Growing With My Garden

  Let us read together one of George MacDonald’s finer stories, Donal Grant.  We will be using the Cullen edition, edited by Michael Phillips, which can be easily ordered on Amazon.  I would like to encourage each reader to post on this blog any comments on the story that may come to mind.   This will give opportunity for us to have discussion and interaction, and this will give us all a sense of community.  MacDonald wrote this novel in the 1880's, at the height of his career.  He depicts Donal as a young man exhibiting thoroughly Christian attitudes.  Any novelist who undertakes to draw a thoroughly good person faces the danger of creating an unrealistic goodie-good character that is unbelievable and boring.  As a character Donal is not only attractive but real and quite believable.  Such an accomplishment is a large compliment to MacDonald as a novelist. Donal is a native of  Scotland, and as such he speaks the Scottish language.  In editing the text, Michael Phillips has

 Poetry has always meant a lot to me.  Let me share some lines for the beginning of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”: Strong Son of God, immortal Love,     Whom we, that have not seen thy face,    By faith, and faith alone, embrace,  Believing where we cannot prove; Thine are these orbs of light and shade;    Thou madest Life in man and brute    Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:    Thou madest man, he knows not why    He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just. Thou seemest human and divine,    The highest, holiest manhood, thou:    Our wills are ours we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

 Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets, and I have many of his poems by heart, often putting myself to sleep by reciting them in my mind.  But I am sorry for his lack of faith.  I’ve taken the liberty to take his poem “Reluctance” and adjust the ending to my liking: "Out through the fields and the woods/  And over the walls I have wended/  I’ve climbed the hills of view/  And looked on the world and descended;/  I’ve come by the highway home,/  And low it is ended./  Oh, when to the heart of man/  Was it ever less than treason/  To withhold one’s heart from God/  And seek recourse in reason;/  To ignore the Gospel truth/  And refuse life’s joyous season./  God awaits the heart’s decision/  To trust Him, one' self denying/  And be shown the path of life/  Utterly on Him relying;/  To hold with faith the promises/  And gladly await one’s dying. (With apologies to Robert Frost)

Both these essays speak to each reader personally, no matter where one is in one’s relationship to God.   We each want a healthy spiritual life, yet each has a certain unease as to where we are at.  What is the way to a more fulfilling and fruitful Christian life?   The first essay underscores the centrality of personal forgiveness.  Christ emphasizes that a person is not forgiven unless that person forgives those who have sinned against him.  Forgiveness is quite a different thing from excusing; the latter seeks to understand and make allowance for; forgiveness erases the acts from one’s thinking,  as though they had never occurred.  Lewis writes: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in us.” To do this requires complete surrender to God.  Lewis concludes: "This is hard.  It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury.  But to forgive provocations of daily life–to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law,

     This essay serves to clarify a wide-spread misunderstanding among nominal Christians about the nature of church membership.  It is widely felt that being a member of a Christian church means simply having one’s name on the role.  The Biblical concept is quite a different one. Being a true Christian is to leave individualism–self-concern behind–and be a loving member of a mystical body, the body of Christ.  Lewis emphasizes that by such membership Paul meant: “what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another, things differing not only in structure and function but also in dignity.” The unity of the church is a unity of people essentially different one from the other, each having a specific contribution to make to the body, and primarily being united to Christ.  He writes: We are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed sinners with sinless Redeemer.  His presence, the

            Lewis here addresses one of the characteristics that is endemic to  human society, that of the tendency for small groups to form unintentionally, and a person finds oneself either within or without a group.  To find oneself within a group can become a source of satisfaction and pride; to be outside can become a source of  dissatisfaction and disappointment.  One is unable to choose, but this an unavoidable feature of life.   His object in addressing this feature of life is to warn against its subtly generating immoral attitudes of envy or ambition or pride, and his advice is simply not to concern oneself with the phenomenon.  If one applies oneself to one’s work, unconcerned as to which group one is or is not a part of, true friendships automatically arise, and in them true pleasure exists.  A person should let any secrecy be accidental, and any exclusiveness a byproduct, not concerning oneself with either.  True friendship “causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the

