The Child in Dickens

'No, I hold myself in quiet and silence, like a baby in its mother's arms, like a baby, so I keep myself.' - Psalms 131:2

St. Aurelius Augustine once said that when he himself, as a baby, beat his mother's breast while nursing, it was really the showing of the secret desire rankling in his heart to murder his mother. He believed that a child's sin was determined before he ever acted sinfully, and would go to everlasting damnation if he died before his infant baptism.

The idea, termed original or ancestral sin, was not taken seriously until the Enlightenment, when Martin Luther and John Calvin took the words of St. Augustine to be theological truths. "Original sin," Calvin said, "therefore appears to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls works of sin.' God, therefore, was deemed a terrible deity who would damn innocent children for sins which they had not committed.

This belief developed. Sinfulness was said to be present even after baptism. We were deemed to be sinning all the time, even when we were not conscious of it, and therefore had an excuse to never combat our sin. As Martin Luther said, "Be a sinner and sin on bravely, but have stronger faith and rejoice in Christ, who is the victor of sin, death, and the world. Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding place of justice: sin must be committed. To you it ought to be sufficient that you acknowledge the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world, the sin cannot tear you away from him, even though you commit adultery a hundred times a day and commit as many murders.'

Never mind the words of Jesus: 'Go and sin no more.' 'Be ye perfect, even as thy heavenly father is perfect.' 'Whoever holds to my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home in him.' Of Paul: 'Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.' Of John: 'We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commandments.' Or the fact that, if sin-guilt was inherent in all Life and not just in action, that Jesus Himself could not have been sinless, as He chose to enter the world through a woman's womb.

To the detriment of all this, the beliefs of Calvin and Luther and Augustine were widely accepted in the Protestant and Catholic church, and continue to be today. This belief in the evil propensities of a child was accentuated by the Enlightenment's divorcing of the spiritual and material aspects of life, of Darwin's treatise on the animalism of man, and the amalgamation of both of these in the Industrial Era, which treated the child as sinful animals without character, emotion, or goodness.

In fact, in the world of the early 1800s, children were not even viewed as human beings until the age of seven. Sanitation was so primitive that it was extremely rare for a child to live to seven-years-old, and therefore they would not be intellectually counted as mind-full until they were proved to live through their infancy. They were deemed as being the essence of sinfulness, thus disregarding Jesus' declaration to 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.' In the original Greek, the last part of the sentence literally reads 'the kingdom of God is this [the little child].'

However, there were some people who struck out against the Enlightenment's painting of children. They were a part of the Christian Romantics, who adhered to the belief that the spiritual was inherent in matter, and that whoever welcomed a Child welcomed Jesus and therefore welcomed Elohim. Thus William Wordsworth declared, "Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height." And William Blake expostulated, "When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still.'

The aggression against the Calvin-Luther-Augustine theology was continued with great force by the Victorian author, Charles Dickens. It was he that paved the way for the Victorian's return to the love of the child, the sacredness of the mother, the unit of the father-mother-child, when 'the Child is Father of the Man', as Wordsworth termed it. In his books he wrote about little children who possessed thoughts, feelings, goodness, and the longing for love and acceptance. Pip, Biddy, David Copperfield, Amy Dorrit, Little Nell, Sissy Jupe, Esther Woodhouse…the list goes on. He shows how the innocence of these children may be tainted by the sinfulness of their parents (Hard Times), through the cruelty of schoolmasters (David Copperfield), by the brutality of women (Great Expectations, Bleak House), or the negligence of fathers (Little Dorrit, Old Curiosity Shop). But he did not just make an example through negatives. He showed the true joy that might come when the family is as it should be. When the family models the Holy Family: the father as protector and provider, the mother as comforter and caretaker, the child as the holy fruit of their love.

This is seen in no greater book than in A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge––the epitome of the anti-emotion movement started in the Enlightenment and followed through in Industrialization––comes to realize the sacredness of Love and therefore the fruit of Love, the Child, through the example of the beautiful, lovely family of Tiny Tim. As Dickens said, 'It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.'

And thus Dickens ushered in the true enlightenment of the Victorian era.

O Sacred Head Now Wounded

O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown;
How art thou pale with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!
How doth Thy visage languish that once was bright as morn!

What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest friend,
For this Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever, and should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to Thee.*

In the days of the Middle Ages, the word 'pity' did not mean the milky, soft emotion that it does now. It came from the word 'piety', and meant a divine compassion shot through with strength and truth, inspired by the Father of all Piety. May we pray that on this day, a day of such gravity for the future of our nation, the Almighty may look on our prayers with his 'pity without end', and renew our nation.

