Posts

Posted on

The Abolition of Man, Part Two

Last weekend, all eyes turned to Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia–“Mr. Jefferson’s university”–where violent right-wingers faced off against violent left-wingers.  A similar clash occurred in Seattle that same day, an event completely overshadowed by the Charlottesville ugliness, and Portland saw more of the same the weekend before.  Shaking my head over the videos of people yelling and swinging at each other, I turn from the computer screen and pick up my copy of The Abolition of Man to read this, the first sentence in the second chapter: “The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.”

Oh.

The Green Book, as you’ll recall (see The Abolition of Man, Part One) was a high school text sent to Lewis for his comment or recommendation.  It got a lot more comment from him than it was looking for.  The purpose of the authors was to teach young people to “see through” sentimentality and dogma and disregard traditional virtues as meaningless.  The authors call for the “subjectivizing” of values—that is, proving that any sentiments judged to be commendable, or worthwhile, for their own sake are “merely” (fatal word!) expressions of the speaker’s own biases.  But there would be no point in debunking suspect values unless you have other values in mind that are not so suspect, right?  Lewis sketches the “correct” approvals and disapprovals as indicated in The Green Book.  Approved: peace, democracy and tolerance.  Disapproved, or at least outgrown: courage, patriotism, and courtesy.

(We have our own lists of approved and disapproved.  One such system is derisively called “Political Correctness.”)

But the authors are fatally blind to the fact that without the latter (i.e., courage, patriotism, and courtesy), the former is impossible.

“It will be seen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time, are the ultimate values; [but] those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort and security are mocked.  [It’s as if] Man lives by bread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker’s van; peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers.”

What they don’t see is that under all lists of Approved and Disapproved is a deeper system, and that’s what Lewis addresses in Part Two of The Abolition of Man: “The Way.”

The Way goes by many names: Hindus refer to it as the Rta, to which even the gods are subject.  In Western tradition it’s known as Natural Law.  For the purpose of his argument, Lewis calls it the Tao: “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”

We all believe this, don’t we?  For all our talk of relativism and finding our own truth, everyone has some sense of absolute right and wrong.  Political discourse these days is nothing if not moral: to one side, the other side is not merely mistaken but nefarious or downright evil.  I have to say, I see this kind of militant morality more on the left than on the right, and could it be because the left (much more than the right) has explicitly rejected Natural Law for a new improved system?

For the rest of “The Way,” Lewis shows how modern attempts to base our preference for peace, democracy, and tolerance on some solid footing other than Natural Law are doomed to fail.  Appeals to utility (the greatest good for the greatest number), community, and common instinct all come up short, as he shows after close examination of each one.   Nothing can perform the service of the Tao except the Tao itself.  When we ditch it, what’s the last resort, our ultimate appeal?

Power.  That’s what the street fights in our cities are all about–who has it, who wants it, who ends up with it.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

In That Hideous Strength, two sets of characters stand in direct opposition to each other.  The little band at St. Anne’s have pledged their loyalty to the Director, who defers to his “Masters.”  The Masters, in their turn, are subject to the highest power, understood as the Lord Himself, originator of Natural Law.

Jane’s conversation with Ransom in chapter 7 underscores this.  “I don’t think I look on marriage quite as you do,” she says, in her best “sensible” mode.  To which he replies, “Child, it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it.”  Natural Law is not merciless or unyielding: when Jane’s life is threatened, she is admitted to the circle without her husband’s knowledge or consent.  That is not in defiance of the Law, but rather obedience to another part of the Law—to save her very life.  “Only those who are practicing the Tao can understand it” (AoM, “The Way”), including what parts supersede others.

At Belbury there’s a group of “progressives” dedicated to replacing Natural Law with a set of “new, improved” values.*  Mark is one of them, following the lead of Curry and Busby at the University; others are Steele, Crosser, and all their underlings and bureaucrats.  Their goal is “reconditioning” society to think the way they do.  But they don’t realize that conditioning works on them, too.  Recall Miss Hardcastle in Chapter 5.1 on the subject of newspaper propaganda: “Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do?  He can’t.  He’s been conditioned.”

The progressives think that they’ve replaced outdated values with new ones, but they’ve actually undermined all value.  That’s why, when Filostrato waxes eloquent about sexless reproduction and metal trees (Chapter 8.3), no one at the table can come up with an argument against him.  They’ve scrapped the Tao.  By selecting only the parts of it they like, they’ve weakened all of it and left themselves no firm principles to stand on.

But there’s a third group at Belbury, the “Inner Ring” whose purpose is not reforming humanity but remaking it. ** They are, in ascending order of venality, Filostrato, Straik, Wither, and Frost.  (Feverstone belongs to a group of one, and Hardcastle is a special case.)  To understand them, we should look at Lewis’s conclusion at the end of “The Way”:

[Some will say,] Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of ‘nature’ which has hitherto been called the conscience of man? . . . You say we shall have no values at all if we step outside the Tao.  Very well: we shall probably find that we can get on quite comfortably without them . . . Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that . . . Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

If you say this, says Lewis, you are at least not guilty of self-contradiction, like those who suppose they can replace Natural Law with a better law.  But you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to something far worse, as we’ll see in the third quarter of That Hideous Strength.

____________________________________________________________

* This is exactly the progressive agenda in the US today: the old values led to slavery, discrimination, and oppression.  Therefore, we must rebuild on new values stressing tolerance for everyone, except everyone who disagrees with us.

**Today we call it  transhumanism.  Lewis did not foresee the rise of Silicon Valley and eager young tech moguls like Sergy Brin and Elon Musk.  Their faith is in technology, not the dark forces of magic, but will they end up in the same place?

 

Posted on

That Hideous Strength: Development

If you’re just joining us, you might want to get oriented with the Introduction and Setup.

Almost all the main characters have been introduced and the potential conflicts are in place.  Now development: that phase of a novel that builds tension and raises the stakes.  All the major plot elements will be rounded up and herded in one direction, although the reader should feel that options are still open.  In that sense, a novel is like a conspiracy theory: the unfolding plot looks like the best conclusion from the facts, but the facts have been carefully selected.  Let’s look at how Lewis chooses incident to build tension and invest the reader in the story.  (I thought this post might be shorter than the last one, but oh well . . . .)

CHAPTER FIVE: ELASTICITY

5.1 The Institute’s S.O.P. is to keep underlings off-balance: this is what Wither calls flexibility and Miss Hardcastle calls elasticity.  Her advice to Mark is to get with the program, and understanding will come in time.  This is a brutalization of Jesus’ words in John 7: 17: “If any man seeks to do God’s will he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.”  That is, one must willingly join in order to know.  Jesus has authority to say that, but Miss Hardcastle’s version should be a clue to Mark that the aims of the N.I.C.E. are more expansive than mere social reform.  He doesn’t pick up on it, possibly because, as she cynically observes, “it’s the educated reader who can be gulled . . . He’s been conditioned.”  What do you think? And what does that say about what’s commonly understood as “education”?

The paragraph beginning with, “The confidential tone,” solidifies, perhaps unnecessarily, what we already know about Mark’s main motivation.  In fact, Lewis makes his motivation more explicit than any other character’s.  That’s because it was close to his heart.

In an address called “The Inner Ring” (1944) Lewis expanded on the theme: “I don’t believe that the economic motive and the erotic motive account for everything that goes on in what we moralists call the World.  Even if you add Ambition I think the picture is still incomplete. . .”  He identified this missing factor as “the lust for the esoteric, the longing to be inside . . . [T]his desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action.”  He experienced it, and so have I.  It goes way back: when Eve’s hand finally reached out for the fruit, it was a lust for forbidden knowledge that drove her.  Mark is not precisely aware that the knowledge is forbidden, only that it’s denied to him.  In order to acquire it, he’ll have to stretch his principles, such as they are—and that’s where the real “elasticity” comes in.

5.2 Does he seem like a rat in a maze?  Or a mouse between a cat’s paws?  I almost feel sorry for him, especially when reading Curry’s letter.  Compare Curry’s praise of David Laird with the doubts expressed in 4.7—is Curry prevaricating or has he convinced himself that this mediocre scholar is really the best man for the position?  “He got a third” (Mark’s letter) refers to the lowest-degree university diploma. ~ Feverstone’s “nasty,poor, brutish, and short” is a slightly misquoted description of primitive man from Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan (1651).  Mark is learning he can’t really trust anyone–Feverstone’s easy manner can turn on a dime and Wither is impossible to pin down.

The Pendragon, Arthur’s family crest

5.3 Unlike Mark, Jane is defined more by what she doesn’t want than by what she wants (making her a weaker, i.e. less memorable character, in the opinion of some critics).  What she doesn’t want is to be messed with; she’s defensive about her self-image as an independent modern woman.  (Lewis described himself this way in Surprised by Joy.)  Though Jane is sincerely drawn to the Dennistons, they make her angry . . . and what else? ~ The Sura they mention is probably based on an actual Indian mystic, Sadhu Sundar Singh, who converted to Christianity in 1904 and lived as an itinerant evangelist until his disappearance in Tibet. ~ You may know Pendragon as King Arthur’s family name, but its earliest origin is in Wales, where it means Chief or Head.  According to legend, Merlin bestowed it as a surname on Arthur’s father.

In the paragraph beginning, “You must see it from Mrs. Studdock’s point of view,” notice how Arthur Denniston echoes Miss Hardcastle’s advice in 5.1: Jane must first commit to the organization before she can understand what it’s all about.  (Remember John 7:17).  Matters of cosmic significance can only be understood from the inside.  Do you believe this is true?

CHAPTER SIX: FOG

6.1 In fiction, weather is often a metaphor.  Fog in this chapter is a metaphor for . . . what? ~ Feeling trapped, Mark finds his only recourse is to “do what he’s told” and maybe something will come of it.  Notice how he tries to feel better about it by blaming Jane.  Have you ever done that with your spouse?

6-2 Bracton College is totally out-maneuvered by the N.I.C.E.  The last vestige of grace and tradition that the University is supposed to protect is destroyed, and the question returns: why do they want the wood, even that last little strip?  A growing crisis in Edgetow is clamoring for a response.  It’s not clear that Mark wrote the first newspaper article suggesting something must be done (and isn’t that always the way government is invited to take more control?), but we’re meant to assume that he is. ~ How does Hingest’s funeral contribute to the mood of this chapter?

6-3 The scene in the library represents Mark’s full conversion to the dark side.  His pleasure at being received is so intense it dulls any twinge of conscience about what he’s asked to do.  This is how even decent men are corrupted–step by step. We learn later that Rev. Straik was a much better man than Mark until led astray by bad theology, demonstrated here by his understanding of the resurrection. (Lewis hinted earlier that he was driven to fanaticism by the death of his young daughter.) ~ Ad metam properate, “Hurry on to the finish.” ~ Professor Frost is one of the inner Inner Circle, and alert readers will recognize him from the description as someone we’ve met before.  In the very first chapter–remember?

