Nielsen’s Nook

While traveling back to Thulcandra, Ransom reflects:

He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite — that life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality.¹

It is said that the theologians of the Anglican church are often their poets and literary personae. Lewis certainly hands us weighty allusion to Christology here.

¹ Lewis, C. S. Out of the Silent Planet. (New York: Scribner, 1938), 145.

Suddenly the lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down. As if some demon had rubbed the heaven’s face with a dirty sponge, the splendour in which they had loved for so long blenched to a pallid, cheerless and pitiable grey. … Things do not always happen as man would expect. The moment of his arrival in an unknown world found Ransom wholly absorbed in a philosophical speculation.

In Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet there are many passages of gusto that evoke such lucid imagery. As Ransom (the protagonist) finds himself imprisoned, approaching the planet of Malacandra, Lewis tells us of Ransom’s perception that I wanted to pass on here.

^[1] C. S. Lewis. Out of the Silent Planet. (NewYork: Scribner 2003), 41.

“How does one get 25 hours out of a day?” Kuril, a Dallas native, asked himself.

“With gas prices soaring,” he thought further, “and the convenience of living by a Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) rail station, it would be wise to become a public transport patron.”

Something about the word patron made Kuril smirk. And in the midst of the mundane a most pleasant thought swam swiftly thought his mind. “It is a sort of luxury to read so much more than I would otherwise. In fact, I read the entire 30 minute commute each way. My 24 hour day just became 24+1.”

Awe fell upon him: there were no mornings here, no evenings, and no night — nothing but the changeless noon which had filled for centuries beyond history so many millions of cubic miles. ¹

“DART is a far cry from a spherical spaceship racing towards Malacandra,” Kuril whispered outloud. “Nevertheless, I hop on the train and find myself there and many other places.”

^[1] C. S. Lewis. Out of the Silent Planet. (NewYork: Scribner 2003), 31.

I was overwhelmed last weekend at the quite sensational(ized) AP news story of J. K. Rowling’s statement that she “always thought of Dumbledore as gay.” As one who has loved reading the Harry Potter books, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. When I read the CNN version of the story the line that seemed to have such a vicious barb was:

Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.

As far as promoting witchcraft, I would think one would be hard pressed to make such a claim of the Potter series. To do so would seem to require one to dismiss Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia with all of its “deep magic” and “magic deeper still.” And, of course, the real question is not the magic of fantasy and fiction but the politics of adding the sexuality to magic. I was not sure what to make of the CNN article. There were myriad feelings and thoughts. I was glad to find out the discussion was not happening with a thousand twelve year-olds or something like that (something the CNN article seemed happy to let one assume).

A colleague of mine pointed me to a piece by John Granger over at HogwartsProfessor.com. Granger has written at least four books on the Potter series. His article is written thoughtfully, with access to primary source material (i.e., Dr. Amy Sturgis, who was at Carnegie Hall and heard J. K. Rowling speak for herself. The assessment, being from a Christian perspective, is worth the read. The following are some summary points taken from the conclusion of the piece:

(1) The meaning of Ms. Rowling’s words are best understood in the contexts of her “connection” that night with the 19 year old woman who asked the question and of the dynamics of the crowd at this Open Book Tour event;

(2) The media presentation of the event as Ms. Rowling’s endorsement of homosexuality and an anti-faith agenda was straight from Rita Skeeter’s notebook and part of their endless campaign to convince the public that Ms. Rowling is the enemy of their enemy, namely, the Church;

(3) The anguished and disappointed response of many Christian readers to these reports was also according to Culture War formula and in keeping with a hyperextended understanding of the word “gay;”

(4) “Dumbledore is gay” no more makes the books an invitation to homosexuality or contrary to orthodox Christian belief than “Sorcerer’s Stone” made them a “gateway to the occult;” and

(5) If you want to understand the ten qualities of postmodern story telling and how Ms. Rowling weaves her engaging stories using all ten, you need to read the Postmodernism chapters of Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader. (I’d blush about the shameless plug except it’s the only thing I know in print or online that covers this subject.)

A colleague of mine passed a link onto me (thanks Stephanie!) for a blog that deals with all things Inklings. As she said, one of the things so likeable about this blog is its simplicity and conciseness, there is plenty to ponder yet not to much to drive one away. Enjoy The Inklings.

Vibrant Sanctified Life

God in his mercies gave us in Christ Jesus a new mind a new set of desires that are beyond what we could imagine before. Paul is urging us on here to that greater immeasurable Christian imagination. Now why do I put it like that?

