I now have my own copy so I can write in it. As far as discerning where I am, I try to go to Confession at least once a week and the day after seems to be a day of massive temptations. Which would be today. So I understand on page 236 where she says she only thought about the Passion and her own sins.
I'm Charismatic and I've heard it said before about the three sources of visions. And I used to have them and get stressed because they showed terrible things until I came to realize that they were symbolic and nothing that was going to happen in reality but they symbolized things that really were going to happen in reality. What a relief. I also expect myself to spend a lot of time with prayer and Scripture.
Unfortunately, I don't have anyone I have to obey right now except Jesus. I was told long ago by someone when I was on a one day retreat that we should join the 200 club by doing the next 200 things we thought God wanted us to do and before we got that far we would pretty much know when the source wasn't Jesus. But I still get tricked from time to time. I think it was Merton who said God knows if we are trying to do His will even when we are mistaken and accepts the good intention, although he didn't use those words.
And I like that she tells us to model our lives on Christ and by their deeds you will know them.
I want to believe that I am Charismatic in the sense of experiencing the Holy Spirit as the nearest point of contact with the Trinity. (Insofar as I allow and invite the Trinity to manifest
Itself in me.)
The likelihood of temptations exploiting my holy desires, (Lower case intentional.) is not a matter of doubt for me, historically. I have been influenced by the adversary for most of my adult life, which in simpler times commenced at the age of 13, with a functional rational component awaking. In the present and future, my concerns about discernment of spirits remains very much alive.
Perhaps you have noted that I asked Bridget if she was drawn to eschatology as a compelling field of study. I now feel OK with asking you the same thing, Sue.
Thank you for sharing your experience. The Truth, freely expressed, is always of value.
I am not particularly drawn to eschatology as a compelling field of study, partly because so many people try to make Scripture symbolic, whereas I think different people have seen the same things and have put them in terms that make sense to them. We see a mushroom cloud and they see hands rolling up the sky like a scroll. We don't use scrolls so their description lacks meaning for us.
I'm trained as a historian so I am much more drawn to the activities of the 14th-16th centuries. Disaster then recovery then trying to go beyond where recovery has led into a new and more human caused disaster. Sigh. And so the world works.
If you know more than a little about R. G. Collingwood, as a Philosopher of History, among other things, we may have much in common. I mean, even more in common...
Not to put too much on a recently abandoned tangent of my own, however.
I'm feeling a bit like a modest dust devil dreaming of greater things; wondering where A Mighty Wind might actually be of Service to Our Lord, if He has such a use of the likes of me.
I think I read him long ago in my Historiograpy class at Michigan State, but I wasn't much impressed because we had to read 400 pages from a select group of journals with at least from 7 or 8 different ones. Once I started reading from the Journal of Interdisciplinary History I was hooked and spent all my extra reading time there.
The thought now bugging me is, "Well, no sense of smell? You know that this, most primitive sense of all, has something profound to do with learning as in Simple Memory?"
I do indeed, but I learned too late to invite medical interventions, which have been known to work.
I've made do with an otherwise possibly useless and ridiculously high IQ: 99.9 percentile Verbal and 99.2 percentile Math on the GRE. (Measured within a sample averaging 90 percentile within the general population.) Crazy! That, and having learned to do residential painting and general carpentry as a young man, enabled me to support myself independently and honorably, after proving too socially inept to thrive in the modern ecology community. (And they say grad school cannot teach you anything you really need to know!) Case closed!
The thought bugging me is: Might not the lack of a sense of smell have something to do with an early self-evaluation, as being one who, "Does. Not. Understand. What. Love. Is?" I have no idea. Maybe normal folk identify friend and foe by what they smell like? As do ants and social creatures of All kinds.
Do I get any slack when Judged by Him Who made me this way? I can manage the rational aspect here. Rationally, I understand and repent bitterly my failures in loving fully, or obeying fully when I was under authority. I am far from Perfections which I do understand in this regard, but what is this total love required by God?