6-4 Mark’s two editorials are very long (hard to imagine any newspaper that would publish them today). They can be skimmed, but it’s worth noting what audience he’s aiming at in in each and the different means he uses to reach them.  He’s actually a talented writer, as the management perceives.  In some circles, talent is everything, and its main purpose is to advance one’s own ambitions.  Also, recall what Miss Hardcastle said about the educated being most vulnerable to “conditioning.”  Mark has already learned that lesson.

6-5 Jane has another dream and soon after meets a nightmare in real life.  No more question of holding herself aloof; one way or another, someone is going to mess with her, and she’d rather it be people she knows and likes.  Notice the weather again . . .

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE PENDRAGON

7-1 The Fisher-King is a mysterious figure in Arthurian legend, associated with gentle, naïve Sir Percival during the Grail quest.  Percival first meets the Fisher-King as an old fisherman who directs him to the right path.  Later, the knight encounters him as a king with an incurable wound attended by keepers of the Grail itself.  Our “Mr. Fisher-King” is none other than Dr. Ransom, who traveled to Mars and Venus and returned from the latter with an incurable wound in his heel.  Meeting him marks Jane’s conversion: “Her world was unmade” (note the repetition).  Ransom is obviously meant to represent Christ (though, unlike Aslan, he is not Christ in another form).  How many resemblances do you see?

7-2 His conversation with Jane seems to touch on several issues but it’s really only one: love.  That’s what all the talk about equality is about, though expressed more succinctly in Lewis’s essay “Membership” (from The Weight of Glory): “Equality is a quantitative term and therefore love knows nothing of it.”  Equality is about giving everyone a “fair share”; love has no concern with fairness, or even sharing.  Otherwise any couple will fall into the tired routine of blaming each other for their problems, as Mark earlier blamed Jane and now she wants to blame him. ~  I was once shaken to the core by Ransom’s observation that “Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions [i.e., equals].  Those who enjoy or suffer each other are not [emphasis mine].”  Marriage has no place for keeping tabs or trading favors; each is totally in debt to the other.  And (as the mice demonstrate) it’s not meant to be a lifelong burden, but more like a dance. ~ The sensual trance that steals over Jane as he’s talking (“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply) is not explained but we’ll get some idea later of what it means.  I think. ~ Brobdingnag, mentioned at the end of the section, is the land of giants visited by Gulliver.

7-3 Why does Lewis have to examine all of Jane’s feelings in such detail?  Well, he probably doesn’t.  He means to show her divided state of mind, and got carried away.  But “the state of joy” that is Jane’s overarching emotion is central to Lewis’s religious thought (see Surprised by Joy), and soon enough that state will change.

7-4 Lewis may lay it on a little heavy in this section (such things as Rubens might have seen in delirium? Not going there!), but thankfully he curtails the torture scene, like most contemporary writers wouldn’t do.  The segment accomplishes at least three purposes: ramps up the tension, shows the real violence and destruction of the Institute’s “engineered” riot, and provides excellent justification for Jane to flee to St. Anne’s.

CHAPTER EIGHT: MOONLIGHT AT BELBURY

8-1 We’re getting close to the heart of the matter at Belbury—the real Inner Ring.  Readers may guess who “the Head” is, but Lewis is not going to spring it just yet.  The conversation between Wither and Hardcastle hints that Mark was invited to the Institute not for his writing ability but for his wife—certainly the last thing he would have expected, and we should be rather surprised, too.

8-2 Jane’s introduction to the full circle at St. Anne’s.  It’s an “equal” society, in the way discussed in 7-2, but note how Jane’s bland defense of equality to the Director doesn’t extend to her attitude toward Ivy Maggs.  As for Mr. Bultitude—he may seem like comic relief, but he’ll serve a purpose later on. (Mr. Bultitude takes his name from a central character in the classic 1880s school story, Vice Versa).  MacPhee is the “resident skeptic,” a hard-headed agnostic of the sort Lewis seems to have had great affection for (in Surprised by Joy, he describes his beloved tutor W. T. Fitzpatrick in similar terms).  William Hingest, who was bumped off in Chapter 4, is cut from the same cloth.  You can grasp the drift of MacPhee’s conversation without understanding all his references—I certainly don’t.  Most of this section can be skipped as not essential to the plot, though interesting in its ideas.

8/3 Mark’s dinner conversation with Filostrato goes on too long as well, but it’s more directly related to Lewis’s theme.  The “Italian eunuch” finds organic life distasteful: his ideal is the clean, white moon.  Note that he is a physicist rather than a biologist, which doesn’t seem to jibe with his experimental tinkering on animals and plants.  Physics is the science of “elegant” theories and big pictures, such as the non-organic dream that Filostrato is sketching here.  It’s not an appealing dream, but nobody at the table can find a reason to refute him.

Well, we can: he is calling good evil, and evil good (Is. 5:20; cf. Gen. 1:31) ~ The moon, bringer of madness, bears down hard on Belbury.  Filostrato’s discussion of life there sounds like fanatical raving, but we’ll hear more of it.  In fact, we’re hearing of it now, with “CRSPR” gene editing to remove inherited diseases.  A benevolent motivation can easily become a ravenous desire to redesign humanity.  And it will.

Finally, Mark comes close to the secret: compare his approach to the Head with Jane’s introduction to the Head of St. Anne’s in the last chapter.  Remember that they are following parallel courses in radically different settings; though neither realizes it yet, they will be confronted with equally crucial decisions very soon.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Lewis described That Hideous Strength as a novelistic re-working of ideas he set out in the three essays that make up The Abolition of Man.  I’ve also begun a read-along to The Abolition of Man, which dovetails nicely with THS.  Even if you don’t have time to read the book (which is very short, but very dense), it’s interesting to see how the novel is reflected in the meditation, and vice versa.

Posted on

The Abolition of Man: Reading Along, Part One

In February of 1943 C. S. Lewis delivered three evening lectures at King’s College in Newcastle.  Later that year the lectures were published in book form under the title of the third: The Abolition of Man.  Over time Lewis came to regard this slender volume as his most significant work.  It’s very short, only 91 pages plus an appendix.  You could read it in an evening–but don’t.  It’s incredibly packed: every sentence could be pondered over or discussed in an evening’s literary circle.

Lewis described the third volume of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, as “a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ that I tried to make in my Abolition of Man.”  The point was that humanity is in danger of becoming inhuman.

The first essay of AoM, “Men without Chests,” raised the alarm about certain educational trends.  He begins with Exhibit A: a literature textbook sent to him by an educational publisher who was probably hoping for an endorsement.  Instead of a favorable blurb, the volume got to go down in history (though anonymously) as the notorious Green Book by “Gaius and Titius,”* educated barbarians who were contributing to the gutting of national character.  G & T had bought into logical positivism, which generally holds that a statement has meaning only if it can empirically proved or objectively demonstrated.  What we today call “values” (and an earlier age called “enduring principles”) are meaningless.

As an example, Gaius and Titius reference Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s story about the waterfall.  There were two visitors besides Coleridge at a certain well-known tourist attraction, one of whom said the waterfall was sublime and the other said it was pretty.  The poet mentally endorsed Tourist A—“sublime” was the proper value given to such a sight, while “pretty” was wholly inadequate.  But G & T informed the young readers that value statements have no objective reality: isn’t one man’s sublime another man’s pretty?  Thus, statements about feelings, metaphysics, or religion are meaningless in the public square, and the sooner English schoolboys and girls learn the difference between fact and value (and disregard the latter) the better off we’ll all be.

Lewis  wasn’t buying it.  As a classical scholar he could marshal the finest minds in Western tradition—and even Eastern tradition—to support his contention that hearts must be educated as well as heads, that emotion has as great a stake in human progress as reason.  While allowing for individual preferences, there are right and wrong ways to feel.  There are qualities that should be encouraged and qualities that should be condemned in no uncertain terms.  If a man’s emotions are not trained along with his intellect, there will be no arbiter between his brain and his gut (the seat of animal appetite).  That’s what the expression “Men without Chests” relates to, along with the much-quoted observation that we’re asking young people to demonstrate those very qualities we’ve educated out of them.  “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

In That Hideous Strength (see my post on The Setup) Mark Studdock, his wife Jane, and his colleagues at Bracton College are all victims of this sort of “progressive” education.  Jane, immersed in quality literature (though she insists on putting her modern interpretations on it) is a little more sensitive to beauty and virtue.  Mark the sociology major is unwittingly swimming with the sharks, for where there’s no objective scale of value—no authoritative word on whether loyalty is preferable to treachery or chastity to unfaithfulness—what’s left is survival of the fittest.  Or the coolest, or the trendiest.  You may have experienced a scale of value of this sort in high school (especially if you were considered the opposite of cool).  If teenagers grow out of this phase it’s relatively harmless in the long run.  But Mark clearly hasn’t.  Because his education has given him no higher star to steer by, his one guiding light is to come out on top of whatever heap he’s in.  He has set aside any real pleasure and enjoyment in things for their own sake; they only get in the way of striving and climbing.  During his visit to Cure Hardy with Crosser he feels the unassuming charm of the place.  It tugs at his better nature, but he pushes aside charm for the sake of “progress.”  Education has almost nibbled his chest away.  We see he still has a bit left, but will it be enough?

After Chapter 4 the action will shift away from the College and its resident Huns, Curry and Busby, but it’s worth taking a last look at these men lacking in the chest department (Chapter Two, “Dinner with the Sub-Warden,” section 1).   They’ve become so involved with the process of education that they’ve lost sight of the content, except as it relates to creating soulless young academics like themselves.  Feverstone–the epitome of cool, by the way–is on to them: “I see.  In order to keep the place going as a learned society, all the best brains in it have to give up doing anything about learning.”  “Exactly!” says Curry, before realizing he’s been had.  Stamping out approved young minds has become the College’s business, and the educated people of Edgetow, as we’ll soon see, are by far the most gullible.

* * * * * * * * * * *

But it appears as though even intellectuals–or many of them–can’t live without honor and virtue for long.  The devaluation of value that lumbered to its feet after the first World War, marched through academia throughout the 20th century and spread its poison through public education, has perhaps met its match in passionate political activism.  The anti-war, anti-discrimination protesters of the 1960s and 70s demanded the right to feel. There was a right and wrong, only . . . they get to decide what it is.  And they get to decide without reference to long-standing tradition, religion, or philosophy.  How does that work out?  Lewis will ponder the question in the next essay, “The Way.”

______________________________________________________________

*Hereby unmasked (via Wikipedia) as The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing, published in 1939 by Alexander (“Alec”) King and Martin Ketley.  Doesn’t that sound exactly like the title of a paper (almost any paper) published by the Modern Language Association today?

