I stood on the shore of a wintry sea

I stood on the shore of a wintry sea, with a wintry sun just a few feet above its horizon-edge. It was bare, and waste, and gray. Hundreds of hopeless waves rushed constantly shorewards, falling exhausted upon a beach of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave. No rock lifted up a sheltering severity above the dreariness around; even that from which I had myself emerged rose scarcely a foot above the opening by which I had reached the dismal day, more dismal even than the tomb I had left. A cold, death-like wind swept across the shore, seeming to issue from a pale mouth of cloud upon the horizon. Sign of life was nowhere visible. I wandered over the stones, up and down the beach, a human imbodiment of the nature around me. The wind increased; its keen waves flowed through my soul; the foam rushed higher up the stones; a few dead stars began to gleam in the east; the sound of the waves grew louder and yet more despairing. A dark curtain of cloud was lifted up, and a pale blue rent shone between its foot and the edge of the sea, out from which rushed an icy storm of frozen wind, that tore the waters into spray as it passed, and flung the billows in raving heaps upon the desolate shore. I could bear it no longer.

"I will not be tortured to death," I cried; "I will meet it half-way. The life within me is yet enough to bear me up to the face of Death, and then I die unconquered."

Myth or Reality

I have sometimes remarked how the shape of my Christian faith might have been very different had it not been from the works of C. S. Lewis. He in turn spoke of George Macdonald as his master saying that he fancied he had never written a book in which he did not quote from him. 

My father introduced me to Narnia. He was so enthused with the books that he wrote Bible cross references in the margins. I’ve not seen anyone else go to such lengths. But I can vividly remember the day he told me that Lewis had died. Lewis was someone who spoke a language I could understand.

It was after I left home for college that I chanced upon a copy of Till We Have Faces subtitled A Myth Retold in an Oxford bookshop. I hadn't known of its existence before so it was an Oh Joy! moment. 

Lewis called it "far and away my best book" and I agree. Because I identify with the protagonist Orual in all her struggles and I want to share her final redemption. In this blog I have already made several references to it: I make no apology for making another.

The myth in question is of Cupid and Psyche as told in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (aka The Golden Ass) being the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety.

To jump in half way through the myth, Aphrodite (aka Venus) gives Psyche barrels of grains, barley, wheat, beans, and poppy seeds mixed together, and orders her to have them sorted by evening. Psyche breaks down in despair, but an ant takes pity, instructing her colony to help sort the grain. Aphrodite, surprised and enraged to see that the task had been completed, gives Psyche a new task: to approach a pack of rams known for being violent and shear their golden fleece to bring back to the goddess. Rather than be killed by these rams, Psyche plans on drowning herself in the river, but again she is saved. Aphrodite then sets a third impossible task: gather the black waters from the River Styx in a crystal cup the goddess had given her. But again she is saved. For her fourth and final task, Psyche is given a golden box and ordered to travel to the Underworld to retrieve a bit of beauty possessed by Persephone, goddess of spring, and queen of the Underworld. Psyche again decides to take her own life, but at the last moment she is once again saved. Finally the marriage between Psyche and Eros takes place and the rest, as they say, is history.

Tolkien argued that ancient myths were the best way of conveying truths which would otherwise be inexpressible. The same could be said of fairy stories, which is why stories like the Narnia chronicles or the Curdie books by MacDonald are so effective. Musicians claim similarly that music can express unspeakable emotions.

I read on a forum on Reddit: I think what it [the book Till we have Faces] means is that what we say we believe is just a thin, distorted, and in some cases even completely wrong picture of what we really believe in our hearts. Instead, what we actually believe drives us and changes us, so that life itself draws it from our hearts to the surface, and it's only after our lives - after we have stopped both talking and doing - that we can stand before God and truthfully proclaim who we are. 

What people see when they look at us is often at odds with what we actually are or believe, as epitomised in Lewis Carroll’s parody:

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,

    "And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

    Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,

    "I feared it might injure the brain;

But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,

    Why, I do it again and again."

In Till we have Faces Orual says: Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when the Fox was teaching me to write in Greek he would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? 

What do you see when you look at your comrade? Will you invest the energy and time required to tease reality out of him or her? And if you did, would you be horrified or would you fall in love? For the basis for true phileo love (friendship) can often be a "What? You too?"

Trauma (e.g. in war-time or disease), or even plain camaraderie over a long enough period, can become the catalyst to break open our hearts. Perhaps that is why God allows suffering to be so much a part of our human experience - because it shapes our innermost being.