Many of us other folks have lost part or all of the sense of smell during COVID, temporarily or permanently. Mine came back but after viral pneumonia in a following year it left again and came back rather enfeebled (this has helped with detachment to favorite foods I suppose). But just as a classroom of Deaf kids might regard hearing as the uncanny ability to know whether someone loudly farted who is all the way across the room (as I once read someone remark on), you could regard the sense of smell as the ability to know whether someone silently farted who is nearby. If I say something smells wrong to intuition, however, I could use another figure of speech, like the sense that "a storm is coming although the sky still looks clear" (barometric pressure) or "someone else is (or is not) in the house", or the time I was walking on a bike trail past a vacant camping shelter and saw a thread of smoke coming from the remains of a campfire (things that are a bad sign, someone should have put it out better). Some kind of sensing (probabilistically) at a distance. But not taste (reserved for what psalms describe as sweeter than honey) which is more of a direct contact, indisputable, definite kind of thing. To use smell as a figure of speech, though, does allow me the liberty to figuratively smell what someone has figuratively tasted "on their breath" (pet cats might do this ... "you ate roast beef for lunch .. I would like some roast beef also..."... For humans to smell a human's lunch such as salami would not be pleasant so perhaps it's better not to combine figurative language.)
Taste I would miss more: Perhaps apples and raw potatoes do smell different, but for me there is no mistaking an apple and a raw tater. If I can taste burned-black, however, I know I might be the only one around the campfire who could still proceed with their meal without much regret.
"A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," is a title that leaps to mind. Ann or Anne (someone) the author's name not yet. Probably later.
Anyway. Even during my most secular humanist "phase," these was a sweetness on the spiration of her breath, uttered upon paper into visible words, that I could not fail to notice.
(Full disclosure, having no sense of smell all my life, I still have an imagined sense of what is implied by references to good and bad aromas. Just as a blind person can mean something real by saying, "I see.")
There IS something lacking in C. S. Lewis. Also, manifestly in, "The Screwtape Letters."
What I want to ask, as a fellow scholar of sci-fi and fantasy, is did (do?) you much care for Lewis's trilogy, (Silent Planet to Hideous Strength). These held my attention as an adolescent, but did not quite satisfy even then, when his other book length sermons were adequate for my perceived theological needs.
I fear I must return to the catching up in previous chapters. Once again, there is much of substance to respond to here. I offer but one spark of yours that landed on dry tinder.
We shall meet with sharpened quills and fresh ink on the open pages of 09 shortly.
I read Lewis's space trilogy first at some age when a lot of Hideous Strength went over my head, I preferred Narnia generally but thought Silent Planet was all right (it was the most Narnia-adjacent, I guess, having something like talking animals)... I also did not properly appreciate The Silver Chair as a child (I had no sympathy for getting everything wrong for a while until I had gotten everything wrong for a while). What I later appreciated was (as always) Lewis depicting the banality of evil in Perelandra (the bad-guy repeating the protagonist's name over and over again just to annoy him, successfully), and the overall character arc in the series which, after I knew about terminology, we could describe as the three ages (stages? thingummies) of the interior life: purgative (Silent Planet), illuminative (Perelandra and that fight in the dark underground, and a ride in a coffin at both ends), and unitive (this is one reason why Hideous Strength is in a way disappointing: Lewis sensibly does not attempt to write a viewpoint character who is above his experience, and so Ransom cannot be the guy we are following around and suddenly we have a couple of *new* everyman characters instead.) As an adult I also appreciated better the symbolism of a bite on the heel (not from a literal snake but he did crush its head). Come to think of it now, Frodo and Ransom both have wounds that will not fully heal (Ransom seems more sanguine about it, if I recall, but of course he did not *fail* the test in Perelandra and so he is differently-wounded on the inside than Frodo; in any case, Frodo's character arc does not depict the three stages so one does not expect him to be a living saint; I do not think it is common for a hero's journey to do that and I do not know whether it was intended by Lewis or just happened. The Deed of Paksennarion, Elizabeth Moon, comes closer than most, in depicting the growth curve of a dungeons-and-dragons-type paladin starting from square one.)
I think I agree that Lewis was writing what he knew. The banality of evil and the microscopic space allocated to hell, and I believe he was raised Episcopalian, was severely tested after the death of his wife, and recovered into Catholicism eventually. Where this arc intersects with his writing-as-arc, I do not know. My sense is that he was wounded and did not recover into Union. And perhaps he did not even enter the later Mansions of Contemplation either. I suppose this is neither here nor there. That would account for the something missing and something that tastes bitter about his later self-presentation, for want of the correct term, however. There is something of a similar bitter failing of youthful ideals about T. S. Elliot as well.
(I've never read any Narnia or done a D+D thing.) Tolkien would be common ground, though The Hobbit came much later to me and my first reading of the Ring Trilogy was post high school, as I was preparing to leave home for a superficially wider world. Looking back, Frodo's wound was not something that I properly noticed, much less understood, until, well, perhaps still not understood...
Thank you. I shall try not to occupy too much space as we figure out how best to serve each other in Christ.