Posted on

That Hideous Strength Read-along: The Setup

In Chapters 1-4, we situate ourselves in a time and place: modern Britain sometime in the 1950s, with the memory of World War II’s devastation fresh and vivid.

The action takes place at three fictional locations: Edgetow, a university town similar to Cambridge, but smaller; St. Anne’s-on-the-Hill, a nearby village; and Belbury, a village in the opposite direction, currently undergoing a process of modernization.  The plot is immediately tangled in University politics, so it helps to know that the University of Edgetow is composed of four separate colleges, each with its own administration and disciplines .  Bracton College is the one that will concern us, because of the characters associated with it.  In these first chapters Lewis, like any good novelist, is introducing his major characters and moving the conflict elements into place—like setting up a chessboard and marking out a strategy.  The problem for contemporary readers is that he takes an awfully long time to do it and assumes a literary and history background that most Americans don’t have.  So here, with the help of notes obtained from the Lewisiana website, are a few pointers.

CHAPTER ONE: SALE OF COLLEGE PROPERTY

1.1 Jane Tudor Studdock, a thoroughly modern post-war young woman, is at the beginning of a marriage that has already proved disappointing.  The words she recalls in the first paragraph are from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the traditional ringing tones of which contrast sharply with Jane’s “improved” attitudes.  She’s not a believer, but Anglicanism was the state religion (still is) with some authority over civil institutions like marriage.  The clash between tradition and fashion sets Lewis’s theme, and Jane’s disturbing dream puts the plot in motion.  She and her husband Mark will be the contrasting poles between which the action will shift and build.

The title page of Bracton’s book, which fellows of his namesake college would have done well to heed

1.2 Mark Studdock is intent on advancing his academic career.  He’s a sociologist, a relatively new field of study at the time, and Lewis doesn’t seem to think much of it.  Mark’s conversation with Curry shows how the academic world (then and now) is obsessed with position: the whole of point of an academic career is levering oneself into a cushy sinecure where one can collect a handsome salary without doing a lot of work (nothing has changes).  Henry de Bracton (ca. 1250), for whom Mark’s college is named, was the author of a book on common law, in which he argued that secular authority is subject to the law.  This also plays into Lewis’s theme.  If you haven’t read Out of the Silent Planet, it’s important to know that Dick Devine (Lord Feverstone), whom Curry mentions as the one who got Mark his position, is the same Devine who accompanied Drs. Westin and Ransom on their trip to Mars.

1.3 This is a lovely section that you can feel free to skip, because there’s a lot of history and atmosphere that you may not be susceptible to at this point.  Suffice it to say that Bragton Wood, a small enclosure within the college, is redolent with mystery as well as history, because it’s the location of “Merlin’s well.”  Merlin is not just a character in the Arthur legends, but rather the character around whom the legends collected.  The earliest references to him (ca. 800 AD) suggest that he had no father, giving rise to the rumor that he was the devil’s son.  More of this later.  What Lewis suggests in this chapter is that the College, feverishly modernizing, is sitting on a vast reserve of ancient power and knowledge that will not be swept aside.*

1.4 Lewis draws this chapter out so long it’s like you’re sitting in on an actual college meeting!  But it’s worth reading for the clever way in which the “progressive” element maneuvers the fellows into voting to sell Bragdon Wood–a sale they would never have approved on a straightforward vote.  This section also introduces the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E., the collective villain of the piece. (Lewis obviously named the Institute with the acronym in mind, but it’s worth a mention that the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, a division of its National Health Service, also takes the acronym NICE.)  Why does the N.I.C.E. want Bragdon Wood?  That’s the question . . .

1.5 Introducing Dr. and Mrs. Cecil Dimble, sympathetic characters who already have a connection with Jane.  They happen to live on Bracton College property, though Dimble teaches at another college.  The couple have recently learned that their lease is not being renewed, no telling why.  Notice how the tension slowly builds as change comes quickly to this sleepy little town, and how the Arthur legend comes up again in the conversation over tea.

*The heedless modernization Lewis saw in the fifties–or actually after the first World War–came into its own during the sixties.  He pictures the change being wrought by an axis of government and academic bureaucracy; he might not have foreseen the wave of radicalism that hit college campuses in the mid-sixties, fueled (in America) by the Civil Rights movement and the VietNam war.  But it was brilliant of him to perceive the corruption of the University as the eventual collapse of civilization.

CHAPTER TWO: DINNER WITH THE SUB-WARDEN

2.1  Non-olet is Latin for “it doesn’t stink,” ascribed to Emperor Vespasian’s reference to tax proceeds from public toilets.  The Sub-warden, remember, is Curry; the college bursar (treasurer) is Busby: these are two Bracton hot-shots who will be edged out of prominence as Lord Feverstone circles like a shark around Mark.  Notice his mention of Dr. Westin, the antagonist of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.  The “respectable Cambridge don” is Dr. Ransom, hero of those books. Feverstone’s talk of “taking charge of our destiny” is exactly what some contemporary scientists–as well as futuristic entrepreneurs like Elon Musk–mean by taking control of evolution.  The catchword today is “transhumanism.”  The theme is coming clearer now, and Mark will not be able to claim that he wasn’t warned.

2.2 and 2.3  Jane has another dream; her fear grows even as she despises herself for it.  Mark is totally out of his element with her.  We will see them together only one other time (briefly) during the course of the novel, and it’s interesting analyze their relationship here: what are the danger signs you see?  Have you noticed anything similar in couples you know?  Remember that Jane and Mark are the two poles of the narrative: the action will shift back and forth between them, with ever-growing light and ever-increasing darkness.

2.4   Mark motors to Belbury, N.I.C.E. headquarters, with Feverstone: “a big man driving a big car to somewhere where they would find big stuff going on.  And he, Mark, was to be in it all.”  Already we’ve seen Mark’s hunger to be in the inner circle, a lust that goes back to high school for almost everybody—I can certainly sympathize.  Incidentally, Lewis’s description of the sights may go on too long here, but I love his hinting at the ineffable potential of passing scenery: it’s like peeking into lighted windows as you walk by them.  Belbury might have been based on Blewbury, a village south of Oxford that became the site of the first nuclear reactor in Europe.

The picturesque side of Blewbury: doomed by forward-thinking bureaucrats?

CHAPTER THREE: BELBURY AND ST. ANNE’S-ON-THE-HILL

3.1 and 3.2  Out of the frying pan, into the fire, though Mark recognizes only that he must find his way to the real power source here, just as he did at Bracton College.  He is first introduced to John Wither, Deputy Director of N.I.C.E. who can’t seem to direct a cogent thought.  William Hingest, whom Mark knew at Bracton, strikes the first sour note.  Crosser and Steele are the kind of mediocre talents that bureaucracy thrives on, and Professor Filostrato may be one of the inner circle.

3.3  Meanwhile, at St. Anne’s, Jane meets Camilla Denniston (whose husband was mentioned in 1.2 as Mark’s rival for his fellowship), and Grace Ironwood, to whom she forms an immediate dislike.  Why?  What is it in Jane’s character that reacts negatively to Miss Ironwood’s?

3.4  Mark’s introduction to “Fairy” Hardcastle, one of Lewis’s more vivid characters.  She’s chief of the Institute’s police, and why should a government institution need its own law enforcement?  That should raise questions right away, as it does for Dr. Hingest, but Mark falls in with the line that the work is too vital, though controversial, to lack protection.  (By the way, did you know the the U. S. Department of Education has its own swat team?  Would it be amiss to wonder why . . . ?)

3.5  The real trouble begins.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE LIQUIDATION OF ANACHRONISM

The title is a mouthful, referring to modernism’s goal of purging the past, along with its obscure symbolism and burdensome rules.  This is a major theme of The Abolition of Man (see my first post on that a week from today).

4.1 and 4.2  The N.I.C.E. is demonstrating the swagger of Nazi hordes, an all-too-recent memory.  Mrs. Dingle’s description of their mowing down the woods compares to the murder of the trees from Narnia’s Last Battle.  I’m intrigued by her question, “do human beings really like being happy?”  A lot of us certainly enjoy being angry, or feeling put upon (speaking for myself).

4.3  Mark shares a morning stroll with the Reverend John Straik, whose presence at the Institute is a mystery.  Isn’t modern science supposed to root out fire-and-brimstone religious fanatics such as this?  I can’t think of a contemporary parallel to Straik (can you?), but he’s not the only one to mold the image of Christ to his own inclination.  Softer forms of Christianity have played in to hands of power often enough, as the National Church did in Hitler’s time.  Notice Mark’s acute embarrassment “at the name of Jesus”—love it!  The name of Jesus was, is, and will always be offensive: a “stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.”

4.4  Foul play; your suspicions should be raised.  I love the last paragraph!

4.5  All Jane wants is “to be left alone.”  This was Lewis’s own desire, as described in Surprised by Joy.  Is this reasonable?  Is it possible?

4.6  The proposed “liquidation” of Cure Hardy reflects what is going to happen to Bracton Wood.  It goes on a little too long; you can get the sense by skimming.  Some redeeming aspects of Mark’s character emerge here, and a good thing too; major characters need to be somewhat sympathetic.  What are these redeeming features?  Notice how his field (sociology) concentrates on group identity rather than individual, exactly as political correctness does today.

4.7  This scene is just devastating: the colleges progressives have sown the wind and now reap the whirlwind of mindless destruction: the “liquidation of anachronism,” indeed.  Notice how Mark is being maneuvered from afar—the inner circle he craves membership in is advancing him like a chess piece.

Christ College dining hall–might that be the famous East Window, in which Henrietta Maria had cut her name with a diamond?
Posted on

That Hideous Strength: An Introduction

“C. S. Lewis?  Love him.  Absolutely L-O-V-E him.  I grew up with one foot in Narnia, you know, and Mere Christianity opened my eyes to the glory of faith.  Till We Have Faces should be on everyone’s reading list.  I’m not as fond of his science fiction, though I liked the first two novels of the Space Trilogy well enough.  But That Hideous Strength?  After the first few pages I had to put it down.  I mean, what the heck . . . .”

In the summer of 1945, George Orwell wrote a review for the Manchester Evening News, beginning, “On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.”  That said, he was ready to give a grudging thumbs-up to C. S. Lewis’s latest work of fiction, which completed the trilogy begun with Out of the Silent Planet and continued in Perelandra.  Orwell summarized the story as “the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world.  A company of mad scientists—or perhaps they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil—are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.”  He describes it as essentially “a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.”

That Hideous Strength could be described as the crime story: the ultimate crime against humanity.  In The Abolition of Man, published two years before THS, Lewis remarked on the rise of scientism (science as ultimate truth) expressed in the idea of “man’s conquest over nature”: “From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”  Every scientific advance comes at a cost, ironically in the same area of its benefit: computer technology increases our knowledge while it curtails our comprehension; embryonic stem cell research promises to enhance life while at the same time commodifying it.  As knowledge grows more specialized and esoteric, fewer and fewer individuals have access to it, and those will be the few who can control the many.

