Reflections Upon Earth

Yesterday I ran outside to check the mail in my bare feet. Hadn’t done that in a while, and I had forgotten how amazing it feels.

Most of the time, I love school and I love thinking about deep questions. But academic life behind a computer can feel so abstract sometimes. Especially in distance learning, it’s a life disconnected from real voices, real faces—in fact, from real people. It lacks a kind of experiential concreteness, which is essential to our natures.

 So when my feet touched the ground outside, I was sharply aware of a contrast. Suddenly I felt that I had come out of a Laputian, abstract head-in-the-clouds world to taste visceral reality in a way that I had been missing. (Catch the Gulliver’s Travels reference there?)  It didn’t seem to matter much whether it was the rough, untamed grass of nature or the smooth, solid asphalt of civilization. They were both of a piece in a world of real things and I loved them for it. All at once I wanted to drop to the ground and kiss it.

But I was in a neighborhood. And those dread creatures known as The Neighbors would see. So of course I didn’t do it. Such is the power of social pressure.

Really, why should we often feel ashamed of such an action as kissing the earth? We only grudgingly approve it in extreme cases, as of a soldier returning to his native land. Otherwise, it’s just…weird…and greenie…or something like that. Worshipping the earth, maybe. 

I’m glad we don’t think the same way about kissing each other. I couldn’t bear to forbid my littlest sister’s slobbery bedtime kisses to me, on the charge that she was worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.  Why can’t we love the earth likewise, without sacrilege? As the crown of God’s material creation, are we so proud as to have forgotten our roots in the dust under our feet? To avoid calling the earth our mother, I think many of us have begun to consider the earth our servant—and you don’t kiss servants much. But Chesterton once said, “The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister,” and as he adds later, “a little sister.” Quite right, for as he says, we have a common Father—a Father who made us both, giving us something more of Himself, but calling all good. We are both a part of nature and something a little more. Same and other. There is no room here for nature worship, but neither is there room for gnostic pride in our “otherness.” The incarnate God has come out in favor of both the groaning creation and the man who causes it to groan—and redeems both.

Guess what? I’ve been inspired. If I kiss the earth behind the garage, nobody will be able to see… :-)

My Confessions

Funny how a bad week or two can make a faithless blogger feel like blogging...maybe it's a stress reliever.

To make a long, harrowing story of embarrassment and sobbing on my bedroom floor short, I've been late with three papers and two Latin assignments in the past few weeks, besides having made a few posts in western lit discussion forums that I wish I could retract.

One of those papers was really late. I mean reaaaally late. I'm always a procrastinator, but I usually manage to stop procrastinating at just the right moment. Not lately, though. I'm also a perfectionist, and I just couldn't get past writers' block; plus, I was struggling with how to deal with the assignment. Every day as it got later, I began an email to my professor asking him for help, but I could never quite follow through with sending them. So I struggled on alone. One night, after I was going on five days late, I grew so desperate to get the paper done that I wrote a final pleading email in the best Anne of Green Gables apology style, eating huge doses of humble pie and BEGGING for help in the lowest possible style. (I cringe at the memory.) And I swore that if I didn't finish the paper by 8:30 the next morning, I would send the email. Well I finished the paper. (One of the worst papers I ever wrote, but though it was terribly late, it was done anyway.)

For an unrelated purpose, I had to talk to that professor on the phone the same day and disgraced myself all over again by sounding absolutely terrified. Yeah, I'm blushing even as I write that. I'll always wonder whether it was actually noticeable, or whether I'm just acutely self-conscious.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, I positively bit two of my sisters' heads off when they tried to ask me simple questions. "How d'ya spell 'Happy Birthday'?" "I DON'T KNOW; LEAVE ME ALONE!!" "Unbutton my dress for me, please?" "GROW UP AND DO IT YOURSELF." One of them went and cried, and I felt terrible but didn't pull myself away from my computer long enough to go apologize. (Incidentally, I also bit off my fingernails, and I used to have very nice fingernails.)

God is gracious and forgiving. I'm thankful that the work of His Son does for me what I fail to do, and that when I fall short, He giveth more grace.

Still, I'm full of enough pride to wish He didn't need to give me quite so much.