*From 'O Sacred Head Now Wounded' by Bernard of Clairvaux

The Pursuit of Happiness

Last night, hundreds of thousands of people, in surfing their television, found themselves watching one of the most beautiful events that has aired in the last four years: the figure skating championship for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Of all the young ladies competing, though all displayed extraordinary beauty, elegance, and talent in the soaring twirls and spinning twists, two women stood out from among the rest. They were small, slender, beautiful girls, wearing sparkling leotards, with glitter framing their dark eyes and concentration molded upon their olive brows. They came from two different Asian countries, where the skill of their dancing has earned them the name of national celebrities. One, a small, Japanese girl named Mao Asada, dances to a simple, classical piece, and, though her dancing is flawless, the choreography has only a fraction of the fire and energy that sizzles over a foundation of breath-taking elegance when Kim Yu-Na from South Korea takes the ice, dancing to the theme song from James Bond. She wins the competition after the stunning, passionate piece, placing five points above her Japanese rival, and exceeding her own record by two points.

The disinterested onlooker enjoys watching these prodigies as they perform; they rejoice with Yu-Na in her success, and, though they pity Asada for her own great talent being superseded, the performance of Yu-Na has left them so breathless that they know the score is fairly won. No one realizes the enormity of the expectation and the extreme responsibility that has been placed on these young, small shoulders by the people of their country. The competition between them does not begin and end with the Olympics: it buries deep, plunging down the course of a hundred years, through the histories of their people. The two countries, and the two girls who stand as the sacred representations of their cultures, are enemies of old.

In the early twentieth century Japan experienced great economic upheaval when the new emperor, Meiji, rose to power. The Koreans insulted and rejected Emperor Meiji in their trading with Japan, and the emperor, seeing that the samurai army was jobless and posing a threat to his regime, sent them off to conquer and colonize Korea. The Koreans experienced great hardship through their slavery to the Japanese over the course of thirty-five years, until America, after the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, came into Korea to free the Koreans. The people, government, and economy of Korea were utterly devastated after Japan's autocracy in their country, and, though the Americans helped them back to their feet, Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't finish the course of regeneration. He, on the advice of the general in charge of the mission, deserted the northern precinct of Korea to a socialist Russia, a communist Mao Zedong, and the new Marxist upstart Kim Il Sung to take over the government in that section of the country. Thus ensued the divide of North and South Korea. This history, branded in the minds of the Koreans and the Japanese, lies in the worldview with which Yu-Na and Asada compete. The angst of their countries' expectations is overwhelming in the very force of this age-old feud.

I once observed a young Korean conversing with one of my brothers about how he saw common ground between America and Korea, in that they both had a mutual enemy in Japan because of Pearl Harbor. I was shocked by this idea. In my thoughts, the tragedy of Pearl Harbor was such an incident of the past that the guilt correlating to it has been forgotten, and that this feeling predominates in America. Japan has been wholly forgiven, just as the memory of the enmity of the Revolutionary War between the English and the Americans is rendered obsolete in our present function as allies. In the same way, the Pearl Harbor incident has been wiped away from our consciences, so that now Japan is one of America's greatest allies. But to the young Korean gentleman, Japan––disregarding the fact that the grave offense paid them is one dating to almost a century ago, and that the Japanese have seen great retribution for their tyranny and are a wholly different people––is still a very grim enemy.

Thus I see how the worldviews of the Western and Eastern worlds utterly clash. Christianity, though started in the East, has spread like wildfire, until, coming to the West, it has conquered and revolutionized the European world. Because of Christianity, we are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that happiness is made by the practice of Christian virtues. The Ten Commandments are instilled in our minds, and this moral creed has given us the ability to rise above all other countries in the corporate wisdom that has led to freedom of religion, liberty of speech, and the high-minded principle of love that has led us to be renowned for our 'short memory': for our forgiveness and for our willingness to give succor to those countries who have not had the influence of the Zoë to give them Life and Light.

In the Eastern world, however, the cultures are steeped in the religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Atheism, all creeds wholly selfish, either in the self-centered pursuit of forgetting self, the megalomaniacal pursuit of a god that sanctions genocide and hate, or the egocentric mind that believes there is no god and therefore that man is the master of his own destiny. Their worlds are old: newness is not welcomed, freedom of thought and independence of belief is denied, and the sins of the fathers are punished in the children. They nurse their hate, for they have never learned the joy that comes from obeying the words:

"Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you."

Photo of Kim Yu-Na

The Medieval and The Post-Modern

'Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.'

~C.S. Lewis

'Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.'

~C.S. Lewis

Medieval World-View

The medieval man believed that the world was set up in a way that inverted our natural experience. He believed that the universe was a chain or set of graded planes, the top of which was the highest Heaven, in which God dwelt in timeless, undeviating unity.

The second link of the chain was the high angels, gradually grading down in an intricate theology of numbers to the lower angels, who dwelt in the realm of Aether. The Aether was described as the means through which God communicated with the Earth. It consisted of all living intelligence beyond the moon. Rather than being Space, as we term it today, the Aether was a dazzling world of light, filled to overflowing with miraculous planets, stars, and spiritual beings. The medieval man believed the darkness with which we see it was only a shadow cast by the earth in the light of the moon, and that, in reality, outside the shadow, it was a sphere of glorious light. Aether and the high Heaven were at the top of the chain, and the medieval man praised them for their very unchangeable quality, their fixedness.