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? 

Gunpowder, band-wagon and lot: Part 2

There was once a boy, born not long after the war when food was still in short supply and when you ate everything served on your plate and Sunday School sandwiches were graced with no more than a feint smear of butter and fish paste or Marmite. He was an unusual boy, not talkative, hating organised sport, preferring his own company, searching the library next door for books about electricity when others took fiction, running when most folk would walk.

Broad Haven, Wales

This boy was enchanted by the wonder he discovered in music, flowers, colours, sunsets, building imaginary water-works in sand, messing with bulbs and batteries, getting his father's model trains to act as if they had inertia. And, just occasionally, by literature in passages like:

I stood on the shore of a wintry sea, with a wintry sun just a few feet above its horizon-edge. It was bare, and waste, and gray. Hundreds of hopeless waves rushed constantly shore-wards, falling exhausted upon a beach of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave... A cold, death-like wind swept across the shore, seeming to issue from a pale mouth of cloud upon the horizon. Sign of life was nowhere visible. I wandered over the stones, up and down the beach, a human embodiment of the nature around me. The wind increased; its keen waves flowed through my soul; the foam rushed higher up the stones; a few dead stars began to gleam in the east; the sound of the waves grew louder and yet more despairing. A dark curtain of cloud was lifted up, and a pale blue rent shone between its foot and the edge of the sea, out from which rushed an icy storm of frozen wind, that tore the waters into spray as it passed, and flung the billows in raving heaps upon the desolate shore. I could bear it no longer... Phantastes, George Macdonald.

or, recalling his own childhood experiences of fever, his head feeling as if it were detached, swollen into an infinitely hard, throbbing globe, too heavy to be raised from the pillow but about to shatter into a thousand pieces if it had, like: "Then the bed no longer had limits to it and became a desert of hot wet sand. I began to talk to a second head laid upon the pillow, my own head once removed..." Or, coming out of the fever, when "I surfaced at last from its endless delirium the real world seemed suddenly dear... I heard its faintest sounds; streams running, trees stirring, birds folding their wings, a hill-sheep's cough, a far gate swinging, the breath of a horse in a field. Below me the kitchen made cosy murmurs, footsteps went up the road, a voice said Good-night, a door creaked and closed - or a boy suddenly hollered, animal-clear in the dark, and was answered far off by another. I lay moved to stupidity by these precious sounds as though I'd just got back from the dead. Then the fever returned as it always did..." Cider with Rosie Laurie Lee.

This boy had had a sheltered conservative Christian upbringing and "gave his heart to the Lord" when ten. Attending a small dame school he at first failed the 11+ not realising that one went to school to learn but, having opportunity to resit and heading his father's injunction to try harder, passed, went on to grammar school and finally university where he attained a 1st class Honours degree. Encouraged by other believers there he left university with a heightened desire to "serve God". 

Years passed. He trained as an electronics research engineer, served actively in church, prayed for the baptism of the Holy Spirit and assumed it "by faith", met and married what would become his best friend, together doing what normal people did in buying a house on a mortgage and starting a family, until...

His parents were aghast on hearing his decision to give up a well-paid and secure job and the qualifications that went with it, and to sell the house he was renovating with their help, all evidence of their love and care for him, and to join a religious community to stake out a life apart from the world system as far as was feasible, along with others who, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth and, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised.

No regrets: he knew better. This movement he had stumbled into was radical, cutting-edge. He would become part of the first-fruits, destined to rule and reign, to live forever, being no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. 

And yet he found that, whereas others testified to dramatic feelings when baptised in the Holy Spirit and a renewed desire to read the Bible, and appeared to get ecstatic during praise sessions, he was left largely unmoved. When, after church, others said how much the praise and the "word" (preaching) had uplifted them, he obligingly smiled, but to him church meetings were something Christians were expected to endure in order to be, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some. It wasn't that he was incapable of being moved: he could not deny feeling strong emotions of wonder when, for example, reaching a mountain peak or enjoying a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, even though this composer had no profession of faith in God. For years he had starved himself of such "worldly" music for the sake of the gospel, supposing that it might be demon inspired. Similarly, after giving in his notice, he had kept away from anything electronic for many years during which, unknown to him at the time, the IBM Personal Computer had made its debut. Such was the zeal he imagined he had: ten out of ten for effort but disappointing results.

But worse was to come...

(continued in Part 3)    (go back to Part 1)

Cell-phones rule OK?

