Ken Myers on C. S. Lewis' views on Presentism

Ken Myers, author of the "Contours of Culture" column in Touchstone magazine, illuminates C. S. Lewis' thinking on "Presentism": 


"Lewis laments the mentality of "Presentism," of provincialism in time, that plagues modern imaginations.  

"How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word 'stagnation,' with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called 'permanence'?...Why does 'latest' in advertisements mean 'best'?" 

"Lewis argued that this preoccupation with the present (and indifference  to or suspicion of the past) was a function of living with so much technology

"I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image.  It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones.  For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is clumsy."

"He went on to argue that our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded - that we should live for the next thing rather than treasure and honor the permanent things - was the single aspect of modern life that detached us most thoroughly from all previous ages of history." (1)


This view is particularly pithy when cross-referenced with a letter I read recently while reading Letters of C. S. Lewis. Lewis is responding to a letter from (I am not making this up) "The Society For The Prevention Of Progress" in May 1944:

"While feeling that I was born a member of your Society, I am nevertheless honoured to receive the outward seal of membership.  I shall hope by continued orthodoxy and the unremitting practice of Reaction, Obstruction, and Stagnation to give you no reason for repenting your favour..." (2)

Citation: 
(1) Myers, Ken. Touchstone Magazine: Contours of Culture, "No Time Like the Present". May/June, 2011.  Volume 24, Number 3. Pages 11, 12.
(2)  Lewis, W. H., Editor. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. New York. 1966. Page 204.

Planting theology...

I'm reading through the Letters of C.S. Lewis right now.  It has been a very rewarding read.  So many nuggets of thoughts buried in his letters.  Lewis wrote this,   

 So I lived a week...in one of those delightful vernal periods when doctrines which have hitherto been only buried seeds begin actually to come up - like snowdrops or crocuses.

and I felt a kinship.


Lewis, C.S. Letters of C.S. Lewis. Hardcourt, Brace and World, 1966.  W.H. Lewis, editor.  Page 194. 

Pancakes all around!!!

Pop quiz.  What familiar foreign phrase in our vocabulary is, when translated, "Fat Tuesday"?

The observance of the Lenten season, in many Christian traditions,  is a time of preparing the heart for the yearly focus on remembering the Passion of Christ.

What does that mean for my family?  This is a period of time that we do a Lenten version of the Jesse Tree.  Each night we read an age-appropriate reading with the children, read some scripture and hang a little picture on the tree, as we recall again why Christ had to come and die.  It is an opportunity (and I try and build as many opportunities into our day, week and year as I can) to teach my family the truths of the faith.  We choose to fast from some particular things in order to spur us to recall regularly our need for His Wonderful Grace.  My wife and I read a different book each year of thoughts on Lent by different authors.  This year, we are reading Bread and Wine-Readings for Lent and Easter, which is a compilation of the writings of several authors, including C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Madeleine L'Engle and many others.  And we will participate with a local Anglican congregation in some of their Liturgical services, which are, for us, wonderful celebrations of the awe-inspiring Gospel of Jesus that we thoroughly look forward to.

Do we "have" to do these things?
No.

Do they make us a little better in God's sight? Far from it.  Kind of the reverse.  They clear our vision a little bit, and help us to see Him in His majesty and mercy.  And we are grateful.

Fat Tuesday is the English translation for "Mardi Gras".  Today is "Fat Tuesday", "Shrove Tuesday", or, as we prefer, "Pancake Day"

Pancake Day?  Yep.  That's how it is referred to in many countries.  The idea behind the tradition is that in many Christian traditions, Lent was a time of fasting.  Depending on time in history and location, the fast was more, or less rigid, and so, because people knew they weren't going to be eating eggs, fat, milk, etc. for 40 days, and since those items would go bad, they would use them up.  And what better way to use up those particular ingredients than whipping up a big batch of pancakes?

How wonderful is that?

So, if you really want to be justified before God, then you had better eat pancakes today. ***

***Sorry, that was a little justification humor.  No man was ever justified by eating pancakes.  I promise.  Even if the pancakes were super-yummy filled ebelskivers!  And even if the Ebelskivers were eaten as dessert after homemade pizza!  Hmmm...I'm looking forward to supper tonight!

Have a Happy Pancake Day!

Blueberry Ebelskivers!

Samuel Johnson Quotes

I have a book on my bathroom bookshelf named Schott's Original Miscellany.  It is filled with informational tidbits that are sometimes interesting (The rules of Cricket), sometimes mind-boggling (the word in English purported to have the most letters is the scientific name for the Tobacco Mosaic Virus, which has 1,185 letters, and which I will not reproduce here) and sometimes useful (a list of commonly mispelled (sic) words, including conasuwer, which is, correctly, "connoisseur").