Orwell had thought long and hard about this; at the time of this review, he was probably already working on his masterpiece, which would be published three years later.  1984 addressed the same theme from a materialist point of view—no miracles.  In his view, and we would all probably agree, man has enough cussedness in him to bring about a totalitarian world all by himself, without demonic help.

But Lewis, in the first two volumes of the Space Trilogy, had already grounded the good vs. evil conflict in supernatural terms.  The basic problem goes way back: back to the garden.  The power-grabbing government agency in That Hideous Strength, which takes over a small university town and plots to seize control over human evolution, is an echo of Babel (subject of the late-medieval poem from which the novel takes its title).  Time and time again, human authorities try to seize ultimate power, which always resorts to Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism: “a boot smashing a human face, over and over and over.”  But Orwell could offer no reason why this is wrong.  Why shouldn’t the strong subdue the weak?  It seemed to be the way nature worked.

Lewis could say why this is wrong: It’s because humanity is made in God’s image, a little lower than the angels, the object of a massive, age-old, ultimately successful rescue operation.  A miraculous rescue.  That’s why THS ends positively, while 1984 is a total downer.

Published immediately after a totalitarian attempt that wrecked Europe (World War II), squarely in the center of another one that threatened both Europe and Asia (Communism), both novels seemed painfully relevant at the time.  But they still are.  The steely, gleaming, soulless utopia imagined in 1950s sci-fi hasn’t quite developed as expected, but sales of 1984 hit bestseller status on Amazon for months after Donald Trump’s election.  Alarmists on the left saw the rise of Big Brother.  That was silly, but there’s more than one way to steal human freedom.  Orwell’s dystopia is ruled by government intimidation; Lewis’s near-dystopia is ruled by scientism.  Our own world is apparently up for grabs.  The federal government, by seizing more power for itself, threatens to kill by kindness, i.e., “taking care” of us until we’re drained of initiative.  All of these systems diminish humanity by aggrandizing themselves.

_______________________________________________

The action of That Hideous Strength takes place after the first two volumes of Lewis’s space trilogy, but appears to have absolutely no relation to them (at first).  That’s why you can read it independently, with only a passing acquaintance with what happened earlier.  So here’s a passing acquaintance:

In Out of the Silent Planet, Dr. Elwin Ransom, professor of linguistics, is kidnapped and carried aboard a spacecraft to Mars.  His kidnappers are Dr. Westin, a brilliant physicist, and Richard Devine, scion of nobility and a former classmate of Ransom’s.  Westin’s interest in Mars is humanistic—he’s looking to conquer the planet for the perpetuation of the human race.  Devine is only interested in profit.  They intend Ransom as a human sacrifice to appease the alien life forms, but they’ve misunderstood what the natives want.  On Mars (whose inhabitants know it as Malacandra), Ransom escapes his captors and becomes acquainted with the three societies of intelligent beings.  He also learns Old Solar, the interplanetary language, and recognizes that Malacandrians worship the same deity he knows on earth, only under another name.  The planet is ruled by an eldil (angel), whom he meets at the climax of the novel.  Westin’s plans for conquest fail, and the three men are allowed to make a perilous return to earth.

Malacandra is a much older civilization than Earth, but Perelandra (Venus) is brand new.  In the second volume of the trilogy, Ransom is summoned by the eldila to this new world, where he meets “the green lady,” a being like himself (except for the color), only with an otherworldly beauty and dignity.  This, he recognizes, is what Eve was like before the Fall.  Trouble arrives in the form of Dr. Westin, whose goals have shifted from his simpler chauvinistic designs toward Malacandra.  Ransom can’t quite figure out what Westin is after until a potential Fall narrative develops with Westin playing the role of the snake and Ransom as . . . what?  By the time he realizes that Westin has been possessed by a malevolent power, it’s almost too late to stop him.  But Perelandra is saved by the narrowest of margins and heroic action by an ordinary man who becomes a hero.  Ransom returns to earth triumphantly, but with a wound on his heel (see Gen. 3:15).  (Perelandra had a profound effect on me the second time I read it; I wrote about that experience here.)

Ransom’s space adventures take place sometime during World War II; That Hideous Strength opens a few years after the war (during which corrupt men have moved to consolidate their power), and never ventures beyond our own atmosphere.   No spaceships hidden in barns, no alien creatures or eldila; just a rather commonplace academic couple and a quick, less-than-invigorating plunge into campus politics.  But in the first chapter, the lady has a very disturbing dream . . .

If you’d like to read along, I’ll cover four chapters per week with a commentary on Fridays.  Four chapters may not seem like much, but they’re long—about 80 pages each—broken up into sections.  My commentary will include notes about historical references, novelistic elements, and sections you might want to skip.  Though I’ve been taken to task for recommending skipping, Lewis himself wrote, in Mere Christianity, that it was okay to pass over sections or chapters that had no relevance for you.

The problem with THS for American readers is that he freely indulges his “expository demon” and goes off on long tangents about English history, mythology, and legend that we know nothing about.  It would be like me breaking off my narrative about early Hollywood in I Don’t Know How the Story Ends to get all misty-eyed over ballad-singing in medieval castles—not entirely unrelated, as movies and ballads are both forms of storytelling, but (speaking of stories) you’d really like to get along with the one you were reading.  Those who have never been able to get through Moby Dick will know what I mean.  But underneath the verbiage is Lewis’ most suspenseful, gripping, even cinematic narrative.

If you have any thoughts about the reading, please comment.  I love talking about books.  Also, what strikes me may not affect you the same way.  FadedPage.com has a .pdf version of That Hideous Strength you can download to your tablet for free.  It’s August: traditionally a long hot month, so find yourself a shady tree, get a glass of lemonade or ice tea, and let’s do some reading.

We get started with  That Hideous Strength: The Setup.

Posted on

Creation, Day Seven: The Temple

Then the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.  And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the Sabbath day from all the work he had done.  So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.  Genesis 2:1-3

Jack’s seventh-day dream

It’s late Saturday afternoon in Pleasant Valley subdivision and Jack Johnson is relaxing, remote in hand, in his new Laz-E-Boy recliner with the tweed upholstery that complements the carpet.  His wife is cooking up a stir-fry in the kitchen, and though he would prefer steaks or hamburgers, he didn’t volunteer to man the grill.  So he will take the consequences, which aren’t that bad.  She uses a lot of garlic, and that’s some compensation.  Also long-grain brown rice with that full-bodied nutty smell that could almost tempt him to vegetarianism if it weren’t for things like grilled hamburgers.  Or bacon.  Ah, bacon . . . He had some for breakfast this morning, and he could write a poem about it, if he were a poet.  Were I of poetic mind,/ What excellencies might I find/ In thy tender waves of salt and crunch/ That beckon me to munch a bunch—

Ow.  What’s that in his jaw?  Lower right molar?  Is his toothache coming back?

Jack turns his head to ease the pressure. The sounds of his children drift through the open window from the driveway, where they’re playing pick-up basketball with some neighbor kids.  At least, 10-year-old Ashley is trying to play.  Jack can tell from her piping tones that Calvin lets her take a shot now and then.  Cal is a good kid, for a teenager.  They’re both good kids.  Thump.  Thump.  Thump.  Clutter-clutter-CHING!  “Two points!  Lay it up, Ash.”

Calvin’s voice cracks a little on the “up.”  Jack has to smile, remembering himself at fourteen.  Wouldn’t repeat it, but there’s a touching vulnerability about—

Ouch.  He shifts in his char again.  Might need to set up a dentist appointment tomorrow.  Hates to go, of course—who enjoys going to the dentist?  But sooner or later . . .

From the kitchen, on the classic rock station Julia is listening to, comes the flat-string cadence of an unmistakable rhythm—bum-bum-bum-ba-dum, bum-bum-bum-ba-dum—followed by a catchy melody he can’t help humming: “. . . lookin’ out my back door.”  Boy, that takes him back.  Summer nights down by the river, hot girls and cold beer; his foot is tapping out the rhythm to John Fogarty’s plangent tone: “Just got back from Illinois . . .”

Julia echoes from the kitchen.  He pictures her swaying in time to the music, her hips moving in that cute, innocently suggestive way that sometimes puts ideas in his head—

The remote bounces off the carpet as Jack clutches his jaw.  That does it.  First thing tomorrow, he’s calling Dr. Groves and demanding to get in.  Or if they say they’re full, he’ll just show up in the waiting room and tell them he’s not leaving until–

“Argh!”  His recliner bolts upright as Jack doubles over.  Pain rips through all other sensations; everything that pleased him thirty seconds ago now mocks him.  Crisp bacon, lilac blooms, plush pillows, fond memories, love for his wife and children—mean nothing!  Pain chomps through the veneer of his peaceful life with jagged teeth.  He clutches his head, choking back a scream . . . .

. . . and tumbles headfirst into a dream.  Or is he awake?  The pain is certainly awake, stomping gleefully on all his nerves like a demented two-year-old.

But maybe that’s the wrong way to think of it.  This is all going on inside his own body, after all.  The pain is part of him.

No, the pain is you.  You are the pain.

Who said that?  Did he say that?  It’s not the kind of thing he’s apt to say.  His conversation is more on the order of, Has anybody seen the hammer? or, How about those Raiders?

At any rate, it doesn’t hurt so much now.  Jack feels around his head and meets no walls or boundaries.  The sensations of sight, sound, smell and touch don’t go away but they seem to swirl together, a spiraling symphony of separate strands all joined at the center.  He must get to the center, where the self resides.  Except that he seems to have shrugged off self; it’s dropped like a ton of bricks.  He doesn’t miss it at all.  His wife and kids and every other living creature meet him here, where all is truly one and pain and suffering lose their power to disturb.  This is rest.  This is peace.  This is genuine, true . . .

Ow.  Ow ow ow OW!

This isn’t working.  His brain dials up another vision.

There’s a sword in his hand—a light saber.  Aha!  This is more like it.  He takes a practice swing and cleaves reality in two.  Dark side, light side.  Good-evil, up-down, wet-dry, male-female, war-peace, sick-well.  He gets this; it’s all a struggle between opposites, a lack of balance.  One tooth has decided to rebel against the rest of his body and he must call the darn thing out.  Get back in line, you misbegotten knave!  Get back in harmony with your fellow teeth and stop calling attention to yourself!  Backing the pain into a corner seems to lessen it, though it still snarls at him.  But then a question sneaks up from behind: if life is a matter of us/them or me/is, who is me, and who or what is my opposite?  And is there an opposite of pain, other than not-pain?  He flourishes the light saber again, but the questions persist, making it hard to concentrate, and soon his whole head is throbbing, not just his jaw.