  This is a fascinating–albeit a very difficult–essay.  Lewis poses theology against science as the two systems that purport to offer a satisfying explanation of the nature of reality, and he builds a strong case for the superior credibility of theology.  He presents an utterly unarguable conclusion: that Christianity, as over against Scientism, is true, and the evolutionary tenet that all that is simply happened over an unimaginable length of time, is completely untenable.   He begins by seemingly putting theology down: it does a poor job of satisfying the imagination.  But that is true of the unbeliever.  For the believer, there is “a special sort of imaginative enjoyment.” He explains: It is therefore quite true that the Christians do enjoy their world picture, aesthetically, once they have accepted it as true.  Every man, I believe, enjoys the world picture which he accepts, for the gravity and finality of the actual is itself an aesthetic stimulus.  Fallen people see Scien

Lewis tackles a very difficult problem in this essay: What really is the relationship between the spiritual world, which we cannot see, and the physical world, in which we receive with all our senses?  How is spiritual reality present in material reality?  The presence of the spiritual within the physical he terms sacramental.  But in some instances the spiritual flows through the material and at other times it does not. The process whereby the spiritual communicates itself through the physical he terms transposition.   Transposition occurs only for the spiritually minded.  The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God; they are spiritually discerned.  People see according to their natures (Cf. Psa, 18:25, 26).  Even so, try as we may, we do not find any of the descriptions of heaven, or our imaginations of it, very desirable.   But our imaginations are confined to using images of the world we know.  Hence, the importance of hope: the reliance by faith upon the pro

  Lewis’s approach to this subject is interesting. The issue of whether or not a Christian should fight in a war is indeed a difficult one.  Lewis first considers if there be in human intuition, conscience, or reason a valid argument for refusing to participate in a war, and concludes there is none.    Lewis then turns to consider authority.  Human authority has universally opposed pacifism and sanctions going to war; and history shows it to be a necessity.  If peoples had not fought to maintain their identity, they would have lost their freedom and become enslaved.  Lastly, he turns to consider divine authority but, instead of first closely considering Biblical statements, he refers to statements in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church and leading Theologians that sanction what they regard as righteous wars.  Finally, looking at Christ’s statements against any retaliation, he concludes they are simply meant to stifle any urge towards “egotistical retaliation for hitting

  At first sight the title of this sermon may be “off-putting” as the British say.  What relevance has this subject for me today?  As one begins reading, however, the relevance to our individual lives becomes very clear.  Lewis was addressing Oxford students in 1939, at the beginning of World War II, but his thought is perennially pertinent.  Lewis asks, given the awesome fact that each of us, and all people, will eventually be in either heaven or hell, how can we possibly be concerned about the everyday affairs of our humdrum lives? : “How can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think about anything but the salvation of human souls?”  But we live in an incredibly rich world and we are creatures of varied talents and great potentials. What should be our attitude towards all the possibilities of life, towards its cultural demands, towards our varied and compelling desires for knowledge and beauty? There are obligations that life puts upon us, and it is for us to respond to them

  In his opening discussion of the difference between unselfishness and charity, Lewis begins with his characteristic emphasis upon what is to be affirmed in our experiences, not what is to be denied.  He would have little sympathy with what Williams called the Way of Negation. Lewis takes a positive view of our experiences in the here and now, but his emphasis is upon our hope for that which is beyond this life for the faithful Christian.  The title for his sermon is taken from I Cor. 4:16, 17: “Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.  For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”  That which is beyond the grave for faithful Christians has nothing in this life with which to compare. All people are possessed with a deep desire, and their lives are spent in quests to satisfy it.  Nothing in this life does, but they keep trying; hence, human restlessness which drives people

  This splendid collection of Lewis’s essays, containing some of the addresses he gave during  WWII and first published in 1949, presents many of his most provocative and insightful thoughts on Christian behavior.  Don’t neglect to read the Introduction, in which Hooper recalls many of his interactions with Lewis.      We will post considerations of the essays on the following schedule:  Please comment and interact. March 6:  The Weight of Glory 13:  Learning in War-Time 20:  Why I Am Not a Pacifist 27:  Transposition Apr 3:  Is Theology Poetry? 10: The Inner Ring 17: Membership 24: On Forgiveness and     A Slip of the Tongue