Lewis put it something like this:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[1]

We are far too easily pleased, indeed. We come to worship Christ, the River of Life, on Sundays content to drink of him with eyedroppers and shot glasses, when he bids us to drink of his inexhaustible grace. We come expecting to hear a good sermon that tickles our ears and maybe makes us laugh when Christ is here presenting himself to us boundlessly, strengthening those of us who confess our weakness and sin. We pray that God would make our lives more convenient when He has bound himself to us for the purpose of walking with us through valleys of thick darkness to lift us beyond the mountain tops of our own imaginations.

¹See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. ²Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. ³And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. (1 Jn 3:1-3 NRSV)

You see, Jesus would give us himself, endlessly, and we settle for a diluted version because we don’t, won’t or can’t imagine the full throttled love that God demonstrates for us as he grows us up. The joy of renewing our minds and offering our bodies according to the holy, pleasing and telic purpose of God for us is that we have fellowship with him now as he grows us up in our faith that could not be imagined apart from Jesus Christ.

But what could it be like for us? Would you imagine for a moment what life might be like with a participation in Christ Jesus deeper still? What would it be like in your life, in the life of your church to have a greater purity of fellowship with Jesus as you would participate with him in the purification of your bodies and minds? Not only would there be transformation in this present time - now - but we would participate in the very telic purpose of God for us as human beings.

[1] Lewis, Clive Staples. The Weight of Glory. (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 26.

There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies blow. [1]

If you’re like me when you read just those two lines of poetry you probably spent as much energy if not more trying to fight off ridiculous images of flowers growing out of the pores of a woman’s face as you did trying to imagine what Thomas Campion was actually describing in his poem, There Is A Garden in Her Face.

Dorothy Sayers, a colleague of C. S. Lewis, quotes Campion in making the point that the modern day person generally has great difficulty with poetry, figures and symbols. We don’t like them because they ask more of us than we have the faculties to appreciate. We tend to like the things that can be measured and then exhausted; yet, poets and prophets have given us figures and symbols that move us beyond ourselves - to something beyond the maximum.

This seems to be true in the way we approach church and worship, in the way we order our lives, in the way we think about happiness and fulfillment, and particularly in the way we think of and relate to Jesus, our Lord. Writing to those who misunderstood the figures in Dante’s Paradiso, his work on Heaven, Sayers writes:

… one of the results of having substituted a philosophy of becoming for a philosophy of being is that the very notion of an achieved happiness has become not merely inconceivable but actually repugnant to us. Timelessness, or eternity, like Heaven itself, passes man’s understanding.2]

What Sayers writes about Paridiso applies to our approach to Romans 12:1-2 with its figures and symbols. In lusting after the measurable and exhaustible we have begun to think of the Christian faith in such terms. We have reduced Christianity down to mere propositions and steps and functions. The consequence is that the way we think about God, Christ, his Cross and even ourselves has become frozen still, comatose, even demonstrating a spiritual rigormortis of sorts.

The Pattern of Eternal Irruption into Paul’s Life

Many of us come to the Apostle Paul’s writings and we resonate with the structure of his argumentation. But let us not forget that Paul wrote as an Apostle not because he studied hard enough or tried harder than anybody else, but because God in His mysterious providence was pleased to irrupt into the Apostle Paul’s life and change everything here and now with a view towards eternity.

We are given that paradigm at the beginning of his Epistle to the Romans where Paul reminds us that he is a servant of Jesus set apart for the gospel of God

… concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh ⁴ and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, (Rom 1:3-4, NRSV)

God had come to earth in the flesh of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. In his perfect human life, Jesus lifted his new humanity to a place so great that sinners clutching to our failed depravity cannot imagine or measure or exhaust it. He has lifted us back to a place of integration and fellowship with God in himself.

Jesus Christ, Paul reminds us, was declared with power to be the Son of God on account of his resurrection from the dead, which demonstrated his life before the grave as perfect.

But resurrections don’t happen all the time do they? Scripture teaches us that all but a few resurrections will happen at the end of time, when Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, will judge the living and the dead.

Paul is telling us that something of the future has broken into the past and changed everything.

[1] Campion, Thomas. Campion’s Works. Percival Vivian, Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. 178. Quoted in Dorothy L. Sayers “Introduction” to Dante’s Paradiso, (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 28.
[2] Sayers, 28.