Jack wakes up.  That was some ride, though he has no clue where he went.  Slowly his life resumes its normal dimensions of sounds and smells and the second hand sweeping around the clock face over the mantel.  And yes, he has a toothache, which has hunkered down to a dull, persistent throb.  Resolutely he puts his hands on the nubby surface of the recliner arms and pulls himself up.  First, aspirin.  Then he’ll find Dr. Groves’s home number and beg him to meet him in the office in half an hour.  The dentist’s office is no place to spend a Saturday but at least it’s a plan.

_______________________________________

How to have a conversation

The Brick Bible, by Brendan Powell Smith, purports to tell the whole Bible Story in Legos.  This seems like a clever idea but in reality it’s deeply subversive, and not only because Smith is a professing atheist with a declared interest in undermining faith.  Even if he were a devout Baptist with a gift for tinkering I wouldn’t recommend his book, solely for its depiction of God  as a Lego man in a white robe, with a white beard and angry eyebrows.  For the first six days he conjures up pebbly water and blocky vegetation, building up to a big finish with the appearance of a naked Lego man.  And on the seventh day, angry eyebrows still intact, God strings up a hammock between two of the trees he made, pours a tall glass of lemonade and “rests.”

From Powell-Smith to Michelangelo is a huge leap, like that from a backyard studio to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, where God stretches out his fingertip to ensoul Adam.  Impressive as he may be, with his muscled chest and flowing beard, Michelangelo’s Jehovah is as inadequate as Smith’s.  God on a chapel ceiling and God as a two-inch plastic figure are equally reductionist—not only because we don’t know what he looks like, but because even that terminology, “What he looks like,” takes us down a false path.

Up until now we have taken a lot for granted.  What’s that? you say.  Time, space, direction?  Didn’t we go back and account for all those things that other creation stories take for granted?

I’ve tried to show that, for God, creation is not a matter of reorganizing what’s already there, but actually making a “there.”  What we haven’t considered yet is God himself—who or what is he (she, it, they)?  On the seventh day, as God “rests,” we should take the opportunity to turn away from what he made and contemplate Him.

Because he is not really resting, or not in the sense of kicking back in a hammock with a tall one.  Perhaps he is pausing, as he asks us to do on the seventh day.

Classic Christian doctrine teaches that God is three persons in one being.  Jews and cults deny it, agnostics ignore it, atheists dismiss it, and even some Christians brush it aside as irrelevant or impossible, or just not very interesting.  An orthodox church will include Trinitarian teaching in its syllabus, especially in relation to how God works in salvation (the Father wills it, the Son accomplishes it, the Holy Spirit applies it).  Which of course is excellent.  But the application of this doctrine extends far beyond salvation.  I suspect the doctrine of the Trinity is the key to the nature of personhood, thought, creativity, knowledge, and reality itself.

I am here.  You are there.  We are located somewhere on a planet, the planet in a solar system, the solar system in a universe.  This is evident, but how did it happen?  If it’s created—which mainstream science denies but almost everyone believes—what sort of being created it?  Systems and dogmas and modern-day mashups claim to have the answer, while agnostics claim there is no answer.  But boiled down to their essence, we are left with only three possibilities.*

1. Monism: God is everything, and everything is God.

Finally we’re at rest. But . . . what are we?

In the beginning, out of Himself, God said—no wait, God didn’t say anything, and in fact it’s meaningless to speak of God as himself because “everything” can’t be a gender or singular personality.  In the beginning there just Is, and all that arises from That Which Is—all landscapes and species, all molecular arrangements—are manifestations of the One.  And ultimately all distinctiveness is an illusion, because All is One.  That leaf, that raindrop, that butterfly is of the same Oneness as you, and their goal is the same as yours: to get back to perfect unity where there are no distinctions.

When pain intrudes, human consciousness recoils; where can it find relief?  Where there are no distinctions there is no strife, no suffering, no pain.  No gain either, because the concept of value disappears.  No part of Oneness is more necessary or precious than any other: “part” is itself an illusion, for remember, All is One.  Which means there can be no loss, because there is, ultimately, nothing to lose.  And the soul is at rest, if it’s anything that can be called a soul.

Monism seeks peace at any price, and the price is human personality.

That’s one problem with monism—we can’t keep from behaving as though we had a personality, even if we think it’s only temporary.  The other problem is that Oneness cannot create; it can only differentiate.  All distinctions that we perceive are a result of maya, or illusion.  Maya is a bad dream from which all humanity will awake, eventually, to the perfect Oneness where

Nothing.  Ever.  Happens.

If the toothache is bad enough, we would welcome perfect Oneness (i.e., oblivion).  Otherwise, particulars have a way of intruding.

2. Dualism: God is a continual dynamic between opposites (unless he taking one side or the other).

In the beginning was pure energy, which split itself in two.  And now we’re getting some action: the universe is locked in perpetual struggle of yin and yang, light and dark, and its goal is to achieve harmony or balance between them.  The object of life is struggle.

Pythagoras was a fan, and perhaps the first to clearly articulate a dualistic system.  Opposites fuel the

If we ever come to terms . . . no more movies!

cosmos, beginning with the primary dichotomy of limited/unlimited.  Nine more pairs of opposites, added to the first, summed up to a perfect Ten: odd/even, one/many, left/right, male/female; rest/motion, straight/curved, light/dark, good/bad, square/round.  Farther east, Zoroastrianism and Taoism came to the same conclusion: reconciling yin and yang is the aim of life and human history.

Georg Friedrich Hegel’s famous “system” is the soul of dualism.  Hegel saw human history, both global and individual, as a clash between duty and self-interest, a perpetual struggle between truth and falsehood, good and evil.  As a culture moves forward in time it develops a thesis–an overarching principle of how the world works (for example, Might Makes Right).  A competing idea develops, usually within that same culture: the antithesis (such as Right Serves Might).  Variations of these themes will appear also, but the two main ideas will go at it hammer and tongs, trading taunts and punches and sometimes bullets, until the society achieves some sort of synthesis between the two.  This will have to sort itself out before it acquires a label (Might Serves Right unless No One is Looking) and becomes an operating principle, which may enjoy a brief heyday at the top before the antithesis develops and we start the whole process again.

Heraclitus would be proud, because the river of time is continually in flux.  His theory of perpetual change is vindicated . . . except when (if) we achieve perfect balance, at which distinctions collapse and labels become meaningless.  Parmenides smugly smiles and the rest of us (if we’re conscious at all) ask ourselves (if there’s anyone left to ask), what that sound and fury was all about.  But if, on the other hand, perfect balance is beyond our grasp, we may as well sit back and enjoy the ride.  Rest is not happening.  Thing and not-thing, quality and anti-quality are locked in continual struggle, not eventual resolution.  It moves, but it’s not going anywhere.

3. Trinitarianism: God alone is God, and God is not alone.

In the beginning God spoke and acted and everything that is came to be.  Think about that.  I just wrote that sentence: fourteen words, arranged in a grammatical order that makes sense—not just to me, but to you.  You may not agree with the idea expressed in the sentence, but you understand the idea.  A triangular process was just completed: the words I wrote, the words you read, and the understanding that now exists between us.  Without all three sides of that thought, there is no communication.

Now consider—

The Creator conceives an idea: “Let there be.”

The idea takes on Form and substance: “And it was so.”

That form and substance provokes a Response: “And God saw that it was good.”

Without a creator who is diversity-in-unity, there is no creation.  Monism can make no distinctions; all it can say is I = Everything.  But nothing truly acts, and therefore nothing reacts.  All exists to be eventually distilled into Oneness—or, if you like, pure Noun.

Dualism is all Verb: act, react, theorize, anti-theorize, do, undo.  It’s dramatic and exciting and looks great on a movie screen.  But it makes no provision for how it came to be, and its logical end is oblivion.

The Trinitarian God is neither noun nor verb; if we’re speaking in grammatical terms, he is a sentence.  He even expresses himself as a sentence: I am.  In him is the thought, and the meaning of the thought, and the shared understanding between the thinker and the meaner.

We’re looking at the only kind of Creator who could be in creation without being creation—that is, the only kind who can actually create.  Instead of somehow diversifying what he already is or manipulating what is already there, the three-personal God has started a conversation within himself (“Let us . . .”) in which thought and meaning produces material reality.  He has established, from the ground up, all that is necessary for anything in the material universe to exist: space and time, stability and change, growth and proliferation, forward motion and pause.  In biblical terms, he has built his temple.

On the seventh day, he enters it.

If you missed earlier episodes of this series, here’s Creation, Day One: Where Does Darkness Come From?

____________________________________________

1. Do a little research into Zen Buddhism and think through an imaginary dialogue about creation and where it came from.  Or better yet, have such a dialogue with a Zen Buddhist.  Or, if you happen to be a Zen Buddhist, write it.

2. How do popular stories and superhero legends like Star Wars, The Avengers, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, etc., reflect dualism?  How about the Babylon creation story?

*Thanks for the following to Ellis Potter’s 3 Theories of Everything.

 

Posted on

Creation, Day Six: Consciousness

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things and beats of the earth according to their kinds.”  And it was so.  And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind.  And God saw that it was good.

Part One: the Buck Stops – Here.  (With a nod to the opening scene of The Last of the Mohicans, 1992)

Anticipated by a full orchestra fanfare, the scene opens on a breathtaking view of mountain ridges, receding in folds of blue.  Our view gradually closes in on a thick hillside forest, intensely green and dappled with sunlight.  The music narrows and intensifies; a thrumming of low strings hints at little lives spinning out beneath our notice.  Spiders swing out on barely visible threads; flies perch and swipe their robotic heads with robotic forelimbs; ladybugs crawl on their pencil-stroke legs; worms chomp mindlessly through loamy soil.

The music picks up speed.  A lolloping squirrel pauses, sits upright, beady eyes glistening, ears pricked.  A few yards away, a nose-twitching rabbit does the same.  Something rides the wind—speed, threat, fear, haste, heart, pant, pain–

Rabbit and squirrel take to all fours and dart away as it crashes on them, with heaving dun-colored sides and sharp, precise hooves.  Even in his present extremity, he is magnificent: a full-grown buck crowned with antlers that rattle overhead branches as he leaps over a log across his path.  One eye flashes, wide with terror.  The forest swallows him up again, and after the excited whisper of leaves has faded there is no sign he was even there.  Except for a thin red line, spooling out like a thread.  And if we listen closely, a pounding of footsteps, a steady two-beat rhythm unlike the syncopated clatter of four hooves on the packed ground.  Listen: it’s coming closer, closer, closer . . .

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . .

 

A two-footed creature, light and swift, leaps into view.  We in the audience feel a little jolt, like Robinson Crusoe stranded on his island, coming upon a human footprint.  The man belongs in this woodland scene, but he is not wholly of it.  He is as graceful in his way as the buck, but something sets him apart: purpose.

He is not motivated by instinct, much less by blind, unrefined terror.  He is not running for his life, or even (not entirely) for his needs.  The buck (once captured) will supply food, clothing, and shelter, but also challenge, drama, joy, and poetic imagery.