Waking Up Our Senses

G. K. Chesterton once said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” We see some things so often, that we never really look at them, and so miss out on appreciating the marvels all around us. We live in a world of immortal beings, and we do not often treat them as such. Our senses are vitiated, and we grow tired of seeing things as they ought to be seen. We smile indulgently at a child amazed by a magnet, and yet the child is closer to the truth than we. He that would enter the kingdom of heaven must become as a little child, and much the same thing is required of the person who would enter the kingdom of earth.

This habit of undervaluing all things is, I think, very much like telling a lie. We often live as though we have weighed the world, and found the stars wanting and our fellow men not much worth our valuable time (perilously close to the sin of bearing false witness against our neighbors). But we have probably never given them the benefit of a perceptive, second look. We are often quite like the Pharisees whose ears were dull of hearing and their eyes closed, so that they could not see God in their midst.

And this is where Dr. Hake says one of the values of literature lies. “[B]ecause literature is concrete and appeals to our senses, literature can help wake up our senses. It can help us to really look at and see the things around us. It can help us to really listen and hear, smell, taste and touch.”

“If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time,” Chesterton said, and we may well say that this is what happens to us when we read an Emily Dickinson poem and for the first time “watch a beetle pass.” Good literature helps us to reach that 1000th glance at something which we finally begin to see. I dare anyone to read The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and not come to appreciate, in “Trespassers W,” something as simple as a broken sign. I hope there is no being so depraved that reading Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop does not, for one moment at least, cause him to look up and see the astonishing Dick Swivellers and Marchionesses that surround him in “ordinary” people. Literature renews us, and if indeed it should happen that a book would cause us to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and understand with our hearts, it might be that we would be converted and healed.


(Originally posted by me in my Western Lit. I class.) 

Review: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Translated into English Verse

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Translated into English Verse by Omar Khayyám




Rather odd poem celebrating the theme, "Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." Or maybe just drink for tomorrow we die.

If anyone accuses you, like Puddleglum, of being "too full of bobance and bounce and high spirits" and of needing something "to sober you down a bit," perhaps some sad lines like these would help:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and—sans End!

Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,
And those that after a TO-MORROW stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There."

....

Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn
My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd—"While you live,
Drink!—for once dead you never shall return."

Of course, if the point was to sober you down, maybe the poem is self-defeating. You'll be none too sober if you really take it's advice.



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Review: Johnny Tremain

Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Hehe, okay, everyone needs a bit of kids' stuff after a whole semester of grown-up person college subjects, right? Epistemology and metaphysics and Descartes and Hume all seem to fade into insignificance before the everlastingly sane world of children.

Johnny Tremain was an enjoyable, well-written piece of children's fiction. It should be fascinating even to a reluctant reader and will make a historical period come alive even if it doesn't teach a whole lot of history.



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Review: The Wrestler of Philippi

The Wrestler of Philippi by Fannie E. Newberry

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


The Wrestler of Philippi had the potential to be a good story. It's set in an exciting time period--the reign of the emperor Nero. It has the plot element of searching for long-lost family members, which is generally interesting. It even had a few scenes that could have been very powerful.

However, several flaws spoil the book. I might forgive the cocoa beans, though that is a serious historical error, and I might even forgive the clearly late-Victorian language of the characters, if the characters were characters at all. But they aren't. Nobody in the book is well-developed because the author tries to follow too many different threads, rather than sticking with one story. (Yes, I know Dickens could do that successfully, but few other people can.) Newberry attempts to weave in some biblical characters and events, such as the demon-possessed girl, whom Paul healed; the mesh does not work out though and only adds to the confusion of divergent story lines. The author also goes out of her way to rationalize a miracle, and then produces an ending more unbelievable than any miracle. She fails to evoke any sympathy for her characters, and in the end falls far short of any real dramatic power. Much better historical fiction for young people is out there; skip this one.



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Review: The Well and the Shallows

The Well and the Shallows by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the ways in which G. K. Chesterton really impresses me throughout this little book of essays is in his deep understanding of the right relationship between Christians, and social and economic concerns. Too often we tend to catch on to something, such as democratic-republican government, and make it part of our religion. We sometimes act similarly about capitalism, forcing ourselves to defend its faults as though it was straight out of the Bible instead of straight out of the Enlightenment. Or we may go in another wrong direction, and say Christians should have no concern in "worldly" affairs. One system is as bad as another and all of them are fundamentally none of our business.