But, most importantly for this particular post, there is also a set of quotations from Samuel Johnson (the author of the first essential English Dictionary, and a thought-provoking wit).  I thoroughly enjoy Samuel Johnson's work and so I will offer a sub-selection of Schott's selection of quotes.

"What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence."

"The true art of memory is the art of attention."

"In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness."

"Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

"The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing."

"Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero...must drink brandy."

"To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise.  It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage."

"The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends."

"Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he doesn't possess."

"It matters not how a man dies, but how a man lives.  The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time."

"He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great."

Citation:
Schott, Ben. Schott's Original Miscellany. Bloomsbury, London, United Kingdom. 1988. Pages 22, 23 

the Cosmati pavement at Westminster Abbey

Stratford Caldecott, on his blog, posted the following picture and commentary about the Cosmati Pavement in Westminster Abbey:





"The pavement was laid down in 1268 by order of King Henry III who had started re-building St Edward the Confessor’s Abbey in the new Gothic style in 1245. The workmen came from Rome, with a man called Odoricus at their head. It is 24 feet 10 inches (7 metres 58 centimetres) square, with dimensions calculated in Roman feet, and consists of geometrical patterns built up from pieces of stone of different colours and sizes cut into a variety of shapes: triangles, squares, circles, rectangles and many others. The basic layout is a four-fold symmetry, but in detail the variations are endless. No two roundels are the same. Of the four "orbiting" roundels one is circular, one hexagonal, one heptagonal and one octagonal. The infill patterns are all different.

The inscriptions that accompanied the design, now damaged, read in part: "If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile" and "The spherical globe here shows the archetypal macrocosm."

The round stone at the centre contains colours representing the four elements. It is on this stone that every king or queen of England was crowned."


He also had this link to a BBC documentary that goes into much more detail about the pavement and its interesting history.


Citation:
<http://beauty-in-education.blogspot.com/2010/10/pope-and-pavement.html>. Accessed 23 February 2011

Alinea Restaurant

William A. Foster says

"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives" (1)

Robert Farrar Capon (an Anglican) says

"For all its greatness, the created order cries out for further greatness still.  The most splendid dinner, the most exquisite food, the most gratifying company, arouse more appetites than they satisfy.  They do not slake man's thirst for being; they whet it beyond all bounds." (2)

Denise Frame Harlan says, in response to that paragraph from Capon's truly marvelous book, "The Supper of the Lamb"

"I'd never known what to do with all the love in my heart for this beautiful, mess of a world.  All this time, I'd been trying to temper and tame my passion for mountains and tea and road trips and cheesecake and people. I'd known God my whole life, had known Christ for a decade, and had focused on Jesus's suffering and sacrifice.  I'd been afraid to love anything too much for fear that I'd disappoint God and prove myself too worldly, too attached to the everyday stuff of creation that would hinder my race toward heaven and the life hereafter.  I'd been afraid, and I'd held my heart back.  Suddenly it occured to me that this fear, this withholding, might be sin.  Maybe I'd had everything all wrong." (3)

Maybe she had.  


I believe that the very good creation of God, when taken in its proper light, can be fingers pointing us, His incarnate creatures, back to the creator, who made us creative in His image.


Alinea is a restaurant that sets the bar high, when it comes to looking intensely at the creation and then continuing the creative act.


I want to go there one (1) time in my life, with my wife.  (A dream my pocket book and consciousness of the needs of the poor forced me to give up as soon as it formed.)


Does anyone want to donate $400? :)


Though the pictures you are about to look at are an exaggerated expression of what I am talking about (with corresponding price tag), I think that God, who gave us all things richly to enjoy wants us to join Him in creation, and enjoy Him in creativity.  

Caramel Popcorn

Apple

Blackberry

Peanut

Bean

PB&J

Chestnut

Tomato

Strawberry

Venison

Hot Potato-Cold Potato

Sweet Potato

Tomato

Note that price at the bottom 

(4)

Citation:
(1) Foster, William A. 
<http://thinkexist.com/quotation/quality_is_never_an_accident-it_is_always_the/226780.html>. Accessed 16 February 2011.
(2) Capon, Robert Farrar. The Supper of the Lamb. Smithmark, New York, NY. 1969.  
(3) Harlan, Denise Frame. "And She Took Flour".  From The Spirit of Food by Leslie Leyland Fields. Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon. 
(4) <http://www.alinearestaurant.com/>. Accessed 11 February 2011

A glimpse of the goodness of God

I am so grateful for every glimpse of the Gospel that I receive.  Here is one glimmering thought that sheds light for us. 