His body is covered with a long shirt and leather leggings that provide some protection from stabs and thorns, but the feathers braided into his hair serve no useful purpose, nor the beads jumping against his chest.  In one hand he clutches a rifle.  The rifle is a manufactured item, with an iron-forged barrel and an oak-carved stock, loaded with a lead ball he made himself.  There was another ball, now spent in the hedge after grazing the buck’s.  On long strides, the man bounds across our field of vision.  Still trembling with that first start of recognition at the sight of his face, we follow.

Another figure in homespun and buckskin flickers through the brush on the overlooking ridge.  From below, a third is working his way up.  They are converging on their prey, closing in on the last stand.

It’s not far.  The buck stops in a grassy clearing, as though he instinctively knows his time is up.  His grating breath echoes harshly in the glade.

Boom!

A second lead ball burrows into his neck and he obediently drops.

The man and his companions approach confidently but respectfully.  They greet the dead animal as their brother and thank him for providing for their needs.  With swift, practiced movements, they gut the buck and truss his lifeless body on a pole.  They are exercising dominion, as all human societies have done for all time.  The killing is about survival, but the blessing is about ceremony and commemoration, and an unspoken need to shape experience.

Of course it’s a shame that the beautiful buck had to die in the first place.  But that’s getting ahead of the story.

___________________________________________

Part Two: Something to Think about—and Someone to Think

By the end of Genesis 1 the earth is bubbling with plant life and creature life—so why do we encounter this puzzling passage in Genesis 2?

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and watering the whole face of the ground—then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. (vss. 5-7)

Higher critics call Genesis 2 an “alternate” account from a different Jewish tradition, and I’m not here to argue.  It’s the same story, but we seem to be coming at it from a different angle: chapter 1 is the summary view, an answer to the philosophical question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  And the scientific question, “Where did it all come from?”  Chapter 2 may be intended as an answer to the ontological question, “What does it mean for anything to ‘be’?” From the image of a world already wildly proliferating, the scene is suddenly, oddly barren.  No bush, no small plants, only a desert-y stretch of ground.  “In the land,” some commentators say, probably refers not to the whole earth, but to the selected piece of earth where God plans his final act of creation.  With startling particularity, we’re told where it is, or at least what is nearby: the River Euphrates, which can still be located on a map under the same name.

Imagine God scraping aside the vegetation, brushing away the debris, rubbing his hands together, flexing his metaphorical fingers, bending down.  All other animals he “created” (Gen. 1:21, 25, 27).  Man, he “forms.”  It’s a particular act from a particular medium, the “dust of the ground.”

Why not mud, or clay?  Every child knows that dust doesn’t stick.

The Hebrew word (apar) is not one of those flexible terms interchangeable with “mud” or “clay.”  Apar is

(detail of “Ex nihilo” sculpture by Frederick Hart)

a powdery substance that can be flung in the air to express disapproval (Luke 23:21) or paired with ashes to accompany deep sorrow or repentance (Job 42:6).  It doesn’t stick together.  Nevertheless God “forms” something of it, the first time that particular verb is used in the creation account.  It implies a personal connection, a hands-on, deliberative, intentional, well-thought-out and considered act.  Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . .

Watch this: the outward image takes shape—a head and a trunk, two arms and two legs, similar in many ways to the other mammals now roaming the earth, and yet strikingly different.  No one, least of all the beasts themselves, would mistake him for a beast.  The Divine Holiness has planned this form down to the last brain cell.

Perhaps he contemplates it for a moment, this ultimate creation, the habitation of his image visible for the first time in a body.  This is revolutionary: spirit and flesh are about to be fused in awareness, and that which eats and digests and defecates and mates and sires and bears will plant one foot in the infinite.  God himself, by his predetermined will and focused energy and infinite power, holds the particles of this quintessence of dust* together.  He bends down and breathes into it,

and man became a living soul.**

The soul with the breath of God in it can never die.  And the Immortal Breath has committed himself to human history with a kiss.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the East, and there he put the man he had formed.  (Gen. 2:8)

“Adam, arise.  Come with me.”

The man pulls himself to his feet in a graceful, coordinated motion of golden limbs.  He understands at once, he loves immediately.  He walks across the bare land in a melting sunrise; for the first time ever, the image of God casts a long shadow.  The sweetness of water meets his nostrils and the chirp of birdsong reaches his ears long before the green of the garden brims on the horizon.  As he approaches, leaves rattle like tambourines, butterflies startle their wings and prowling cats prick their ears and tilt their exotic faces.  The garden buzzes with a rumor of the king’s approach.  When he enters, the entire animal assembly is waiting for him, called together by the same voice that brought them into being.

Now, says the Lord: What are you going to call them?

  1. If it’s warm enough, find a patch of ground outside and lay on it.  Try to overcome your scruples and forgo the blanket; nothing between you and the bare ground.  Spread your fingers and flatten as much of your body as possible.  Imagine the great round ball of the earth in all its physicality, and try to feel yourself as one with it skin, bones, vital organs, every part of you.  Recall that one day (if the Lord tarries) your body will be one with it, and take a few deep breaths.  Do you feel infinite?  Why?
  2. Spend some time contemplating the family pet, or the birds gathered around your feeder.  Look into their eyes, if you can.  How do you feel kinship?  How do you feel alienation?
  3. Write a list of the frustrations you have with your body.  Then make a list of the things your body can do.  Which list is longer?
  4. Go people-watching in a local park or mall.  Imagine them all—young and old, fat or thin, lively or weary—as immortal souls that will never die.  How does this change your view of them?

_________________________________________________

*Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, “What a piece of work is man” speech.  In medieval thought, “dust” was the fifth element, after earth, water, air, and fire: the mysterious, invisible substance out of which God created life.

** KJV.  Most modern translations render this phrase as “and man became a living creature,” or “living being.”  I’m sure that’s closer to the Hebrew meaning, but from the context it’s clear that this living creature is distinct from all the others, so I prefer the older translation here.

Next up: God “rests.”  Did anything happen on Day Seven?  More than you know . . .

Posted on

Can We Talk? Janie and Charlotte on Assimilation and Shared Values

Janie and Charlotte, good friends from college who have gone their separate ways politically, try to be reasonable about some hot-button issues.  We’ve talked about religious freedom, the proper role of government, and state-supported health care.  Most recently the topic was the wide-open one of immigration, which led to a slight narrowing of focus, as follows:

Janie: In our last conversation, we left off with a question from you: “Why does diversity cause such fear and anger in people? And how is unity possible when there is a fundamental rejection of our inherent diversity?”  We also agreed to look further into a widely-discussed Atlantic article by Peter Beinart: “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”

To address your first question: Diversity causes fear and anger in some people regardless.  I do believe that the majority of Americans, both conservative and liberal, have no problem with diverse groups who come to America wishing to be Americans.  It’s true that most of us are more comfortable hanging out with people who are like us, with common interests and goals, but that’s only human.  By and large Americans take a live-and-let-live approach to other cultures as long as we perceive no threat.  Most of us, I think, even get a little misty-eyed when a naturalization ceremony is televised, when new citizens of every shade and background express their joy at becoming part of this nation.

As for the second question, I’m not sure about your premises.  I read your blog about Unity in Diversity and found some of it puzzling.  You say, “Our unity has always, will always arrive out of our shared values and our common dreams: liberty and justice for all . . .  a union the Founders conceived in the midst of the creative diversity of their day and . . . still being perfected here in the ethnic, religious, and intellectual diversity of our own day.”  The stated shared values of the founders were “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but I would say liberty was the chief value that pulled all thirteen colonies together.  That was in opposition of many of their own citizens who didn’t see the need to separate from the mother country.  The “creative diversity” you mention wasn’t nearly what it is today—almost all the colonists were white, Christian (by identity if not practice), and of European descent.  Their very real regional diversity was not a source of strength—it was a serious weakness that tore the nation apart in a mere fourscore and four years.

Over the last thirty years or so I’ve been hearing that American strength lies in its diversity.  But that makes no sense on the face of it; strength lies in unity.  Diversity is great for expanding our little worlds, learning generosity and humility, and trying lots of delicious new recipes!  But diversity in itself is not strength.  We are stronger when can come together in spite of our diversity, not because of it, and that means discovering our shared values and being willing to defend them.

That’s what makes some of us nervous.  As Beinart says near the end of his article, “Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity.  They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity.”  What are those shared values, exactly?  What do we have to fear from immigrants and even native-born citizens who regard most of American history as a chronicle of injustice?  How should we feel about undocumented immigrants waving Mexican flags at protest rallies?  What about groups like LaRaza and the New Black Panthers, who don’t appear to have any interest in unity?

You asked about assimilation.  To me, that does not mean giving up your culture, your special holidays and observances, or even your language.  It does mean accepting the Constitution as the law of this land, obeying the laws, learning English (or at least encouraging your children to learn it), and pledging allegiance to the flag.  What about you?

Simple, no? Well, no.

 

Charlotte: I said at the outset of these conversations that I believe you and I can find much to agree on and I think we are finding some of that agreement here. For example, I can certainly agree with your description of assimilation above and I appreciate that you don’t think assimilation demands giving up one’s culture. Of course all people who live here should accept and obey the laws. But I have to wonder if your statement implies that immigrants and newcomers disrespect and disobey laws more than natives do. You said before:

What some fear…is allowing in more immigrants, “legal” and not so much, who do not subscribe to American ideas and want to change it to something else. Or they’re coming for welfare benefits or criminal activity or outright subversion. These are the minority, I know, but there are significant numbers to cause concern.

Where is this coming from, this conviction that there are “significant numbers” of immigrants who do not subscribe to American ideas and what to change it to something else? I know it’s out there; I see it too. But I don’t believe it’s nearly as real as many Conservatives think it is.

Stereotyping is rampant and over the top these days: Hispanics are all illegal and here to steal your jobs and rape your daughters. Muslims are all terrorists and secretly plotting to subvert the Constitution into sharia law. A LOT of people actually believe this stuff! How do we combat such harmful prejudices?

You say you don’t understand the premise of this question of mine: “How is unity possible when there is a fundamental rejection of our inherent diversity?” Then you quote from my blog and say some things there “puzzle” you. I am puzzled why you are puzzled; it seems pretty straightforward to me. I have been a huge advocate for unity for years and I thought my blog portrayed that passion.

Old and Young. Rich and Poor. Gay and Straight. Religious and Humanist. Black and White and Brown. E pluribus unum. From many, one.

When we move out of our uniform, homogeneous tribes and recognize the shared humanity inherent within our wide-ranging diversity, that’s when we will discover a glimpse of a true unity that is far better than any sort of uniformity.

So I am agreeing with you that affirming our shared humanity and our common goals is an important source of our unity. See my blog post, “The Problem with Unity Is Uniformity.”