Everyone now-a-days has a cell-phone. We sit down to dinner, are together in the lounge or in church, and out come the cell-phones. Never mind talking - it's easier to chat even when in the same room. I have a Pixel-2 and I love it. I can video chat with my daughter in Australia or son in Alaska. It is my watch, calendar, camera, GPS enabled map, music and video player and recorder, calculator, internet browser - and then there are apps and games. No need for an encyclopedia - hardly any need of prayer for guidance - Google does it all! It does so much more than being a portable 'phone. And I take great care of it. But of course you know all this because you, too, have a cell-phone. Even if you think yourself computer-illiterate. You probably pay for data too - and by the time you add up the cost of the phone and the service charges you are likely paying out a considerable sum per year for the privilege.

Not only that, I've been to Africa where many folk are poor, living in one room hovels, rarely able to afford more than beans and rice to eat. And yet they all have cell-phones.

Hand in hand with the internet, the ubiquitous cell-phone is an unprecedented invention, a miracle of modern technology, a paradigm changer. And yet most folk are very hum-drum about it and seemingly take the whole show for granted, indeed communication with friends and access to the internet has more or less become a universal inalienable right. We soon complain when we lose connectivity for any reason. A big truck took down our overhead fibre feed a couple of days back and it hasn't been fixed yet (it is Easter weekend) - but J has kindly jerry-rigged a feed from a property we own up the road to keep our insatiable appetite fed.

I am reminded of the little maiden's globe in Phantastes. This book is a bit like the Bible in that the imagery is vivid and beautiful but often hard to interpret. Indeed I am not at all sure that an exact interpretation is intended.

She came along singing and dancing, happy as a child, though she seemed almost a woman. In her hands--now in one, now in another--she carried a small globe, bright and clear as the purest crystal. This seemed at once her plaything and her greatest treasure. At one moment, you would have thought her utterly careless of it, and at another, overwhelmed with anxiety for its safety. But I believe she was taking care of it all the time, perhaps not least when least occupied about it.

The protagonist Anodos narrates... I put out both my hands and laid hold of it. It began to sound as before. The sound rapidly increased, till it grew a low tempest of harmony, and the globe trembled, and quivered, and throbbed between my hands. I had not the heart to pull it away from the maiden, though I held it in spite of her attempts to take it from me; yes, I shame to say, in spite of her prayers, and, at last, her tears. The music went on growing in, intensity and complication of tones, and the globe vibrated and heaved; till at last it burst in our hands, and a black vapour broke upwards from out of it; then turned, as if blown sideways, and enveloped the maiden, hiding even the shadow in its blackness. She held fast the fragments, which I abandoned, and fled from me into the forest in the direction whence she had come, wailing like a child, and crying, 'You have broken my globe; my globe is broken--my globe is broken!'

Then much later in the book he meets the little maiden again, and she recounts:

You broke my globe. Yet I thank you. Perhaps I owe you many thanks for breaking it. I took the
pieces, all black, and wet with crying over them, to the Fairy Queen. There was no music and no light in them now. But she took them from me, and laid them aside; and made me go to sleep in a great hall of white, with black pillars, and many red curtains. When I woke in the morning, I went to her, hoping to have my globe again, whole and sound; but she sent me away without it, and I have not seen it since. Nor do I care for it now. I have something so much better. I do not need the globe to play to me; for I can sing. I could not sing at all before. Now I go about everywhere through Fairy Land, singing till my heart is like to break, just like my globe, for very joy at my own songs. And wherever I go, my songs do good, and deliver people. And now I have delivered you, and I am so happy.

Perhaps if there was an EMP, like the solar storm of 1859, that put out all telecommunications and rendered cell-phone virtually useless, we might learn to sing. And, singing, put the world to rights.

Father's day

Today is Father's Day which makes me particularly want to honour each of my wonderful children. "My" is undeniably true and yet my part was minuscule. To be a father must be the greatest honour a man can achieve and children must be the greatest investment in this life. By it we understand in some small part what God is like. Thank you Jonathan, Christopher, Sarah, Kate for being who you are, for your love, for your belief. My heart is saying much more but how to write it I know not. I want to include Ali in this list but cannot as it is not Husband's Day.

Sometimes I am aware that I have not posted for ages but have nothing to say. Today my mind is teeming with stuff. Not that it takes many thoughts to count as teeming for me. It's all mixed up with A and T's plights (BTW T's course of hospital treatment has been completed and A's hands are healing well albeit with only two and a half fingers on one hand) and a preface to MacDonald's Phantastes in which Lewis remarks that "the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central" and this morning's sermon about the glory of tribulation (as opposed to whingeing about it), patience and perseverance and wot not, and my general malaise. As usual I am finding it hard to even figure what I am feeling myself, let alone try to communicate it to anyone else. It would require a listener with remarkable empathy for me to convey it verbally. Thus is the raison d’être for this blog. That few read it is neither here nor there. The case of the cardboard cut-out engineer comes to mind (see note below).

