priestly poets, poetic priests

"I don't deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet."
-G.K. Chesterton, Manalive

Now go and read some good poetry;
be thrilled with the joy of being thoroughly alive! :]

excuse me, i have my rights

Yesterday I was having such a grumpy day. Off-season workouts had just begun, and I legitimately had not been that sore for over two years. Every step I took yesterday, every time I tried to raise my arm, especially every time I sat down or stood up, I experienced the most excruciating pain. Conditioning was supposed to be extra long that night. Add to that the fact that I had not been getting as much sleep as I would have liked for the last few days, and you have a pretty good idea of my state of mind. And, of course, I considered several people to be unusually obnoxious, crunching ice or chewing their gum with open mouths for the entire class period. I was just grumpy.

However, while sitting in literary criticism (discussing Freudian psychology and psychoanalytic literary theory... bleh), I had a bit of a revelation. Who am I to claim all these things from life? I mean, how do I think that it is my right to have a body that is not sore, or to get a full eight hours of sleep a night? I realized how blessed I was to have a body that functioned to the capacity that I could work out and be sore. I recalled this quote by C.S. Lewis:

"Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that [a man] can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered."

I just recently told someone about how firmly I believed in curing flaws NOT by focusing on the unwanted vice, but on the desired virtue. I had resolved to curb my tendency to complain, but my focus was still on not complaining, rather than on being positively thankful. Next on my agenda: realizing that I really have few claims on life that I should expect as basic rights. Being well-rested and free from pain are not basic rights, they are blessings. I want to see life in a consistently grateful way.

you are what you eat.

At church on Sunday, I was thinking about the Lord's Supper, and I was struck by a new thought:

As Christians, we are physically nourished, corporeally fed by the symbol of Christ's redeeming grace. The phrase that came to my mind was a simple one. As Christians, we are sustained by sacrifice. We wouldn't have spiritual life without Christ's sacrifice--we are spiritually fed by his death on the cross. In a small measure, through the symbol of communion, we are also physically fed by Christ's sacrifice.

What does that mean practically--that we are sustained by sacrifice (both physically and spiritually)? It means that we should be primarily fed by Christ's sacrifice on the cross, but that we should also live in such a way that we languish without consistent sacrifices of our own, sacrifices for other people among whom God has placed us.

I want to continually challenge myself to live a life of servant-like self-sacrifice and to cultivate an appetite for wholehearted unselfishness. Or perhaps, rather than focusing on "unselfishness," I should aim for the rather old-fashioned "charity." As Lewis remarks in his Screwtape Letters, the focus shouldn't be on my unselfishness in foregoing certain benefits, but in surrendering benefits so that others may be happy in having them. My focus should be not on the bigness of my own self-denial, but in the simple joy of providing blessings to others.

My (admittedly very small) first step? I have a piece of a friend's favorite candy in my pocket. Tomorrow he will have a pleasant mid-day surprise.

Thus starts my mission to embody a willing and joyful charity.

a poetic whim

I came across this poem in the preface to my edition of The Great Gatsby (a fantastic novel that I enjoyed, if you're looking for some tragic and richly descriptive social satire. But my opinion of Gatsby is entirely beside the point. The jaunty and oddly fascinating little poem is what I really mean to share).

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
-Thomas Parke D'Invilliers

flabby sin and flabby virtue

C.S. Lewis' Screwtape, devil and tempter, on the modern pandemic of milquetoast sin:

"Then there was the lukewarm Casserole of Adulterers. Could you find in it any trace of a fully inflamed, defiant, rebellious, insatiable lust? I couldn't. They all tasted to me like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or to make themselves feel modern and emancipated, or to reassure themselves about their virility or their 'normalcy,' or even because they had nothing else to do.

"The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness--how should a jelly not conform? Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible.

"The quality may be wretched; but we never had souls (of a sort) in more abundance."

I hope this inspires you, not to avoid sexual immorality (though you undoubtedly should), but to be bold, wise, and deliberate about your actions. Know what virtue is! Meditate on it and seek it in every area of your life! I hope you are sure enough of who you are (and Whose you are) that you are never misled by the world into halfhearted sin.

blessings and bodies

This semester I read a poem by Andrew Marvell called "A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body." In this poem, the soul complains,

"O who shall, from this dungeon, raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as it were, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart."

Recently I read a similar poem by C. S. Lewis entitled "The Magician and the Dryad," the dryad is given a body through the magician's art. Far from rejoicing, she laments this incarnation, crying,

"Oh till now she drank
With thirst of myriad mouths the bursting cataracts of the sun,
The drizzle of gentler stars, an indivisible small rain.
Wading the dark earth, made of earth and light, cradled in air,
All that she was, she was all over. now the mask you call
A Face has blotted out the ambient hemisphere's embrace;
Her light is screwed into twin nodules of tormenting sight;
Searing divisions tear her into five. She cannot hear
But only see, the moon; earth has no taste; she cannot breathe
At every branch vibrations of the sky. For a dome of severance,
A helmet, a dark, rigid box of bone, has overwhelmed
Her hair... that was her lungs... that was her nerves... that kissed the air.
Crushed in a brain, her thought that circled coolly in every vein
Turns into poison, thickens like a man's, ferments and burns.
She was at peace when she was in her unity. Oh now release
And let her out into the seamless world, make her forget."

Have you ever considered your physical body to be, not an expression of your soul, but a restriction of your soul? I hadn't, until this year, and now I sometimes long for, in the words of N. D. Wilson, "eyes hard enough to pierce the cherubim games, for unbursting ears to hear the planets sing." But perhaps, perhaps, in the words of C. S. Lewis' "On Being Human,"

"I know the senses' witchery
Guards us, like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be."

Meanwhile, I am thrilled with the beauty and joy God does allow us to experience. Lewis continues,

"Yet here, within this tiny, charm'd interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours...
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The hill-born, early spring, the dark cold bilberries
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot,
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves
Porridge, the tingling taste of oranges..."

Yep, I'm pretty thrilled with the blessings I have, and I'll always be curious--could there be more?