Below the moon there came Air, through which the Aether communicated with the Earth. The Air, in the medieval mind, was directly influenced by the warfare that went on in the Aether and the highest Heaven. Thus, birth, death, sickness, health, were all contributed to events taking place in the spiritual realm. Therefore doctors would blame sicknesses on what they named 'Influence', which, in the Italian, is 'Influenza.' Thus the beginning of the term.

Below the Air there came the Earth, on which Man, with his supposedly disgusting inconstancy and fickle purpose, dwelt. Man and Earth were distorted mirrors of the Heavenly realm. Thus the medieval man's fetish with creating as much beauty on Earth as possible, in order that he might come closest to the vast glory above the moon; thus the medieval man's staunch belief in the spiritual properties of the stuff of Earth, and his loyalty to magic-lore. For where the Astrology of the planets and the Aether forced upon man a changeless Fate, Magic was developed as a means to cast off the icy clutches of serendipity.

Beneath Man came the Animal world, which the medieval man viewed as a grotesque shadow of himself, through which he could learn spiritual lessons. For example, the ant was a lesson for the sluggard, the rule of the queen bee a lesson for the monarch.

Lower than the Animal was the Plant, filled with life and yet inanimate.

And below the Plant, at the very outskirts of the medieval world-view, lay Hell and the daemonic world, as far away from God as was possible in the intricate planing of the spheres.

Post-Modern Worldview

Interestingly, the post-modern man has a fully different view of the world. In fact, it is inverted. Where the medieval man believed in a world of utter order, absolute truth, the post-modern man believes there is no truth, and that each person's absolute is made up only of his mysterious experiences. Rather than God being at the center of the universe, with the sinful Earth being at the very outskirts of the Heavenly Realm, the post-modern man believes that the sinful world is the center of the universe.

As time goes by, the post-modern worldview becomes more and more obsessed with what to the medieval man was the low rung on the ladder: the Plant. Thus, the Green movement. The post-modern man has intellectually negated the possibility of either a Hell or a Heaven, and, instead, has endowed the realms of Plant, Animal, and Air with a strange, god-like authority which must control the actions of Man.

On the next link of the post-modern chain is Man, which, with the Animal as his god, is seeking to become more and more like an Animal himself. Just as the medieval man sought to become like his Creator, so the post-modern man seeks to become like his supposed predecessor, the Animal. Thus, the post-modern man has negated meaning in the universe. There is no spiritual realm, there is no truth, there is no creativity, there is no intelligence except to prove intelligence non-existent, for the Animal is not in the image of the Divine, the Animal has no reason or emotion, the Animal has no creativity, the Animal has no intelligence. With all divine impartation, with all sub-creational responsibility, with all wisdom gutted, the only thing left for the post-modern man is his gut appetite. His chosen life is one of wandering purposefulness, constant changeableness, the very thing the medieval man detested as a part of the Fallen realm.

Below Man is what the post-modern man terms Space. It is a domain of nothingness. Even the stars, the planets, and the miraculous lights that inhabit the world take a background view to the blackness that was only a shadow hiding glory in the medieval man's mind. The post-modern man believes in no beauty, no glory, no virtue. He believes only in a sadist mentality… the savage instinct for survival.

Summary

So, we see that the medieval man, embracing his God-given desire for the Kingdom of the Spirit, did everything he could to minimize his Fallenness by enveloping himself in the realm of Glory. The post-modern man of today, by completing the negation of the Dark Ages begun in the Renaissance, has minimized the spiritual to the utmost degree, in order to more wholly embrace the Animal in the Flesh.

El Shaddai

'It is El Shaddai who blesses you:

blessings of heaven above,

blessings of the deep lying below,

blessings of the breasts and womb,

blessings of the grain and flowers,

blessings of the eternal mountains,

bounty of the everlasting hills––

may they descend on Joseph's head,

on the crown of the one dedicated from among his brothers.' - Genesis 49:25-26

The bottle changed society.  

Billy Sunday raved at the increase of alcoholism in the early 20th century.  He toured throughout the nation, he preached from every pulpit and stage available, he published in every newspaper, he proclaimed his beliefs, and ultimately succeeded in stopping alcoholism for a season.  And yet there was no opposition when 1950 began, and another sort of bottle came to the forefront.

Bottle-feeding had been in some fashion seen since the Middle Ages.  It was not very common.  The limited and unsterile supplies available made bottle-feeding a very arduous task, causing many babies' deaths from the unclean effects of horn bottles and dried cow teats.  For this very reason the practice was unpopular.  Even when the rubber nipple was invented in the mid 19th century, the contraption was hardly used because of the pungent smell of the black India rubber.  