I had occasion to learn this morning that Lewis was an examined and defended rationalistic atheist before becoming a theist before becoming Catholic before becoming fully convinced of the historical reality of the Resurrection.
It is entirely possible that what I perceive as lacking in someone else is also possibly lacking in myself. Do ya' think?
Edit 3h later. That nails down the, "something lacking," I had noted previously.
Last night I watched a one-hour documentary about the meeting of Lewis and Tolkien in 1931 in which Lewis was persuaded to become a theist. (Lewis's Protestantism in its mature form tracked as sooo Catholic to me that I made an assumption, well founded on ignorance...)
"Tolkien and Lewis: Myth, Imagination, and the Quest for Meaning." Prime video. Really quite good and challenging to what might be complacency in our Church regarding the sophistication of other belief systems. Or more precisely, the complacency of many Catholics regarding the full depths of our own beliefs.
The misery of self knowledge is a fast and safe road (I guess, although with some caveats like "are there also symptoms of clinical depression") but he can't find many people who will *consent* to feeling it (on his schedule and not theirs) because it is pretty dreadful. The whole problem is *wanting* ... wanting things to be other than what they are.... "Wanting to not want" (if one knows that this is the problem or has had a taste of what it would be like but can't get back to that state because of course it was a preview by some temporary grace for encouragement) is just the same misery in a different shape (I want to be a saint already but I am not! Just as bad, in feelings, as wanting to be a millionaire or other material things) and one has to consent to God fixing it at whatever pace is pleasing to him, and consent to being unable to do much of anything besides consent (although we have to do what little we can). We do not stop being "nothing" but we will eventually be cured of wanting to be something.
I now have my own copy so I can write in it. As far as discerning where I am, I try to go to Confession at least once a week and the day after seems to be a day of massive temptations. Which would be today. So I understand on page 236 where she says she only thought about the Passion and her own sins.
I'm Charismatic and I've heard it said before about the three sources of visions. And I used to have them and get stressed because they showed terrible things until I came to realize that they were symbolic and nothing that was going to happen in reality but they symbolized things that really were going to happen in reality. What a relief. I also expect myself to spend a lot of time with prayer and Scripture.
Unfortunately, I don't have anyone I have to obey right now except Jesus. I was told long ago by someone when I was on a one day retreat that we should join the 200 club by doing the next 200 things we thought God wanted us to do and before we got that far we would pretty much know when the source wasn't Jesus. But I still get tricked from time to time. I think it was Merton who said God knows if we are trying to do His will even when we are mistaken and accepts the good intention, although he didn't use those words.
And I like that she tells us to model our lives on Christ and by their deeds you will know them.
I want to believe that I am Charismatic in the sense of experiencing the Holy Spirit as the nearest point of contact with the Trinity. (Insofar as I allow and invite the Trinity to manifest
Itself in me.)
The likelihood of temptations exploiting my holy desires, (Lower case intentional.) is not a matter of doubt for me, historically. I have been influenced by the adversary for most of my adult life, which in simpler times commenced at the age of 13, with a functional rational component awaking. In the present and future, my concerns about discernment of spirits remains very much alive.
Perhaps you have noted that I asked Bridget if she was drawn to eschatology as a compelling field of study. I now feel OK with asking you the same thing, Sue.
Thank you for sharing your experience. The Truth, freely expressed, is always of value.
I am not particularly drawn to eschatology as a compelling field of study, partly because so many people try to make Scripture symbolic, whereas I think different people have seen the same things and have put them in terms that make sense to them. We see a mushroom cloud and they see hands rolling up the sky like a scroll. We don't use scrolls so their description lacks meaning for us.
I'm trained as a historian so I am much more drawn to the activities of the 14th-16th centuries. Disaster then recovery then trying to go beyond where recovery has led into a new and more human caused disaster. Sigh. And so the world works.
Very good. Thank you.
If you know more than a little about R. G. Collingwood, as a Philosopher of History, among other things, we may have much in common. I mean, even more in common...
Not to put too much on a recently abandoned tangent of my own, however.
I'm feeling a bit like a modest dust devil dreaming of greater things; wondering where A Mighty Wind might actually be of Service to Our Lord, if He has such a use of the likes of me.
God always has use for the people He made. Just ask him what He wants you to do TODAY and do it. And then do the same thing tomorrow.
I think I read him long ago in my Historiograpy class at Michigan State, but I wasn't much impressed because we had to read 400 pages from a select group of journals with at least from 7 or 8 different ones. Once I started reading from the Journal of Interdisciplinary History I was hooked and spent all my extra reading time there.