"...the God who saves us and the God who judges us is one God.  We are not, even, condemned by his severity and redeemed by his compassion; what judges us is what redeems us, the love of God.  What is it that will break our hearts on judgement day?  Is it not the vision, suddenly unrolled, of how he has loved the friends we have neglected, of how he has loved us, and we have not loved him in return; how when we came before his alter, he gave us himself, and we gave him half-penitence's, or resolutions too weak to commit our wills?  But while love thus judges us by being what it is, the same love redeems us by effecting what it does.  Love shares flesh and blood with us in this present world, that the eyes which look us through at last may find in us a better substance than our vanity..."

-From Love Came Down - Anglican Readings for Advent and Christmas

That thought reminds me of one of my favorite poems.  Scott Cairns, whose poem I found here, wrote this

Possible Answers to Prayer

"Your petitions—though they continue to bear   

just the one signature—have been duly recorded.   

Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent   

entertainment value—nonetheless serve   

to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath   

a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more   

conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,   

the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes   

recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly   

righteous indignation toward the many   

whose habits and sympathies offend you—         

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend   

how near I am, with what fervor I adore

precisely these, the several who rouse your passions."

Thoughts on the family in relationship to the church

What is the relationship between the family and the local and universal church?  That question has been one of my constant companions as our family has grown and I have realized that I have a biblical mandate as a husband and father.

While browsing this rather wonderful Anglican family blog, I discovered The Domestic Church website.  Here are some interesting excerpts with thoughts on what it means to be a family within the context of the church:

"The Early Church described the family as the “domestic church.” This meant that it was not just a sociological unit. Rather, the family was created to play a specific role in God’s plan of salvation.

"Thus, the family is deeply associated with the Church in both its nature and structure. In the Old Testament, the family was so central that without it, there simply was no covenant. In the New Testament, the family reached its proper fulfillment in Christ. The family became the place where the Holy Spirit works out the salvation of each member and provided stability and structure for life’s journey.

"The baptized family is the first place where the essential teachings in catechesis, prayer, and morality are carried out to help in the conversion and development of growing Christians.

"Because the Christian family is the Church in miniature, it also shares the nature of Christ. It has a priestly, prophetic, and kingly dimension to it. The family offers Christ and intercedes for its own members and those around it (priestly); the family is a sign of Christ’s love and faithfulness to a world that is enmeshed in the culture of death (prophetic); and the family serves its own members and those around it sacrificially (kingly).

"By participating in the saving and redemptive nature of the Church, the family is profoundly rooted in the Church’s mission. The family has truly become a little church, or as it is better known, a domestic church."

An Anglican's Response

Those that have been keeping tabs on me for a while will know that I have been considering the Anglican Church as a possible way of expressing my faith and worship. I first started considering this as an option when I discovered how many of the authors that influence my thinking are Anglican.  (C.S. Lewis, Os Guinness, Jeremy Begbie, J.B. Phillips, G.K. Chesterton-who was Catholic, nee Anglican, Alan Jacobs, and probably most importantly Ken Myers.)  


These are all men who, as authors and thinkers, I deeply admire, and whose thoughts I ponder.  As I realized that Anglicanism was a common thread, I decided to explore for myself.  


In the middle of that, I happened upon Alan Jacobs e-mail address.  His blog, which I follow, was having a comments issue, so he posted his e-mail address in order to rectify the problem.  I took that opportunity to write to him with a question, "Why are you Anglican?" (a question which I introduced a little less abruptly in the e-mail.)


A.J., the "Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English" at Wheaton, was polite enough to respond, and here is a part of his e-mail, which was a copy and paste of something he wrote for his church's website:


"We are heirs of CATHOLIC tradition: we draw for our sustenance upon
teaching and practices that go back to the Apostles but flowered fully
in the Church's first several centuries. The foundation laid for us,
and for all subsequent generations of thoughtful Christians, by the
Early Church Fathers is a rich legacy. From those early times we
inherit our Creed, our sacramental worship, and our sacramental
theology; these we share with Christ's true Church wherever it may be
found. We see that kinship in powerful ways when we look upon our
brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Orthodox
world. In that sense we claim, and rejoice in, catholicity.

"But we also acknowledge that that Church has not always faithfully
preserved its theological and spiritual inheritance, and that, in His
love and care, in the sixteenth century God raised up great men of
faith to REFORM the church, to call us back to the Bible as the
ever-living Word of God, the reliable testimony to his grace and favor
towards us in the life, death, and resurrection of His Son. In that
Word we see clearly that we are saved by God's boundless grace, and we
appropriate that grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It is this
message -- which we share with all the churches that trace their
lineage to the Reformation -- that we proclaim in our preaching and
enact in our worship.

"We strive to be a church that is fully catholic and fully reformed;
and this is what we think it means to be ANGLICANS."


This short essay was particularly interesting because I had recently decided to stop acting as if history didn't exist as I pursued loving God and loving others.