It was not until the 1950s, when Pyrex and soft rubber were first introduced, that Dr. Spock published his famous manual on baby and child care, and, in an instant, 80% of all women across the US had embraced the progressive model––bottle-feeding.  The fad was quite in keeping with the times.  Between processed cheeses, new inflammatory polyester combinations for fabrics, canned and powdered foods, preservatives to give food a longer shelf-life, immunizations, birth-control, and Caeserean Sections, the '50s were a time of great modernization.  How is it that, though every one of these fads have been proved as extremely unhealthy and risky life-style choices, bottle-feeding has not been paired with them?

Today it is known that breastmilk holds every nutritional ingredient that a baby needs for optimal growth.  It is the perfect temperature, it is clean, and it is extremely beneficial for the mother.  When a mother breastfeeds her baby she is protected from osteoporosis, breast cancer, and ovarian cancers.  It releases hormones that reduce stress, allows her to bond with her baby, produces estrogen, and gives her femininity and gentleness.  It is even better for her baby.  Breastmilk jump-starts a baby's immune system, builds strong bones, reduces the risk of developing diabetes, prevents food allergies, protects against heart-disease, cancer, obesity, asthma, unhealthy teeth, Multiple Sclerosis, ear infections, and even weak kissing ability.  Breastfed infants have higher IQs than bottle-fed infants and they grow up to be more independent and capable.  Most importantly, breast-feeding creates a child that not only holds an intense bond with his mother, but easily bonds with other people and is more capable of loving.

Yet the majority of new mothers are told to nurse their babies for a couple weeks and then give them a contraption made of Pyrex, plastic, and rubber.  To put in their babies' new and fresh bodies a formula that is not only extremely expensive, but is made up of additives, preservatives, chemicals that are harmful to the baby's health, and vitamins and minerals that the baby is not even capable of digesting.  The great health and spiritual benefits of the natural, divine way of baby growth is completely overlooked.

Thus we see, in the '50s, the start of a new family model that had never been known before.  Safe sex was the safe thing.  The human race was discouraged from bearing too much new life.  The fruit of the womb, the procreation of souls, was suppressed through the newly legalized birth-control, forgetting the fact that the pill aborts the sperm and egg after they have joined together to create the human embryo, is catastrophic for the health of the woman, and is the cause of many defects in children today.  The government became more influential, and, in their widened power, decided to take on more and more of a child's development, cheating the mother and father out of their God-given responsibilities.  Mothers were encouraged, if they were so selfish as to bear a child, to let the doctors get the baby out of her through a surgical procedure that would not only be extremely unhealthy for her and the baby, but would cheat her out of the toil and labor that is the birth of true womanhood and spiritual maturity.  The mother was supposed to have only one month in which to bond with her baby, and then she must put her baby on the bottle, re-enter the work-force, and give her job to an impartial worker in a day-care.  At four-years-old the child would be sent off to pre-school, and for twenty thousand, one hundred sixty hours of the rest of their childhood, the mother's responsibility would be taken off her hands and the government would indoctrinate her child in the way that they pleased.

This was the new model of family.  Even the terms for children were changed, and the words 'kid' and 'teenager' became widely used.  Children, not experiencing any of the divine bonding instruments in infancy, were raised in schools with a sterile atmosphere, and soon found themselves to be more influenced by their peers and teachers than by their parents and siblings.  At thirteen, the child began to act strangely.  They rebelled against their parents.  They flocked with their friends from school.  They adopted all sorts of habits that were extremely unhealthy psychologically and physically.  

Doctors and psychologists pronounced this a natural phenomena, forgetting the fact that for thousands of years the 'teenager' psyche had never even been heard of––that the term 'teenager' had been non-existent till very recent years.  In every culture of ancient times, from the East to the West, the child became an adult at twelve and thirteen, the time when, scientifically, the brain changes, the child's learning fashion takes on the form of an adult's, sexual maturation begins, and they believe the world-view that, according to statistics, they will die believing.  Rebellion had been scathingly rejected in these cultures.  In ancient Judaism it was a sin punishable by stoning.  Yet these facts were forgotten, and parents were, instead, told to let their children 'go their own path.'  Yet in third-world countries, where these medical habits were mostly unheard of, children from thirteen to nineteen were the best workers, the best helpers, and were generally close to their parents, grandparents, and siblings.

The wealth of the nation was such that parents, after having been told to step out of their children's way, were expected to send their children to college.  It was a very new phenomenon.  Never before had both women and men received such an education.  They were shipped off to universities where socialist, communist professors taught them to believe all the doctrines their fathers had spilled blood to purge from the world in the last decade, and in those government institutions sins were introduced through the close association of their peers that had formerly been only known in the very darkest, most secret of places.