Annie Dillard. I had to resort to "search."
The thought now bugging me is, "Well, no sense of smell? You know that this, most primitive sense of all, has something profound to do with learning as in Simple Memory?"
I do indeed, but I learned too late to invite medical interventions, which have been known to work.
I've made do with an otherwise possibly useless and ridiculously high IQ: 99.9 percentile Verbal and 99.2 percentile Math on the GRE. (Measured within a sample averaging 90 percentile within the general population.) Crazy! That, and having learned to do residential painting and general carpentry as a young man, enabled me to support myself independently and honorably, after proving too socially inept to thrive in the modern ecology community. (And they say grad school cannot teach you anything you really need to know!) Case closed!
The thought bugging me is: Might not the lack of a sense of smell have something to do with an early self-evaluation, as being one who, "Does. Not. Understand. What. Love. Is?" I have no idea. Maybe normal folk identify friend and foe by what they smell like? As do ants and social creatures of All kinds.
Do I get any slack when Judged by Him Who made me this way? I can manage the rational aspect here. Rationally, I understand and repent bitterly my failures in loving fully, or obeying fully when I was under authority. I am far from Perfections which I do understand in this regard, but what is this total love required by God?
Many of us other folks have lost part or all of the sense of smell during COVID, temporarily or permanently. Mine came back but after viral pneumonia in a following year it left again and came back rather enfeebled (this has helped with detachment to favorite foods I suppose). But just as a classroom of Deaf kids might regard hearing as the uncanny ability to know whether someone loudly farted who is all the way across the room (as I once read someone remark on), you could regard the sense of smell as the ability to know whether someone silently farted who is nearby. If I say something smells wrong to intuition, however, I could use another figure of speech, like the sense that "a storm is coming although the sky still looks clear" (barometric pressure) or "someone else is (or is not) in the house", or the time I was walking on a bike trail past a vacant camping shelter and saw a thread of smoke coming from the remains of a campfire (things that are a bad sign, someone should have put it out better). Some kind of sensing (probabilistically) at a distance. But not taste (reserved for what psalms describe as sweeter than honey) which is more of a direct contact, indisputable, definite kind of thing. To use smell as a figure of speech, though, does allow me the liberty to figuratively smell what someone has figuratively tasted "on their breath" (pet cats might do this ... "you ate roast beef for lunch .. I would like some roast beef also..."... For humans to smell a human's lunch such as salami would not be pleasant so perhaps it's better not to combine figurative language.)
Taste I would miss more: Perhaps apples and raw potatoes do smell different, but for me there is no mistaking an apple and a raw tater. If I can taste burned-black, however, I know I might be the only one around the campfire who could still proceed with their meal without much regret.
Things do work out.
"A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," is a title that leaps to mind. Ann or Anne (someone) the author's name not yet. Probably later.
Anyway. Even during my most secular humanist "phase," these was a sweetness on the spiration of her breath, uttered upon paper into visible words, that I could not fail to notice.
(Full disclosure, having no sense of smell all my life, I still have an imagined sense of what is implied by references to good and bad aromas. Just as a blind person can mean something real by saying, "I see.")
There IS something lacking in C. S. Lewis. Also, manifestly in, "The Screwtape Letters."
What I want to ask, as a fellow scholar of sci-fi and fantasy, is did (do?) you much care for Lewis's trilogy, (Silent Planet to Hideous Strength). These held my attention as an adolescent, but did not quite satisfy even then, when his other book length sermons were adequate for my perceived theological needs.
I fear I must return to the catching up in previous chapters. Once again, there is much of substance to respond to here. I offer but one spark of yours that landed on dry tinder.
We shall meet with sharpened quills and fresh ink on the open pages of 09 shortly.
