentally, that Newton should have the right to kill anyone he pleases, whomever happens along, or to steal from the market every day. Further, I recall developing in my article the idea that all... well, let's say, the lawgivers and founders of mankind, starting from the most ancient and going on to the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Muhammads, the Napoleons, and so forth, that all of them to a man were criminals, from the fact alone that in giving a new law, they thereby violated the old one, held sacred by society and passed down from their fathers, and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood (sometimes quite innocent and shed valiantly for the ancient law) could help them.” 

--Raskolnikov, Crime and Punishment 

a roaring lion, a white witch, and a simply enormous wardrobe

Quoted: 

“He'll be coming and going. One day you'll see him and another you won't.” 

“Once the feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow.”  

“If things are real, they're there all the time.” 

“Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.”  

“In our adversity, God shouts to us.” 

“Once a kind or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen...”  

“All names will soon be restored to their proper owners.” 

“If ever they remembered their life in this world it was as one remembers a dream.”  

“If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most, or else just silly.” 

"All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.” 

drinkable light

“Another thing was the light. There was too much of it. The sun when it came up each morning looked twice, if not three times, its usual size.”

“And every morning  (which gave Lucy the strangest feeling of all) the huge white birds, singing their song with human voices in a language no one knew, streamed overhead and vanished astern.”

“She could even see the shafts of sunlight falling through the deep water onto the wooded valley—and, in the extreme distance, everything melting into a dim greenness. But some places—the sunny ones, she thought—were ultramarine blue.” 

 

 

“’I tell you the water’s sweet,’ said the Mouse. “Sweet, fresh. It isn’t salt.” 

“’Sire,’ said Drinian, ‘I see whiteness. All along the horizon from north to south, as far as my eyes can reach…’Lilies, your Majesty!”

“And of course, as it always does in a perfectly flat place without trees, it looked as if the sky came down to meet the grass in front of them. But as they went on they got the strangest impression that here at last the sky did really come down and join the earth…more like glass than anything else.”

 

--------------------------------

{Aslan's country, described in Voyage of the Dawn Treader}

how the adventure ended.

"And then--but, mind you, it may have been all a dream...I looked up and saw the very last thing I expected: a huge lion coming slowly toward me. And one queer thing was that there was no moon last night, but there was moonlight where the lion was. So it came nearer and nearer. I was terribly afraid of it. But it wasn't that kind of fear. I wasn't afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it--if you can understand. Well, it came close up to me and looked me straight into my eyes. And I shut my eyes tight. But that wasn't any good because it told me to follow it.

"And I knew I'd have to do what it told me, so I got up and followed it. And it led me a long way. And there was always moonlight over and round the lion. At last we came to a well. I thought if I could get in there and bathe, it would ease the pain in my leg. But the lion told me I must undress first.

"So I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place. So I started to go down into the well for my bathe.

"But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they were before. So I scratched and tore again."

"Then the lion said 'You will have to let me undress you.' I was afraid of his claws. I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back and let him do it. The first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. Then he caught hold of me and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious.

"And then I saw why. I'd turn into a boy again."

--The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

la joie de vivre.

From the time I could walk and talk, I have been head over heels in love with England. Tea parties, tube maps, Jane Austen marathons, and hoarding Cadbury chocolate constituted much of my childhood.  I’d lay awake at night, aching to see misty moors and pebbly beaches.

After much teasing from my family and questioning looks from friends upon first seeing my union jack plastered room, I’ve often wondered at my seemingly innate longing. Especially after this last summer that I spent in France. La Belle France. I fell in love with France in a way that will affect me for the rest of my life, and its place in my heart is equal with that of England.

Yet, that ache, that joy I felt from loving England my whole life is still there as a part of my identity, even after falling in love with another country.

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes his experiences as a child where he ached in a similar way to my longing for England. His longing occurred when was reading Beatrix Potter. He says,

“It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened; the experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire (that was impossible—how can one posses Autumn?) but to reawake it.”

Lewis describes this feeling as joy. Of it he says, “it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which her eis a technical term that must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure…it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness of grief.”

When reading this, my thoughts automatically turned to England. A lifetime of learning about and dreaming of England has filled me with this Joy, one that cannot be possessed, but provides overwhelming emotion. This is like our Joy in Heaven. The aching we feel is but a taste of what is to come. My longing for England is a reminder of what it is to be alive, of what is beauty.

While in France, one cloudy afternoon, I found myself on a cold, misty beach in Bretagne. I had spent the loveliest day visiting castles and speaking with locals about the American invasion during WWII. It was a day of immense pleasure and satisfaction.  However, when I dipped my toes into the English Channel, when I was physically connected to England for the first time in my life, I was overpowered with joy, with that desire that nothing in this world can satisfy. And from that desire, I could only conclude that I was not made for here.

How beautiful that we can access that heavenly joy through such simple things as thinking on a foreign country.

on poetry.

{i wrote this last week, and forgot to publish it after is saved it as a draft...whoops!}

“In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.” 

--Miracles

i have a mild obsession with poetry, with Keats to be specific. 

Keats' poetry explores the beauty of human existence, of how even as we are awaiting ultimate death, life casts the shadow away from our frail souls. 

One of my favorite poems by him, "Endymion" begins:

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

It’s loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

--John Keats

 Combined with Lewis’ assertion that Christianity is the poem of existence, Keats’ poem made me think of Christianity in a new way.

 Christianity is a thing of beauty, something that lasts forever, stretching beyond all time.

It’s loveliness increases as we come to realize its beauty and its truth.