And thus the '60s ensued.  We have seen what the '60s brought forth, when the hippies reigned, with their free sex and free drugs that were supposed to bring peace to the world, and yet brought nothing but riots and sexually transmitted diseases.  We see and taste the fruit in our leaders, our government, and our culture.  We know that our families are broken, that our government is weak and oppressive, that our education is ungodly, that the Church has melded in with the World, that every new generation becomes more and more engulfed in sin, and that we have accepted these things as the norm.  Yet God would have us taste and see that His ways are good––He would have us know life, and know it more abundantly.  He is El Shaddai, which, in Hebrew, means the God of the Breast.

Photo by Ann Geddes

On the Nature of Faërie

'Western culture as a whole has grown so rationalistic that it is difficult to even get your head around its influence.  If you look back at the time in which the Old Testament (and even the New) was written, the world was seen as a place of mythological forces where everything from disease to wealth and success was seen as a personal statement about one's relationship to God (or the gods).  We in Western Christianity have taken our faith out of its natural context of a spiritual and mystical universe into one of rational science.  The transition is uneasy to say the least.' - Benjamin Wolaver

'My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery.  I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition.  The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.  They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things.  They are not fantasies; compared with them other things are fantastic.' - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

'The more I think about Scripture, the more "implausible" our cosmic story seems.  Two magic trees, a flooded world, the Promised Land, ten ludicrous plagues, the fire on Sinai, the voice of God, the Holy of Holies, power-wielding prophets, the God Man, twelve apostles for twelve tribes, a global mission, a villainous "Man of Lawlessness", a final battle, a future resurrection.  If you think about it, it seems pretty outrageous…which is why it's so brilliant.' - Benjamin Wolaver

Thoughts on the Euangelios

The incarnation shocked humanity.  Never before in the history of religion had divinity shrunk to infancy.  The magic of the event terrified the world.  The God of the universe who created woman, impregnated a common peasant girl and grew from embryo to infant in the womb that He had molded with His own hands.  The girl who carried Yahweh in her belly, who was scoffed and mocked by the world of the time and treated as a sinner and outcast, journeyed to Jerusalem with her faithful husband, and, being refused even by the country inn, was forced to birth the Son of God underground.  'In the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth,' Chesterton states.  The Voice of Elohim became the most vulnerable creature in our world––a new-born baby, crying in the arms of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl, whose tiny arms couldn't reach up to touch the noses of the cattle that He had spoken into existence.  Yahweh came to earth, and suddenly the family that God had instituted in the beginning was turned upside down, for the mother and father became the children of their Son, and their son was their Father and Creator.  And they called His name Jesus.

Jesus' life was hounded from the beginning.  After being anointed by the Magi, confirmed by Anna and Simeon, praised by the angels, and worshipped by the shepherds, Joseph, following the command of God, the father of his adopted child, escaped to Egypt with the precious mother and baby to escape Herod's wrath.  The age-old war of the demons against children asserted itself once more in a mad effort to kill the Child, but was thwarted by a simple carpenter's faithfulness to God.  

Jesus grew up, and threw off the stagnant and sinful customs of the time.  Though He was the most intelligent and promising students in the educational system, and wanted as a disciple by the leading rabbis of the day, He rejected the complacency and legalism of the priests and stayed at home to learn the trade of a simple carpenter until His time came.  And then the Son of God asserted Himself.  

He gathered the outcasts to Himself.  He insulted the leading figures of the day.  He ransacked the false religion pervading the Temple.  He forgave the sins of people who faithed in His Father.  He called Himself the ancestor of Abraham.  He healed the sick.  He outsmarted the scribes.  He was faithful to His Father.  He loved purely.  He gave freely.  He professed to be the Son of God.  He spoke words of truth that were shocking to the darkness of that time, and yet conquered the barbarian sinfulness of the time, and have forever resurrected throughout history, and are still living and speaking today.  For they are words of universal and timeless truth.  The world will try to take some of Him and leave the rest, but He was the Man who encompassed all Truth, all Holiness, all Power, all Righteousness, all Faithfulness, all Love.  

There have been many philosophers in the history of this world, but the smarter they were the more they knew that they were not a god.  Yet Jesus spoke words of intelligence and verity, and He proclaimed Himself to be God.  He was a Man directly distinct from the sophists and philosophers of His time, a Man who had nothing to do with the wild and distorted mythologies and hero-worship of the time.  And yet He complemented both sides.  He was a philosopher, He was a hero, His life was a Story, but a true one.  He vanquished the lies of the World, and rose up as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

His creed spread like wildfire throughout the world, and the only people groups that would have none of Him were the Middle-Eastern Muslims and the Hindus and Buddhists of Asia.  And these are the two countries that are living examples of stagnancy.  The West has blossomed, grown, died, and resurrected as the Flower of Christendom, but Asia and the Middle-East are too old to die.