I read Lewis's space trilogy first at some age when a lot of Hideous Strength went over my head, I preferred Narnia generally but thought Silent Planet was all right (it was the most Narnia-adjacent, I guess, having something like talking animals)... I also did not properly appreciate The Silver Chair as a child (I had no sympathy for getting everything wrong for a while until I had gotten everything wrong for a while). What I later appreciated was (as always) Lewis depicting the banality of evil in Perelandra (the bad-guy repeating the protagonist's name over and over again just to annoy him, successfully), and the overall character arc in the series which, after I knew about terminology, we could describe as the three ages (stages? thingummies) of the interior life: purgative (Silent Planet), illuminative (Perelandra and that fight in the dark underground, and a ride in a coffin at both ends), and unitive (this is one reason why Hideous Strength is in a way disappointing: Lewis sensibly does not attempt to write a viewpoint character who is above his experience, and so Ransom cannot be the guy we are following around and suddenly we have a couple of *new* everyman characters instead.) As an adult I also appreciated better the symbolism of a bite on the heel (not from a literal snake but he did crush its head). Come to think of it now, Frodo and Ransom both have wounds that will not fully heal (Ransom seems more sanguine about it, if I recall, but of course he did not *fail* the test in Perelandra and so he is differently-wounded on the inside than Frodo; in any case, Frodo's character arc does not depict the three stages so one does not expect him to be a living saint; I do not think it is common for a hero's journey to do that and I do not know whether it was intended by Lewis or just happened. The Deed of Paksennarion, Elizabeth Moon, comes closer than most, in depicting the growth curve of a dungeons-and-dragons-type paladin starting from square one.)
When I read the Silver Chair I connected immediately. Been there, done that. It fit me much more than the other books.
Perhaps I could do worse than reading the Narnia series, however late the hour.
I think I agree that Lewis was writing what he knew. The banality of evil and the microscopic space allocated to hell, and I believe he was raised Episcopalian, was severely tested after the death of his wife, and recovered into Catholicism eventually. Where this arc intersects with his writing-as-arc, I do not know. My sense is that he was wounded and did not recover into Union. And perhaps he did not even enter the later Mansions of Contemplation either. I suppose this is neither here nor there. That would account for the something missing and something that tastes bitter about his later self-presentation, for want of the correct term, however. There is something of a similar bitter failing of youthful ideals about T. S. Elliot as well.
(I've never read any Narnia or done a D+D thing.) Tolkien would be common ground, though The Hobbit came much later to me and my first reading of the Ring Trilogy was post high school, as I was preparing to leave home for a superficially wider world. Looking back, Frodo's wound was not something that I properly noticed, much less understood, until, well, perhaps still not understood...
Thank you. I shall try not to occupy too much space as we figure out how best to serve each other in Christ.
I had occasion to learn this morning that Lewis was an examined and defended rationalistic atheist before becoming a theist before becoming Catholic before becoming fully convinced of the historical reality of the Resurrection.
It is entirely possible that what I perceive as lacking in someone else is also possibly lacking in myself. Do ya' think?
Surprised by Joy was an interesting book (I have not reread it in a long time though).
Surprised by Joy; not one I have read.
Lewis remained Protestant.
I stand corrected.
Thank you.
Edit 3h later. That nails down the, "something lacking," I had noted previously.
Last night I watched a one-hour documentary about the meeting of Lewis and Tolkien in 1931 in which Lewis was persuaded to become a theist. (Lewis's Protestantism in its mature form tracked as sooo Catholic to me that I made an assumption, well founded on ignorance...)
"Tolkien and Lewis: Myth, Imagination, and the Quest for Meaning." Prime video. Really quite good and challenging to what might be complacency in our Church regarding the sophistication of other belief systems. Or more precisely, the complacency of many Catholics regarding the full depths of our own beliefs.
This thing about a soul becoming naked is beginning to feel quite literally True.
Another rung up in the Ladder of Trusting Jesus?
Rung as in bells having been sounded?
Sounded as in Depths plumbed?
Plumbed as in, Bob, suspended,
Perfectly Vertical?
Between Heaven and Earth
The misery of self knowledge is a fast and safe road (I guess, although with some caveats like "are there also symptoms of clinical depression") but he can't find many people who will *consent* to feeling it (on his schedule and not theirs) because it is pretty dreadful. The whole problem is *wanting* ... wanting things to be other than what they are.... "Wanting to not want" (if one knows that this is the problem or has had a taste of what it would be like but can't get back to that state because of course it was a preview by some temporary grace for encouragement) is just the same misery in a different shape (I want to be a saint already but I am not! Just as bad, in feelings, as wanting to be a millionaire or other material things) and one has to consent to God fixing it at whatever pace is pleasing to him, and consent to being unable to do much of anything besides consent (although we have to do what little we can). We do not stop being "nothing" but we will eventually be cured of wanting to be something.
Thank you!
I am moved to a feeling of Joy and Dread,
Swirling like cream in hot black coffee.
Light and Darkness dancing together
Not blending into grey.
Perhaps this is the Sublime? Another emotional mystery becoming accessible to me for a First Time?
Time is short, Dear Lord Jesus!
You know All I may yet manage:
I Trust in You!
I Trust in You!
I Trust in You!
Just Bring It!
Please!
Glory Be x Three
Crosses Self x Three
Amen