The truth is that neither of these standpoints correctly represents Christianity, which is in its nature, both extremely other-worldly, and extremely concerned with this world also. Chesterton put it quite well in the essay "When the World Turned Back": "We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things." We should, by all means, be actively involved in all the concerns entailed by the command to love our neighbors as ourselves, whether politically or socially or what-have-you, but we should never come to a place where we forget that any man-based system is capable of going wrong.

In this little book, Chesterton wrote words that should be the motto on the door of every Christian activist: "Try a Monarchy if you think it will be better; but do not trust a Monarchy, in the sense of expecting that a monarch will be anything but a man. Be a Democrat if you like (and I shall always think it the most generous and the most fundamentally Christian ideal in politics); express your sense of human dignity in manhood suffrage or any other form of equality; but put not your trust in manhood suffrage or in any child of man. There is one little defect about Man, the image of God, the wonder of the world and the paragon of animals; that he is not to be trusted. If you identify him with some ideal, which you choose to think is his inmost nature or his only goal, the day will come when he will suddenly seem to you a traitor."

As Chesterton suggests in the title of the book, it is the world that is shallow, and Christianity that has the well of truth. We may acknowledge that the puddles of the world may hold some good water, and we may pour into them of the "living water," but we should never mistake the puddles for the well.

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Christmas Break

Partial list of my activities since the end of the term:

1. watched "Miracle on 34th Street"
2. sewed Christmas dresses for two small sisters
3. watched "The Bells of St. Mary's" (second favorite Christmas movie)
4. sang "What Child is This?" in church Christmas program (dreadful experience)
5. met a fellow Distance Learning classmate
6. finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
7. watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (favorite Christmas movie)
8. read "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" by William Blake
9. read Rasselas by Samuel Johnson
10. sewed Christmas potholders (harder than Christmas dresses)
11. joined Mom in dancing the chimney sweep dance from "Mary Poppins"

Shall We Devote a Whole Month to Christmas?

"All the old wholesome customs in connection
with Christmas were to the effect that one
should not touch or see or know or speak of
something before the actual coming of Christmas
Day. Thus, for instance, children were never
given their presents until the actual coming of the
appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up
in brown-paper parcels, out of which an arm of a
doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally
stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect
of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications.
The editors of the magazines bring out their
Christmas numbers so long before the time that
the reader is more likely to be lamenting for the
turkey of last year than to have seriously settled
down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which
is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought
to be tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas
Day. On consideration, I should favour the editors
being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg
or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude
I leave to individual choice."
--G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered


Dear Mr. Chesterton,

Humbly acknowledging the vast superiority of your intellect to mine, I must beg to differ with you here.  Why should Christmas be restricted to one day? We look forward with anticipation to the commemoration of the birth of our holy Saviour; why therefore should we repress our celebration? Let us bring out our tree the day after thanksgiving and watch our Christmas movies--the modern equivalent of your Christmas magazines--every other day from now until then.  Your own church, Mr. Chesterton, holds an Advent season every year; and if we begin early to pray, may we not also rejoice?

Your devoted reader,
Sarah

Review of The Story of the Other Wise Man

     Since its first publication in 1895, Henry van Dyke’s novella, The Story of the Other Wise Man, has been an annual Christmas favorite and has been reprinted in a new binding nearly every year. Often considered a story for children, but enjoyed by adults as well, this poignant tale follows the adventures of Artaban, “the fourth wise man”, as he searches for the One foretold by the star he has seen, and how in not finding—he finds.
    The book was well researched and as a result, is rich with the flavor of the Orient.  Older readers may enjoy the first part of the book the most, where Artaban explains the reasons for his quest, and find the ending a little clichéd though still well handled.  Younger readers may find the late nineteenth century writing style difficult to read, but with a little patience, they should be able to understand and appreciate it.
    Making a great holiday read-aloud, this thought provoking story reminds us that the real story of Christmas does not end with Jesus’ birth.  For those who still seek Him, that is only the beginning.