The Rusted Musket

I was laying on my belly under the shady tree by the volleyball pits; it was Bible camp week. Spread out in front of me, at the edge of my trusty Mexico blanket, sat two items. A folded up Anglican version of the Apostles’ Creed and GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. The Apostles’ Creed was necessary in order that I might understand Orthodoxy, for, as Chesterton put it, “When the word “orthodoxy” is used here it means the Apostle’s Creed, as understood by all who call themselves Christians… until a very short time ago.” ¹

So, a book called Orthodoxy, an Apostles’ Creed, blue sky’s in front, and volleyball pits behind. This is how I entered chapter one…

According to Chesterton, the Maniac is the type who needs all the answers, who puts fairy tales in there proper place, who, instead of floating easily “on the infinite sea” seeks to cross it and make it finite. ² This is the man who sees an unreasonable universe and tries to make it wholly reasonable, which of course it never is. The Maniac tries to fit the heavens into their head and can’t. The land of the maniac is not Narnia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth or Dagobah.

This isn’t to say that reason is bad, it isn’t, Chesterton merely warns against reason divorced from its dancing partner; mystery. For when “you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.” ³ A normal life demands the abnormalities of imagination, of this I try my best to indulge. For instance, I trend towards these fantastical images as my computers desktop background, stuff like orange hued skies with bending trees or little Gorp’s investigating flowers; I love these things, they speak the language of mystery and can be trusted to lead the way to truth and sanity.

Why after all, the universal imagination, the vivid dreams of other lands if we’re just “leaves inevitably folding on an utterly unconscious tree,” if we’re just following the “blind destiny of matter.” ⁴

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As a student of the Western Empire there’s a natural infinity I have for individualism, especially the rugged kind; and Indiana Jones fedora’s. A problem occurs however when I try to combine this individualism with my life in Christ. For they are in fact, incompatible. As much as I love rugged individualism I have to admit, Christ doesn’t talk about it, rather, he talks about membership.

Did you know that membership is a uniquely Christian word, one that Christian’s made up to best explain what was going on? Member, in the Greek, means organ, and this membership is what the Christian is called to, not solitary individualism, or collectivism I might add. We are not just another “specimen of some kind of things as X and Y and Z,” we are a body, where the parts are not interchangeable and also dependent on the other. Lewis explains it as if each person is almost a species in himself. He continues by using a metaphor of family, “The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter; she is a different kind of person. The grownup brother is not simply one unit in the class of children; he is a separate estate of the realm. The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the dog. If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure. It’s unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.” ¹ (incommensurable means almost impossible to measure or compare)

Unity compels us, and is compelling to us. As a boy I had my mom read the Wind in the Willows again and again, not because the pictures were awesome, which of course they were, rather, the Rat, Mole, and Badger working together “in harmonious union, which we know intuitively to be our true refuge both from solitude and from the collective” ² made me feel good. Of course, as a boy I couldn’t have articulated myself like Lewis did, but the seemingly incompatible group that conquers insurmountable odds in Wind in the Willows resonated within my little chest. Just like the Star Wars crew, or the Lord of the Rings party would as I grew older. All of these seemingly incompatible groups that conquer insurmountable odds pointing to what could only be fully fleshed out in Christian membership.

It simply won’t work any other way, a christian Achilles, or replacing name with number…

To a family, provision is many things. Of the many, the intentionality between standard of living and standard of family is important, for they are not the same. Neglecting family in favor of more work hours that increase wealth which is then claimed as benefit for the family is a lie. I’m not here referring to temporary situations that demand sacrifice in order to make ends meet, I refer instead to a deliberate casting off of family in the pursuit of monies far above and beyond necessity. Put this way, if one had to choose between the reckless pursuit of one or the other, would it not be more honorable to recklessly provide yourself to your family than to an office?

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In the year 1940, C.S. Lewis gave a lecture to Oxford Universities Pacifist society entitled “Why I am not a Pacifist.” This lecture produced thoughts ranging from how we decide what is good and evil, the non strength of speculative generalizations, and if you can “do simply good to simply Man.” ¹ It was for me, a fantastic mental journey, and if the reader finds in themselves a desire to know more about Lewis’s argument, I suggest they read the lecture in full, because, the item I’m most interested in sharing today, is just a small little bit Lewis offers up at the end concerning what we can and cannot influence.