But then again, I have had experience talking to people who seem to believe even naming our differences is divisive. I’ve heard people say they are “color-blind” and they only see how we are alike. But that’s just not possible. We ARE different. Our diversity is a fact. And honoring each person’s uniqueness honors their humanity.

I do believe that both our variety AND our commonality provide strength for America. Tapping into people’s different perspectives, abilities, experiences, insights and then crafting all that varied wisdom into approaches that help us attain our common goals is what this nation has done again and again. Our variety gives us a broader base of resources. If my husband and I are unified in our desire to buy something we want but really can’t afford, then that unity is no strength. On the other hand, if one of us says: “Wait. Let’s look at if from another perspective,” then it’s our differences that make us stronger.

Our disagreement here is slight. (I would not say our strength is “in spite of our diversity.” That’s too negative a phrase.) But we both make the point that our strength lies in coming together from our diversity into unity. (But not uniformity, as I say in my blog.)

Here is a moving essay from Parker Palmer, wise Quaker. He too celebrates the strength of our American diversity and understands its valuable contributions to our efforts for unity.

I’m arguing from my perspective on the Left and I asked an honest question about “Why does diversity cause such fear and anger in some people” from the Right. And I have to say that all my reading and pondering and conversing brings me to this conclusion: White Christian America is being displaced and diluted and I believe much of the anxiety we see has to do with that loss of power and privilege. When we look closely, it’s pretty obvious that the immigration debate is primarily about Brown people.

Back to the Peter Beinart article in The Atlantic. He says this:

Studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam…suggest that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.

Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age…

This echoes my own diagnosis. And it repeats my question: why does greater diversity reduce trust and cooperation? Are we doomed to such a small practice of our shared humanity? Or can Conservatives and Liberals find our common ground and widen it into a great space?

Janie: Okay, I’ve been thinking about this.  I do believe conservatives and liberals need to find common ground in order to make policy, but I’m afraid “shared humanity” is so broad as to be unworkable.  Let me offer two examples.

In 1867 Karl Marx published Das Kapital.  By the end of the decade hundreds of Eastern European immigrants to America were committed socialists.  The years between 1878 and 1898 saw bloodiest labor wars the USA has ever experienced.  There were lots of reasons for this, not just immigrants with bad ideas.  But in most of those riots and shootouts, eastern Europeans were prominent players.  There were some positive effects in focusing attention on severe labor abuses and gradually bringing change; I suppose you could say diversity helped bring about eventual unity.  But it was at a great cost over an issue that could have been handled other ways, and made socialism seem like a viable alternative for the US, at least for some.  I don’t want to debate the virtues of socialism just now (!), only to say that, in my opinion at least, socialism as a system is not compatible with the nation that was founded in 1776.

Another system incompatible with the US, and with the western tradition generally, is Sharia Law.  I have no idea how widespread the notion of imposing Sharia Law in this country might be.  In some areas of high Muslim concentration, such as Dearborn and Detroit, judges are trying to figure out how to balance practices connected with Sharia (such as female genital mutilation) against American civil law.  But the huge influx of Muslim immigrants is becoming a significant problem in Europe.  A couple of weeks ago I came across this article with a scary title:  “I’ve Worked  with Refugees for Decades.  Europe’s Afghan Crime Wave is Staggering.”  The point is not that Muslims should be barred from safe havens in Europe, but that certain Muslims who subscribe to a radical form of Islam (which includes imposing Sharia Law) are wreaking havoc by their utter contempt for Western standards.

Could that happen here?  The US is very different from Europe, culturally and geographically, so I don’t know.  But I think that is what some are afraid of, and an example of what I meant by certain  immigrants wanting to make this country into something else.  What are we willing to allow?  What are we prepared to defend?  What principles of this nation must be protected at all cost, and (this is crucial) what policies will help protect them?  “Liberty and justice for all” is not a policy; it’s an ideal.  As we encountered before in our debates about health care:  Nobody is arguing about the ideal, but how do we institute these noble goals without bankrupting ourselves or committing suicide?  More to the case, what policies do we need to continue as a welcoming nation committed to liberty, free speech, and opportunity?

Charlotte: A lot of my liberal friends and I wonder if the agenda of far right white Christians is our own homegrown version of a kind of “sharia law.” I have to say some of the proposed policies of my Texas legislators are “alarming” and “wreaking havoc” in our communities. Here’s an article for you to consider with a fair number of comments that voice some of our anxieties. https://www.facebook.com/coffeeparty/posts/10156438091398327

How bout I read your article and do some homework so I can respond to your concerns and you read my and tell me how you would help allay my fears? Sounds like another challenging topic for our next conversation. I’ll start.

Janie: You’re on!

Posted on

Let Them Come: Teaching Children to Pray

Prayer is not a part of Christian life.  It is Christian life.  It’s what your conversion was about: union with Christ.  It’s your side of the conversation, your participation in the divine nature (II Peter 1:4).  And so many of us suck at it.

That’s the problem most of us have in teaching our children to pray.  But it’s no excuse—we teach children every day those things we may not be so good at ourselves: be patient, don’t yell, say you’re sorry (and mean it).  We don’t want to hinder these little ones from coming to Christ.  So, when thinking about how to teach them to come to him through prayer, we should first think about what hinders us?  Some possibilities:

  • Bullet-point lists (excuse the self-referential irony).  “Five tips for improving your devotional life.”  “Top ten secrets of success from the experts.”  “Six ways from Sunday.”  Goal-oriented people can’t resist a list, but their neatly-numerated charm is deceptive.  If a human being were a collection of parts that could just be oiled up occasionally we’d be easy to operate, but we’re no more likely to put a numerated tip into practice than a well-spoken word from mom or an insight from C. S. Lewis.
  • The automated head-tip.  If you were brought up in a Christian home you should be familiar with the posture your body assumes at the words, “Let us pray.”  We’re accustomed to bowing heads and closing eyes at meals, bedtime, before the sermon, after the sermon, all during communion.  This is not to be despised, but it creates a ritualized fog around something that should also be personal and intimate, and the longer we’ve been in church the more automated our prayer life can get.  When your head bows, does your mind go on auto-prayer?
  • Our Martha mode.  We’re “anxious and troubled about many things” (Luke 10:41), including how to pray.  Sometimes the prayer guides and books make us even more anxious, because the suggestions don’t seem to “work,” or what helps for a while doesn’t hold up.  The Lord’s gentle reminder about “the better part” doesn’t always help either—easy for him to say!
  • Endless distraction.  I wonder if it was easier for the saints of old to pray when their lives weren’t so crowded with entertainment, shopping lists, stuff to buy and stuff to get rid of, places to go, errands to remember—they pop up in our prayers like ads on a website.  (And if those annoy us, just imagine how God feels about it!)
  • This weird, other-worldly relationship.  You’ve heard the comparisons: if you had an appointment with the President of the United States, or even the president of the local PTA, you would have something ready to say and the proper attitude with which to say it.  But if you were married to the POTUS, or the boss of the PTA was your mom, every encounter would be ad lib and subject to the emotions of the moment.  What we have with God is intimate transcendence, invisible presence, everyday awesomeness . . . come up with your own oxymoron, and you probably wouldn’t be too far from the truth.  But then, the whole Christian faith is stuffed with these alarming juxtapositions (that we could not have made up ourselves).
  • Lack of faith that God is really there and really listening.  Is that really what it comes down to?

The good news is that grownups and children are on this journey together.  We grownups actually never stop being children in the Kingdom of Heaven, and having actual children in the house gives us a chance to revisit those lessons we didn’t fully learn the first time.

My main suggestion, for lack of anything wiser, is to become just a little more intentional about prayer as the kids grow up.  Bullet-point list coming up!  Some of these ideas may help; if not, they may be useful as a stepping stone to other ideas for weaving prayer, or an attitude of prayer, into the hours as they pass.

  • The old ACTS formula—prayer consisting of four elements of Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication—makes a helpful outline for instruction.  At prayer times (family devotionals, bedtime, grace at meals), you might emphasize one or two of these (not all four): What can we praise God for today?  What should you ask forgiveness for?   Is there anyone we can ask God to help?
  • Speaking of bedtime prayers, this is a great time to review the day.  Talk about things that might be troubling them or things they might be especially happy about.  Share things you’re thankful about, discuss ways God can help with problems, probe for faults that need to be forgiven, etc.  These topics may pop up naturally at the end of an outstanding or traumatic day, but if it’s just ordinary, ask a leading question or two to draw out prayer material: What was your favorite part of today? What would you like to do tomorrow? Who do you know that needs help?  Keep these conversations brief, unless some issue comes up that needs to be talked out.
  • If you have more than two children, spending time with each at bedtime may not be possible.  That’s okay; just try to arrange time for an evening chat twice a week, or every other day.  If something comes up with a particular child, the schedule may have to be rearranged, but flexibility is a skill worth learning.
  • Remember Jesus.  If you’ve ever read Mere Christianity, you may remember Lewis’s discussion of prayer as a kind of trinitarian group project.  When we pray, it’s the Holy Spirit within prompting us, God the Father before us, and Jesus beside us.  I’ve drawn great comfort from two verses about Christ’s intercession: “Who is there to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died and was raised and is now at the right hand of God interceding for us” (Rom. 8:34).  Also Hebrews 7:25: “Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”   These passages would be good to memorize, and frequently thank Jesus for being there “Before the Throne of God Above” for us.
  • In times of crisis, don’t pray alone!  When appropriate, include the kids in lifting up Grandma’s cancer diagnosis, Dad’s unemployment, big brother’s emergency appendectomy.  Use your judgment about this, though.  Don’t bring the kids alongside your marriage problems (they need Mom and Dad to at least appear unified) or burden them with too much trauma.  Just show them that you, too, carry burdens that Jesus is willing to share.
  • Speaking of crisis, let prayer come naturally when you’re in a jam.  Several years ago, during a car trip from Texas to Missouri, the alternator in our old station wagon went out.  I didn’t notice the battery light, so we just ran it out until the vehicle simply stopped, giving me just enough time to pull over.  Since my husband wasn’t along I was the only responsible adult, and my first impulse was blind panic (What do I do???).  But the Holy Spirit prompted me to say, “We’re going to pray about this.”  So I did, and within a minute after Amen a highway patrol car pulled up behind us.  (My sister has a similar story about getting hopelessly lost in New York City.)  Such a prompt reply is not necessarily going to happen every time, but pray anyway, and God will take care of the rest.
  • Make prayer a conversation.  Even in informal settings, we tend to take turns, keep our heads bowed (furtively peeking when someone gets up), and if someone starts her turn the same time we do it’s so embarrassing.  No one conducts conversations this way, unless it’s by the aid of a shaman-esque talking stick or mic.   A group free-for-all wouldn’t work, but if it’s just you and Molly and Dan (for instance), you shouldn’t be afraid to ask a question in the midst of a prayer (“Who was that lady you mentioned?”) or add a coda (“And thanks for Molly’s first time on the big slide—that was fun!”).  You may not even feel the need to bow your heads: hold hands and look up occasionally, or sing a short praise chorus or Psalm.  (And singing during prayers is perfectly fine!)
  • If you have family devotionals, you might do occasional popcorn prayers, where you ask each child (and include Mom and Dad) to make a specific petition, offer a particular praise, thank God for something that happened during the day that made you happy, etc.  You might even put slips of paper in a jar for each family member to draw out.  That’s their prayer “assignment” for the evening.  And it’s okay to swap.
  • If we’re in too much of a hurry to get to petitions, praising gets neglected.  Cultivate a habit of praise during the day: if you hear a beautiful piece of music, enjoy a clear blue sky and a fresh breeze, witness a perfect figure-skating maneuver or home run, comment on it, and remember to praise God for it during prayer time.  It’s fine, of course, to praise God for it in the moment, as long as the praise sounds natural and not calculated.