Christianity will never pass into nothingness, but is a fact, the very essence of being.

But, it will keep a place of refuge for us, a place of rest from all cares.

Christianity allows us to have sweet dreams, to have full hope.

It gives us health of spirit, freshness untainted by cynicism and bitterness.

With Christianity, we can breathe, for Christianity gives us new life.

I’ve often thought of the absence of poetry in discussing the gospel.

It’s as if I wished for trumpets and stained glass windows and candles and frescos.

Christianity doesn’t need any of those things, although I still think they are very beautiful.

Rather Christianity is the poem itself.

hope, He's coming

i'll probably sound like a broken record in this post. That's because i simply can't get over Lewis' discourse on Hope. it's so so very beautiful. So sorry of any repeats from last week's post.

HOPE
Synonyms:

noun.  expectation - expectancy - expectance - trust - promise

verb.  trust - expect - anticipate

 

i love the idea of Lewis that hoping is not passive. It's active, because something must be done to have hope. To have hope means to look forward to better things, to expect that this looking forward is not futile, to trust in God's promises of True Happiness. 

 

He says, "If i find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable conclusion is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only arouse it, to suggest the real thing."(Mere Christianity)

 

That doesn't necessarily devalue our mortal experiences, but gives us something to hold onto when things in our lives don't feel exactly right, when we come close to grasping a certain feeling or longing, but can't quite get there. We know that there is something more.

Lewis describes the tree ways that people deal with this grasping. The first way, the Fool's Way, is when people remained discontented for the duration of their lives. The second, the Way of the Disillusioned 'Sensible Man' is the way of the pessimist who doesn't see the point in hoping at all. Then, there's the Christian Way, the way of knowing that all of our longings will be satisfied, it's just that we are made for another world. 

Ahh! Beautiful.

all creation groans

listen to this. (best quality, ignore the fan video)

"If i find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy, i can only conclude that i was not made for here"

A very serious little girl, growing up my mom always told me that God has commanded us to hope on my more despairing days. That statement never made complete sense to me, that is until i read C.S. Lewis' discourse on Hope in Mere Christianity. 

Lewis explains, "A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not...a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do." Hope is at the core of what it means to be Christian. 

i've struggled with this idea, especially on days when i'm feeling particularly gloomy. God isn't saying that He forbids us from feeling sorrow. After all, He is the ultimate Man of Sorrow, acquainted with grief. 

Rather, our hope in Christ is our hope that someday we will experience True Reality, that our sorrow-burdened souls can be made light.

rumours of true Reality

First of all, listen to this.

When i was in middle school, my best friend moved across the world to New Zealand. Needless to say, this move drastically shaped her life, and, although in a more minor sense, shaped mine too.

i will never forget that lucky time in my life when i saw her again from out the window of a train in the small town of  Greymouth on the south island, waving her hands over her head like and S.O.S. plea. Another thing I will never forget is the car ride from the train depot through meandering and bumpy roads to her house a few hours away. We listened to Brooke Fraser, a native Kiwi and the artist who sings the song above, and i was instantaneously in love.

A few years later, she had a second album come out. My best friend and i (who was back in the states) turned it on her little CD player and sat in silence track after track. The first song on that album is titled "Shadowfeet" (lyrics found here.) and i have listened to it countless times since. It wasn't, however, until i read the Great Divorce this last week, that this song has gained all the more significance to me.

"But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly."

--George MacDonald

Throughout the book, this idea of true Reality rung out to me. While the book is described as "a dream," the thought came to me that what the main character experiences is quite real to him in the moment in which he is dreaming. Similarly, everything that we experience is our own reality.

However, there is a true Reality, one that whether we make it our reality or not, fully exists.

This Reality is God and Heaven and the Gospel. The thought came to me that no matter how we label Reality, it is there. The church, for example, exists and is fully real. However, the church is not separate from existence. The church, or the gospel, is existence. It is life, it is Reality or the way things are. The church is merely the structure that we learn of that Reality and worship Him who knows all Reality from beginning to end.


It's a reality that "whispers of a well-lit way."

"It started out as a feeling, which then turned into a hope." --Regina Spektor (from Prince Caspian)

{most of this is from a previous journal entry, written last week}

So, why C.S. Lewis? 

Besides the whimsy and the fairytale, i love C.S. Lewis for the essence of his works, for the almost-ancient feeling that i get when i read his words. This semester, i will use this little corner of the internet to record my musings, findings, and all other sorts of -ings related to Lewis while i'm enrolled in a C.S. Lewis class.

This last week, i read this in the Screwtape Letters:

"The more often [one] feels without acting, the less [one] will be able to ever act, and, in the long run, the less [one] will be able to feel." 

Apathy-

1. A lack of emotion or interest

2. A lack of sense of purpose

3. The opposite of love

For as long as i can remember, i've been afraid.  I've been afraid of a lot of things, the dark, plane crashes, the phantom of the opera, loneliness, disease, just to name a few. But nothing scares me quite like apathy.

 i believe that we were made as feeling creatures for a reason. While for some of us (i.e. myself) might sometimes feel too much, i believe that our innermost feelings, those that belong to our eternal-selves, can be compasses that direct our lives. Not every feeling should be acted on, of course, but when we feel something good, something holy, God wants us to act on it. We are not meant to be passive creatures.


To feel nothing, to feel apathy would be to not feel alive, to not feel that holy connection to heaven. There have been moments in my life when i have been on the brink of apathy, and i didn't feel very alive. So, to feel more alive each day, i want to act on my feelings, to live more intensely and purposefully.

Because, then i will feel more love which i guess is what matters most in the end.