Pacifism, Lewis felt, was a movement too grand to be practical as a life goal. A tension exists, if you will, between what one can influence and what one cannot, this and each outcomes actual fruition. For instance, suppose there is a Dentist who spends all his time pontificating about the need to rid the world of tooth aches. This Dentist, in truth, could do more for ridding the world of tooth aches by actually pulling one aching tooth than he could in a year of just talking about it. Lewis felt “the best results are obtained by people who work quietly at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace.” ² On a personal level, I see how I tend to mirror the Dentist mentioned earlier in my desire to protest macro events, universal happenings, instead of events I can touch with my own two hands. Lewis felt this was where the substantial lay, the limited objective, the art of life where one tackles “each immediate evil as well as we can.” To this I would like to add, perhaps starting in our own hearts…

If eternity does indeed hang in the balance, why be occupied with anything other than the exclusive occupation of eternity, why fiddle while Rome burns? In other words; is there any reason to bother with things such as enjoying the outdoors, reading a book, or finding love whilst the tether gets ever shorter towards eternity? As one pursues the first question, another, somewhat similar, if not more deeply perplexing question arises; why is it, that when I came to faith the Lord didn’t just replace my secular methods with sacred ones?

Here are my thoughts on the matter, crudely and insufficiently laid out.

It must be recognized, to be exclusively anything is tough, nay impossible, and probably unforgivable, especially concerning things not spiritual. Lewis, in his lecture “Learning in War-Time,” remarks with surprise at how his life, post conversion, inevitably consisted of “doing most of the same things one had been doing before” ¹ He shares a story similar in surprise concerning his march towards the front line trenches of WW1. He fully expected, upon arrival, to be totally engulfed in an all consuming aura of war. Instead, the closer the trenches, the less he found himself talking and thinking about the campaign and the allied cause. Other unrelated, non war-exclusive thoughts came to mind. For you can’t “suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic life” fully. Thus, even the desire to be exclusively sacred, even though desirable, is not going to happen.

What we come to find is the reason why St. Paul extols Christians to keep their job skills honed, and assumes they’ll be attending wedding parties. Because, as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, they’ll never be able to completely disintegrate the secular/fallen human life into sacred holy life. Lewis equates the new sacred life as something that won’t wipe the slate clean of the “merely human life which we were leading,” but acts rather as a “new organization that exploits, to its own supernatural ends,” the old. Thus, the Christian becomes familiar with, “Whatever ye eat or drink or whatsover ye do, do all to the glory of God.” ²  This of course, needs to be squared away with the knowledge that there are some human pursuits, perhaps all, in a particular case, that try as you might, cannot be bent towards the glory of God. These need to be surrendered for His sake, and yours. For example, in my marriage relationship I can’t expect harmony if I indulge in activities that deliberately push my love away.

Conversion changes us, blows us apart, but in our life there still remains the original framework of humanity. Therefor, the new task at hand is not to ditch all supposed secular acts, rather, to commit even our most mundane of toils and normal of pursuits to the glory of God.

The next few months I will endeavor to reproduce thoughts pulled from C.S. Lewis’s excellent collection of essays entitled The Weight of Glory. The origin of the posts, it should be noted, are not rooted in solitary eureka moments of private study, but in the conversational overflow of a few like minded gentlemen gathering for coffee and CSL every other Monday morning. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything as cooperative in nature, it has proved refreshing. Because of this, I would encourage anyone who hasn’t read a book with others to try it; much good comes from gathering and sharing. I’d also like to tip my hat to those Gentlemen of Like Mind, you have helped connect the dots and complete my thoughts!

Now let us begin.

Nostalgia is my euphoria; memories, a series of romanticized events. Music, books, and knick knacks a sort of beauty that wakes up longing deep within my chest. In Weight Lewis compares everything that lights the bonfire of longing within our hearts to “the scent of a flower we have not found.” In essence, the fulfillment of our longing must not be mistakenly found in what we feel are adequate images of beauty because they “will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.” (1) To stop at the medium is to only smell a flower but care not what it looks like, to set our satisfaction level at images parading on Plato’s mythical cave wall, to mistake the missing identity as the real identity!