As I hope you can tell, all this is more attitude than checklist, habits of thought before action.  I can’t tell you or your kids how to pray.  Only God can do that—keep asking him.

(This post is a continuation of “Hinder Them Not“)

Posted on

Creation, Day Five: Being and Soaring

And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.  So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.  And God saw that it was good.  And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”  And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

Why did the philosopher cross the river?

Time: ca 500 B.C.

Place: a river somewhere in neutral territory

Characters: The philosopher HERACLITUS* and his followers, a noisy, busy band of clowns, and the rival philosopher PARMENIDES** and his followers, a staid, stately group of stiffs, converge on opposite sides of the river.

HERACLITUS.  Ah!  Parmenides of Elea.  We meet at last!

PARMENIDES.  Heraclitus of Ephesus, greeting!  Our encounter was in the stars and thus there is a sense in which we have always met.

CLOWNS (ad lib).  Huh??  What’d he say?  What the–!

H. thought you might say that. But even as you speak, time passes, and the Parmenides I now behold is not the same man who spoke moments ago.

STIFFS.  (all with question marks over their heads and puzzled expressions)

P.  Nice try, Heraclitus. But you and I both know you’re just being cute.  The world could not possibly operate on your principle.

H.  Au contraire, Parmenides! I present to you the evidence.  Observe this river.

The dueling duo as imagined by Raphael. In real life, they probably never met.

CLOWNS comically observe with popping eyes.

H.  I place my foot in, like so—

extends foot into water

H. And now I withdraw my foot . . . .

The foot comes up, dripping.

H. And when I do, it is no longer the same river, because all the water that first embraced my foot is past, never to return. Ergo: you cannot step in the same river twice!

CLOWNS cheer, turn cartwheels, slap high fives, etc.

P.  (arms folded, surrounded by followers who do the same) That’s ridiculous.

H.  I beg to differ, esteemed sage! We cannot escape the stream of time.  Everything that is, is in a state of flux—you, me, this river, this tree.  Everything is on its way to becoming something else.

P.  Something else? Does that mean you are only Heraclitus temporarily?  Will I one day have the pleasure of meeting a Demetrius or Sophocles instead of you?

H.  Well . . .

P.  Will this river cease to be a river?

H.  Uh . . .

P.  Will this tree become something other than a tree?

H.  No, but—

P.  Will your nose migrate to another position on your face, or become an eye, or a mouth?

H.  Don’t be silly.

P.  Then how can you call anything by its name, other than by reason of its being, unchangeably, what it is?

STIFFS.  (in unison, uniformly pleased)  Bravo, Master.

H.  (grabbing a clown baby from among his followers) Remember when you were this age, Parmenides?  Would your followers have recognized you?

P.  That’s not fair . . . .

H.  And when you’re old and gray and can’t remember where you put your stylus, will they still be around?

P.  Let’s not get personal. Just tell me what matters most: being, or becoming?

H.  Without becoming there’s nothing to be!

P.  Without being there’s nothing to become!

H.  So it seems we’re at the same place we started—

H and P. (together)  IMPASSE!

______________________________________________

The argument between Parmenides and Heraclitus is still going on.  It’s a fundamental question—if not the fundamental question—of both philosophy and science.  Is life a matter of being or becoming?  Is reality best described as particles, or process?  If “life is but a brief candle” (Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5) that burns brightly for a relative second of time and then disappears in a trail of smoke, what was that all about?

Something tells us there’s more to life than movement and cessation.  If selfhood means anything, there must be an essential self, a being that is immutably Ben or Asaph or Samarra, who will somehow survive its death and live on in some fashion (He has also planted eternity in the heart of man, Ecclesiastes 3:11).  We resist growing older, continually express surprise at how fast babies develop and kids lunge from childhood to adolescence, even though it literally is the most natural thing in the world.  We accept that newborn Sarah is the same as septuagenarian Sarah, but it just doesn’t seem right.

Yet who would live forever, unchanged?  In Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, a family drinks from a secret spring whose water keeps them from ever growing older.  The main character, a ten-year-old girl, is offered some of that same water but eventually refuses it.  As anyone should.  As frightening as our forward motion through time, feeling sometimes as rudderless as Noah in his ark, we wouldn’t have it any other way.  Change is where things happen.

But not just for the sake of happening.  During my teen years the daytime soap opera Dark Shadows, with its two romantic leads Barnabas and Quentin Collins, was all the rage.  Barnabas was immortal and had a propensity for biting lush young females on the neck.  Quentin had an unsettling habit of growing facial hair and sharp teeth during the full moon.  Every day’s episode would end on a typical cliffhanger, ensuring the audience would be back the next day even if they had to cancel a dentist appointment or rearrange their shopping schedule (no TiVo or cable then).  One summer I watched an episode to see what all the excitement was about, then watched another, and another, and found myself hooked.

Besides paranormal sexiness, change was the attraction, as it is for every soap.  Every single day brought new plot developments and twists and secondary characters tracing their arc across umpteen episodes.  Would she, won’t he, could she, will he—and suddenly I realized that the show had no being, only becoming.  Barnabas’ story would never resolve; nor Quentin’s.  Just endless cycles until, like me, everybody got fed up.  Dark Shadows was a smashing success for about two years.  When the novelty wore off the mechanics of change-for-the-sake of-change were exposed for all to see.  Other soaps, like Days of Our Lives and General Hospital ran on the same principle, but doctors and rakes and gamblers and vamps have more than one trick up their sleeves, and could keep an audience guessing longer than vampires and werewolves.

That’s the problem with Heraclitus.  Change for the sake of change ultimately satisfies no one.

Everybody wants to be somebody, and I don’t mean Somebody with a capital S.  We simply want to know ourselves.  Project yourself back to high school—or worse, junior high—and recall how desperate you were to know how to act.  “Just be yourself,” the grownups said.  But the swift changes of adolescence had swept you away from who you were.  Everybody was looking sideways at the cool kids, trying to pick up cues.  Did you just give up and set out to be a nonconformist, only to find you didn’t have the courage for it, and maybe that wasn’t really you either?

But Parmenides has his problems too.  Change can come too hard and fast, but what if it never came at all?  The weightlessness of adolescence terrifies, but it also exhilarates.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split couds and done a thousand things

You have not dreamed of . . . .           

(John Magee, “High Flight,” 1941)

Any history of human flight begins with the dreamers who launched themselves from cliffs, flapping madly their homemade wings constructed of canvas and balsa wood.  Except for fulsome phrases about “man’s longings to soar,” these jokey introductions to human flight hardly ever pause to wonder why an otherwise sensible human being would feel compelled to leap out into empty space.  Our body structure, weight and substance are not in any way adaptable to larking about in the sky.  Nothing could be more obvious, and there’s plenty to do on land, so why even think about it?  Why dream about it, as many of us do?  “I dreamed I was flying,” we say, and the implication is almost always good.  We love those dreams.  What is the source of this deep-rooted envy of our fellow creatures who can simply lift their wings and launch into three-dimensional movement?

Swimming is the closest we can manage under our own power, but only the best swimmers experience it, and for only as long as their breath holds out.  If I could choose an animal to be for a while, my choice would hover between an otter and a whale.  Otters have more fun, but they are subject to being killed and eaten by predators.  Nobody bothers a whale (except of course for humans, but we can leave them out of the equation for now).  And they seem to have their own kind of fun, as I gather from videos of them launching their huge bodies out of the sea to kiss the air in a shower of sunlit drops.  Wouldn’t that be the life—no predators, no food shortages, full rein of the boundless ocean, living large while propelled solemnly about on massive flutes.

Air and water—home of three-dimensional movement, of effortless fight and endless wave, darting and dodging, soaring and diving, never at rest.  And never—to speak figuratively—in the same place twice.  Birds build their nests and salmon return to their spawning beds, but their symbolic habitat is the never-ending Now, where no creature plants a foot or fin.

We need both: we need the solid ground, where we can build and plant.  But our hearts yearn for the waters and the air, for “High Flight” and trackless sea:

I must go down to the sea again; to the lonely sea and sky

and all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.

(John Masefield, “Sea Fever”)

To be fully ourselves, we need to venture out in unexplored territories and uncertain futures.  We need to grow and change: a human who doesn’t grow and change may have more qualities in common with an amoeba.

But also, to be fully ourselves, we need to be . . . ourselves.

On Day Five, God creates inhabitants for the depthless sea and the lofty sky.  Their scales flash in the sunlit water; their feathers strain light as they lift for flight.  Though they live measured lives, they cannot measure.  Birds don’t build birdhouses; whales don’t plant plankton farms.  They are there to feed us, and to be fed, as a Jewish teacher pointed out during a sermon on a hillside: “Consider the birds of the air.  They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns.  And yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matthew 6:26).

On another hillside, or perhaps even that same one, after the sermon, he confronted a crowd of 5000 hungry people.  Time for a practical application, as five small fish multiplied in his hands like a huge haul in a net, and filled every person there to the full.

The inhabitants of sea and sky feed our bodies, but they also feed our imaginations.  Our bodies can’t fly, but our minds can.

Creation, Day Six – Consciousness

  1. Think back on your childhood, from as early as you can remember, up through early adulthood.  Are you still 7, or 10, or 17 somewhere inside?   Do all those stages of yourself still exist?  What age to you best remember, or most identify with?
  2. How would you divide the phases of your growing-up years (e.g., early childhood 4-11, pre-adolescence 12-13, adolescence 14-17, young adult 17-25)?  What color would you give each phase?
  3. What’s different about you or your surroundings from last week to this week?

___________________________________________________

*Heraclitus of Ephesus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, ca. 500 B. C.   Though little is know about what he actually taught, he is credited with the idea that all matter is continually in flux.

**Parmenides of Elea, born ca. 515, wrote a poem called “On Nature,” of which about 100 lines survive, sketching his view of nature as all one thing and change as an illusion.