Why did I cycle 48 miles over mountains yesterday? I suppose that people here think I do it for pure enjoyment. I sometimes wonder about people. In fact the idea occurred to me after lunch, realising that I had no further duties and no set time for an evening meal, but it took me at least 15 minutes to pluck up enough courage - thoughts of all those hills, and of others here who spend their free time lying in the sun doing absolutely nothing, were putting me off.

I finally set off. The incline to the Sally Gap is gentle enough to start with but gradually gets more and more intense - struggling up that last stretch I wondered whether I would make it before feinting or something worse. I told myself I could always turn around. But I didn't. I persevered.

The prize was of course the generally downhill stretch to Laragh with its wonderful wide scenery. Then followed the ascent to the Wicklow Gap, a climb I know well but is still so hard. I purchased 500ml of Club Orange in Laragh for an outrageous €1.60, set myself for the one hour climb, habitually stopped to consume the drink half way at the rocks. Once again I wondered if I would make it. I could hardly turn back now! But here I am to tell the tale.

Why did I submit myself to such agony - was the prize really worth those two climbs? I don't have a clear answer, except that exercise generally is good for one and it's a bit of a challenge. It is sort of mixed up with this glory of tribulation (is this a euphemism for masochism?)

---------

The cardboard cutout engineer.

Working on some engineering issue at the BBC Research Department there were times when one needed input from another engineer. It was a common experience that, after you had made the effort to find someone and then had conveyed the problem in words, the answer came to you before the other person had had a chance to chip in. And so we reckoned it would do just as well to have a room containing a cardboard cut-out engineer to whom we could share our problems.

Obedience

George MacDonald, fantasy writer par excellence

I said: “Let me walk in the fields.”

He said: “No, walk in the town.”

I said: “There are no flowers there.”

He said: “No flowers, but a crown.”

I said: “But the skies are black;

There is nothing but noise and din.”

And He wept as He sent me back –

“There is more,” He said; “there is sin.”

I said: “But the air is thick,

And fogs are veiling the sun.”

He answered: “Yet souls are sick,

And souls in the dark undone!”

I said: “I shall miss the light,

And friends will miss me, they say.”

He answered: “Choose tonight

If I am to miss you or they.”

I pleaded for time to be given.

He said: “Is it hard to decide?

It will not seem so hard in heaven

To have followed the steps of your Guide.”

I cast one look at the fields,

Then set my face to the town;

He said, “My child, do you yield?

Will you leave the flowers for the crown?”

Then into His hand went mine;

And into my heart came He;

And I walk in a light divine,

The path I had feared to see.

Obedience - George MacDonald

Such gut-wrenching poignant truth in economy of words! How I wish I could encapsulate what I want to convey in a similar manner rather than blather on and on...  (I come from a church background where multiplicity of words is almost a dogma.)

I suppose I was led to MacDonald by Lewis, possibly in his reference:

“Turning to the bookstall, I picked out an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantastes, a Faerie Romance, George MacDonald. Then the train came in. I can still remember the voice of the porter calling out the village names Saxon and sweet as a nut—‘Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train.’ That evening I began to read my new book.

“The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perception of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new” (Lewis, Surprised by Joy).

Finding a paper copy of Phantastes took many years - now it is available for free download on the internet. Of his other fantasy stories I suppose I love At the back of the North Wind the best as discussed elsewhere.

Macdonald was not accepted by the Christian status-quo in his time - this alone has tended to attract him to me. Some paint him with the heresy of universalism but this in-depth treatment seems to say otherwise. MacDonald is said to have burst into tears when the concept of predestination was first explained to him. Interestingly I, too, recoiled from the idea as explained to me by someone at college who took a hard, Calvinistic line.

Lewis regarded MacDonald as his mentor as is evident in his The great divorce.  In his preface to "George MacDonald. An Anthology" he says "I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him."  And of Phantastes he writes “After this I read Macdonald’s Phantastes over my tea, which I have read many times and which I really believe fills for me the place of a devotional book. It tuned me up to a higher pitch and delighted me.”

I could go on and bore you with my favourite passages from MacDonald's writings. Maybe another time...