Sehnsucht is a German word describing the human hearts “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what.” Lewis reminds us that this sehnsucht, our sehnsucht, can only find completion in God’s love shown through Christ Jesus. All else, the nostalgia, the delights, and yes, the scent of flowers point to this…

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 1949), 30.

Some weeks ago, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake flattened all there was to flatten in Haiti. The world, in response, sent money and aid to a Haitian nation that was literally down for the count. I believe I was watching a football playoff game the following weekend when the Red Cross asked viewers to donate ten bucks, for use in Haiti, by texting 90999. I seriously thought about doing it, then didn’t. Later on, I was looking at video game stuff on the internet and saw that Bungie (Halo franchise) was selling T-shirts and giving 100% of their profit to Haiti; I bought the T-shirt. Did I buy it for Haiti? No, it was for me. Dear reader, the heart of man is always about ulterior motive, selfishness over self sacrifice.

The Lord though, whose light shines most bright in darkness, highlighted my selfish foolishness and paid me back. When the T-shirt arrived, I opened the box and out came this wad of cloth the size of a bed sheet, basically, it was way too big; I can’t even wear it without looking like an idiot. Ha! serves me right…

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When my cousin Danny and I were kids, we spent every Wednesday night at youth group being complete pukes to our favorite youth pastor Harry. It went like this, we’d sit in the corner, or up front, or wherever amongst the sixteen or so regular attenders and giggle, joke, and goof off uncontrollably until Pastor Harry told us to shut it, then maybe we’d go silent for a minute or two but as sure as cereal gets soggy we’d start up again. Honestly, we were the kind of kids you like to loathe, oblivious to the feelings of others, utter juvenile attention seekers.

Now we’re thirty and have both worn the mantel of youth leadership; I was a youth worker for a few years and Danny is currently a youth pastor. Recently, after a massive fondue party, we reflected with embarrassment on how tough and probably disheartening it was to have been tasked with basically babysitting us unruly jerks for all those years.

So Harry, if you somehow ever see this spot of words, please know that you are awesome and that we’re sorry. You meant the world to us as an adult who listened and cared about our frivolity filled lives. Though we never deserved it, you always gave above and beyond, you inspire us still.

Love, The Giggle Queens

There is an inevitable fork in the road of life that forces a choice between one of two major directions. The choice is this, do I choose bread or roses, the path of practicality or passion? On a base level this is the decision between the minivan or the convertible, but on a more serious level, your direction in life. For instance, do I go to college for the degree I’m passionate about but offers little real world opportunity to provide for a family, or do I go for the college degree that will be dependable, if not at all excitable to my spirit?

I was discussing this theme the other night over some fantastic Italian, when something worth retelling happened. My good friend opinioned that if the choice was between bread and roses, he felt the best option would be rose bread! This delightfully lighthearted response has grown on me, and in turn, helped steer my thoughts in another direction; that of scripture. I once read somewhere in Ecclesiastes something to the effect of being busy during the day, and at night not letting your hands be idle, for you don’t know what will succeed, this or that, or whether both will do equally as well. I think my thoughts went in that direction because it affirmed the rose bread diet my good friend spoke of.

I admit, this doesn’t quite answer that college question, or the minivan vs. convertible debate. Still, it makes me think that even though life’s decisions seem like either/or affairs, maybe they don’t always have to be…

Ecclesiastes 11:6

The Old Testament tells a story of a man named Job whose three friends mourned with him after a string of crushing tragedies. When Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar (Job’s friends) saw with their own eyes the gravity of Job’s situation they tore their robes and collapsed in the dirt next to him; no one would say a word for the next seven days. If at the end of that seventh day Job’s friends had just left, content with their solidarity and support through grief filled silence, they would’ve gone down in history as some of the most compassionate friends ever. As it was, they did not, they had to open their months and give Job their advice and judgment.

The scriptures say we are to “ Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” If you can help it, I guess I write this as an encouragement to keep your comments to a minimum if you ever find yourself in a situation like Job’s friends did, because folks mostly don’t need your words, they need your presence in time of tragedy…