In fact, the modern example of the ancient war between mythology and philosophy are the creeds of Asia.  Their worship is why Asia is infirm, stale, and oppressed, whereas the West is equally as historical, but has experienced the resurrection of life that is following Christ.  For Christianity is the only religion that is the key which fits the questions of this world.  It is Life, and it is like life.  It embraces life when Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Fatalism, Optimism, Mythology, and Atheism all refuse to be intellectually honest and choose to strive to negate certain aspects of life in order to hold on to their mistaken ideals.  Christianity bridges all these religions because it is a story and it is a true story.  It is the freedom that comes from the free-will which is the essence of a story, the truth which is the longing of our intellects, and the divine supremacy of God which satisfies the yearning in our soul to know our Creator.

Islam, too, is a stagnant religion.  Islam and Christianity are similar in the fact that they are the only monotheistic religions stemming from Abraham, but in very little else.  For where Islam worships a solitary and therefore self-centered and uncharitable god, without even the ability to love because he is lonely, Christianity worships the Triune God.  He is the God that is the embodiment of the Family.  He is the essence of power, and yet is wholly selfless because the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost are forever loving each other and the world in Sacred Communion.

For just as the mythology and philosophy in Asia is too tolerant to die, and the selfishness and hate of Islam is too bitter to die, Christianity is continually experiencing rebirth.  Over and over again, the Faith has been so diluted as to die, but it has always risen again in new power at the pivotal moment.  We worship the God who rose from the grave, and who has given us the power which raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

On Faërie and the Everlasting Man

A Faery Song

Buttercups in the sunshine look like little cups of gold

Perhaps the Faeries come to drink the raindrops that they hold.

The daisies with their golden hearts fringed all about with white,

Are little plates for Faerie fold to sup from every night.

Soft moss a downy pillow makes, and green leaves spread a tent,

Where Faerie fold may rest and sleep until their night is spent.

The bluebird sings a lullaby, the firefly gives a light,

The twinkling stars are candles bright, Sleep, Faeries all, Good Night.

Elizabeth T. Dillingham

On reading the Tolkien essay, 'On Fairy-Stories', I gleaned many interesting facts about the history, etymology, and ideals of fantasy.  I'd like to share them with you, so here are my notes.

To begin, the whole lore of fairy-stories is misnomered, as the very term 'fairies' originated from a mistranslation that should have been 'of Faërie'.  The people of Faërie are really called elves and fays.  These personages were also joined by dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons, and then mortal men who had been offered the Silver Bough of enchantment.

As fairies are strange to the lore of Faërie, so are the little Thumbelinas generally depicted in modern Disney movies.  Elves, historically, were tall and angelic-like creatures––much in the style of the Lord of the Rings and King Arthur's Court––until England and France, with their obsession of refinement, effeminance, humor, and shallowness, turned them into the absurd, annoying, little people with impish faces and leering expressions. 

As the very term 'fairy' is mis-used, so is the term 'fairy-tale'.  What most people call a fairy tale usually isn't a fairy tale at all.  They are generally either traveller's tales of awe-full and often satirical happenings and adventures, or they are merely stories of the dream-world.  Tolkien says, 'If a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a thing imagined in his sleep, he cheats deliberately the primal desire at the heart of Faërie: the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder.'  Of course, they can still be good stories, like Alice in Wonderland, but they are not of Faërie.

And, just as the terms of Faërie are wronged, so are the lore of Faërie degraded in the eyes of our society because of the encroaching shallowness that has pervaded the arts of the imagination in history.  Ever since the rise of Calvinism and Puritanism, adults have become too cynical to enjoy Faërie.  As the adults rejected the beautiful reminiscing of Eden found in Faërie. the only remembering of it was found in ignorant Irish nursery maids telling it to children.  Yet children love to copy their elders, and followed in their parents' footsteps, until the tradition of the tales of Faërie had been degraded until the only relic left were silly, shallow movie and story characters that would earn the contempt of anyone.  For this reason, Tolkien hated when stories were dramatized or made into movies and plays because it trumped the personal imagination of the reader.  He believed that imagining things was one of the most important parts of experiencing a book.

We have forgotten that elements of the truths of Faërie can be found in the Old Testament.  Anyone can read the King James Bible and see many references to unicorns, dragons, griffins, and other animals that were believed in until the people of the last three hundred years decided they were smarter than antiquity.  One reads of blessings, curses, miracles and powerful words, magic trees, spiritual laws, universal truths and the strength and glory of the God of Love.

Every sort of culture going back to the very earliest historical records had their own mythologies and beliefs about Faërie.  It rose to its highest peak with the mythology of the Romans, and then went on a demise as people began to scoff creativity and embraced the ideals of the philosophers of the time.  This belief system, however, failed them as well, since their sophistries merely went in circles and when taken to their conclusions negated life itself.  In the end, they all turned to atheism.  Atheism was the last shock––the last shot of adrenaline for their wearied minds.