  The text for this week’s reading begins with a focus on Damaris.  Williams undertakes to show the step by step process by which she comes to spiritual maturity.  The first step is to become aware of others as individuals with needs of their own, rather than as objects that interfered with her work.  She begins to see her father, and then others, in a different light, and she goes out to look for Quentin in order to help him.  She is beginning to be motivated by love of others.   Quentin is pursued by a bestial figure, but as Damaris shields him, a lamb appears and takes the place, we are told, of the lion.  The unbridled strength that is the cause of buildings falling and Quentin overcome by fright is checked by gentle loving action.  The lamb frolics for joy.  The bestial creature, which represents Foster, who had tried along with Berringer to summon and control the archetypal strength of the universe for his own purposes, perishes. In Chapter 15 Williams gives superb and stir

  As the chapter head tells us, the narrative begins to focus its attention upon Damaris’s conversion.  We are shown hr mental absorption with a completely abstract understanding of human experience–she is preoccupied with composing a graph of human thought.  As a  result she has a thorough-going contempt for the actual experience of people, and even wants to rid herself of her father when he seems to be ailing. Suddenly the archetypal Strength or Energy that gives things form and structure withdraws from the neighboring buildings, causing them to collapse.  Damaris reacts not with alarm but complacency; then a stench arises, driving her to a downstairs window where she is confronted with an appallingly huge and terrible flying creature.  For the first time in her life she feels the need for somebody to be with her, and she cries out for Anthony and her father. Her father appears but he, absorbed in his vision of beauty, calmly spurns her.  Then the house itself disappears, and she

  These chapters show wrong attitudes towards the nature of reality, and culminate with Anthony coming into the right attitude and achieving the correct relationship. Anthony visits Richardson, and learns that when the arrogant people seek to command and control the  celestial powers, they become hostile beasts, so that the lion becomes a dragon when people like Berringer and Foster seek to command it for their own self-centered purposes. Chapter Nine begins with a description of how Damaris’s state of mind prevents her from experiencing the peace of mind that can come from a right relation to nature.  Her mental preoccupation with “the relation of the Divine Perfection with creation” ironically prevents her from the sort of actually experiencing it which her father and Anthony are receiving. Her intellectual world was all that mattered to her, and getting her articles published only nourished her egotism.  When she encounters the deeply frightened Quentin and he tries to induc

In Chapter Four, when Mr. Foster visits Anthony and Quentin, the mystery of the lion and the snake begins to unfold.  Williams is drawing upon Platonic metaphysics.  Plato taught that every object in this created world is derived from an archetypal idea.  For instance, behind all the trees in this world is the idea of Tree.  The infinite variety of individual trees is the result of a creating demigod trying to copy the idea and never getting it quite right; hence, all the incredible varieties of trees.  Because all individual trees are imitations of the idea of Tree, they are inferior to the idea.    In our novel, Williams is asking, what idea or principle makes all things hold together; that is, makes things cohere?  Is there not a principle of Strength? And is there not a principle of Beauty, that makes some things, such as butterflies, beautiful?  What if these Ideas could be summoned by someone who concentrates on them?  Foster’s explanations begin to unfold the kernel idea of

In all his novels Williams explores the nature of reality–of the world our senses perceive and our minds try to understand–and the array of possible attitudes towards it.  Our spiritual health depends upon our exercising the right attitudes towards the life we encounter.  In The Place of the Lion, Anthony depicts the ideal set of mind; many of the other characters depict seriously wrong approaches.  As you read, carefully note the attitudes of each.    Anthony has jovial, confident, and expectant attitudes towards whatever may occur, convinced that ideas are “more dangerous than material things.”  Thus the main theme of the novel is introduced: what reality do ideas have, and what is their relation to the material world?  Meeting those who are on the lookout for a lion, he volunteers to help them.  He sees the quest as “enormous fun.”  Quentin, on the other hand, wants to “bolt.”  When they see Berringer, who has been overcome by the lion, lying in his yard, Anthony is quick to try