Then Jesus was born, and in his enigmatic, wonderful, and heroic life He melded the two together.  He was the second Adam, and He proclaimed the truth that sets us free.  It was not the truths of fatalism, that explains everything good and beautiful in life away, or the giddy fantasy of mythology, which negates the more serious issues of life, but He showed how both the material and the spiritual are one.  He blazed a path that had never been blazed before––His words were shocking to His listeners, and yet everlasting––His life was a Story, a Word, a Logos, that brought a sword to sunder the demon-worship of the time.  He died and rose again, and arose to the Father, and His legacy has never died out.  Where mythology, stoicism, and sophism are all too old to die, as in the ideologies of Asia, Christianity has been a constant resurrection of the fire that purges away the chaff from the wheat.  It has revealed, and is forever revealing, the real Truth of Elohim, the God-Head, which is the Trinity of three distinct Beings in love and unity with each other.  It is the Family that, though blinding in its very splendor, shines its truth-bearing light on the world, and fills our hearts with the soul of son-ship.  We too, may become children in the Family.

The Importance of Christmas

The Gracious Time

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

And then, they say, no spirit date stir abroad;

The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

by William Shakespeare

In this day and age we have hundreds of critics scoffing our Christmas celebrations and debasing our traditions because we are supposedly neglecting the people who are really the neediest.  We are said to be a materialist and consumerist society.  But the gifts of Christmas does not take away from our ability to give to the indigent…it increases it.  

Christmas is a prime time for buying gifts, and, in the long run, this is one of the best things that can happen for the world.  We sell and buy, and thus feed the food chain.  Without the boost that Christmas retail gives our capitalist economy, we wouldn't be able to send the three hundred billion dollars overseas that we do each year.  Without this economical protein, we wouldn't be able to provide for the soldiers who are overseas protecting the poor in third-world countries.  With one Christmas in which we didn't buy presents for one another, many of the upper class businesses would be on the downslide, trickle-down economics would influence the middle class, and the lower class would end up losing jobs and homes, and everyone would be in such financial straits that the charitable contributions we make each year would be dismissed in order to earn our bread-and-butter.

Not only would this drastic change take place, the spiritual state of our country, as degraded as it is, would become even more dark.  Christmas provides an opportunity where everyone looks outside their selves and focuses on others.  We are forced to think about what those closest to us need, to open our eyes to the potential happiness of others, to open our cheque books and spend our well-earned dollars in order to bless another.  We decorate our houses as prettily as we can, we listen to comparably good, wholesome music for the first time in the year, so that our eyes and ears may be blessed with the lovely aesthetic of beauty and tradition.  We watch movies like It's A Wonderful Life and White Christmas, we read books like A Christmas Carol, and smile as we are reminded once more what true loving-kindness means.

We invite one another over to our houses, we give our best hospitality, we prepare food that other people like and that has historical significance, we partake together in unity around a common table of fellowship.  We experience a communion with people we may not like very much, but whose faults the spirit of Christmas has glazed over.

We embrace the traditions.  We remember our ancestors.  We dwell on many old spiritual relics, from the memory of the Christmas tree and the conversion of Ireland, to the stockings and the candles, the holly and the old stories of Saint Nicholas, Good King Wenceslas, and so many other patrons that are renowned for their generosity and kindness.  

We resolve to be better people.  We look forward to the future, and try our best to change the things that need to be changed in order to make that future brighter.  Our discipline doesn't always hold through, but the thought counts.  

And most of all, we celebrate the magnificent, terrifying, humble, beautiful, and righteous Baby, the second Adam who came into the world to free us from the chains of Satan, and split the darkness of the world with His first cry of life.  We remember the Christmas Child, the Holy One.  May God bless us, every one.

Notes on 'The Everlasting Man'

'The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth is really a very perfect image of a certain idea of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to he Eastern philosophies and religions.  It really is a curve that in one sense includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing.  In that sense it does confess, or rather boast, that all argument is an argument in  a circle.  And though the figure is but a symbol, we can see how sound is the symbolic sense that produces it, the parallel symbol of the Wheel of Buddha generally called the Swastika.  The cross is a thing at right angles pointing boldly in opposite directions; but the Swastika is the same thing in the very act of returning to the recurrent curve.  That crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a wheel.  Before we dismiss even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols, we must remember how intense was the imaginative instinct that produced them or selected them both in the east and the west.  The cross has something more than a historical memory; it does convey, almost as by a mathematical diagram, the truth about the real point at issue; the idea of a conflict stretching outwards into eternity.  It is true, and even tautological, to say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.' - G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

The greatest of the evidence against evolution is the fact that animals are not creative.  We have never seen a monkey draw a Mona Lisa, or ants build statues of their gods, or birds write operas to sing, or horses worship a god, or bears bury their mothers and write poetry in remembrance of their cuddliness.  In fact, the reason why they call evolution prehistoric is because it is not in history, and therefore no where in reality except the warped minds of their dreamy and materialistic creators.  What we do see is intelligence from the very beginning, creativity, worship, perseverance, and morale.  There were two great religions in the beginning.  There was the Fall, there was the slow turning away from god, until man had given themselves up to the senses and created mythology and diabolism and sophism, and then there was Abraham's story––Abraham, the only man who turned away from the popular trends to follow the one and only true God.

Mythology was never really taken seriously by the Greeks.  They felt the need for worship, the presence of the spiritual realm, and opened up their imaginations and welcomed every god that they heard about, even offering up altars to any god they had missed.  That is why the philosophers and priests were always at odds––the philosophers embracing reason and rejecting 'romance'.  That's why the Israelites kept embracing all the gods they heard about, and Yahweh was extremely different from the world culture, since He insisted on being the Holy One.  It was not till Christianity came that the world learned that reason and spirituality are fused.

Yet even while the world reveled in a wild and lofty worship of the mythological gods, for practical purposes they turned to the lower gods, the demons of the spirit realm.  Their shallow minds, grasping the immensity of the heavenly beings, felt that only the underworld could answer their personal needs, and so they embraced the demons.  They became obsessed with superstitions.  And so we see the dark and diabolical side of the world before Christ––the worship so eerily described in The Lord of the Flies, the sacrificing of children to Moloch and Baal, the mad prostitution with idols and their priests, the cannibalism of different tribes and nations.  But these people were not the savage barbarians as thought today.  They were some of the most progressive and mature societies, and, being tired of the morality of mythology, they turned to the wild orgies of diabolism to experience a new high.

The only bright spot in this world was Rome.  They started as a small nation, who worshiped the gods of the hearth more than the gods of the country, and were very family centric.  Virgil began the chivalry praised today, with his praise of the behavior of piety, patriotism, and the honor of the countryside.  Rome loved the natural.  They started the legends of the Merry Peasant and the china shepherdess, the peace of simplicity and satisfaction in the beauty of the creation of the Creator.  And they grew strong in comparable holiness even as Greece plummeted to the ground, and, being disillusioned with their poetries and philosophies, they turned to worship of each other.  Thus the rise of sodomy and the mad bloodthirstiness that pervaded their society.

But also growing stronger and stronger beside Rome was Carthage, and it was as the forces of Darkness alongside the forces of Light, even in the false light of paganism.  Carthage was a society very much like ours, with their intense materialism and their obsession with Moloch and sacrificing babies to their gods.  It was the capital of the demonic war against children.  Hannibal, with a host of satanic forces leading him on, conquered city after city, and finally conquered Rome.  But Rome, though vanquished physically, were not vanquished spiritually, and they rose up and defeated Hannibal and burned Carthage to the ground, thus destroying Satan's pivotal center of power.  They, likewise beat out upon Corinth, mad with sodomy and orgies, and defeated the evil there.

And so for a while the better in paganism drowned out the dark, until Rome, too, became disillusioned with philosophy, grew too tired and dull for the creativity of imagination in mythology, and were degraded to a state of atheism where joy and gladness were forgotten and the gods were forgotten and the only thing left to produce an emotional high was the worship of sexuality and blood.    Atheism and the lower pleasures were the last shock––the last shot of adrenaline for their wearied minds.

And then Jesus was born.

'The temptation of the philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety.  They are always attracted by insane simplifications, as men poised above abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air.  It needed another kind of philosopher to stand poised upon the pinnacle of the Temple and keep his balance without casting himself down.' - G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

From the Heart of George MacDonald: Phantastes

'But it is no use trying to account for things in Fairy Land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the very idea of doing so, and takes everything as it comes like a child, who being in a chronic condition of wonder, is surprised at nothing.' –George MacDonald, Phantastes

'Past tears are present strength.' -George MacDonald, Phantastes

'Tears are the only cure for weeping.' -George MacDonald, Phantastes

'I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence.  I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man, that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.  In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself beside it.  Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.' -George MacDonald, Phantastes

'My spirit rejoiced.  They left me to my repose.  I felt as if a cool hand had been laid upon my heart, and had stilled it.  My soul was like a summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the wind of the twilight has begun to blow.  The hot fever of life had gone by, and I breathed the clear mountain-air of the land of Death.  I had never dreamed of such blessedness.  It was not that I had in any way ceased to be what I had been.  The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to lead a purely spiritual life.  If my passions were dead, the souls of the passions, those essential mysteries of the spirit which had imbodied themselves in the passions, and had given to them all their glory and wonderment, yet lived, yet glowed, with a pure, undying fire.  They rose above their vanishing earthly garments, and disclosed themselves angels of light.  But oh, how beautiful beyond the old form!  I lay thus for a time, and lived as it were an unradiating existence; my soul a motionless lake, that received all things and gave nothing back; satisfied in still contemplation, and spiritual consciousness.' -George MacDonald, Phantastes

'The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die.' –George MacDonald, Phantastes

'I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being beloved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness.  I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies.  Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return.  All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.' -George MacDonald, Phantastes