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Possibly a quote from one of their books?
Good heavens! Neither do I!
If this is the impression that Christians give of what Christianity is, then woe to us! While it’s not what I want to hear, it’s important for Christians know the impression we make. So, I value what you’ve said here, Mark.
There is military imagery associated with Jesus, particularly in the book of Revelation, which is full of all sorts of apocalyptic imagery that is equally bizarre. I cringe at the emphasis on these images more and more. “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war!” Really? Where did Jesus talk like that himself?
Jesus never denied that he was God – he unblushingly received worship from his disciples at times – or a king, but stated emphatically that he isn’t a king like any other – “My kingdom is not of this world.” And he demonstrated that greatness in his kingdom comes by humility and humiliation, even martyrdom. First to the block, so to speak.
Unfortunately, this assumption is more widely held all the time. Perhaps an important gauge for some of the vital signs of the church. When do we know the illness is terminal? Then what?
Well, it’s a start.
He definitely does those things.
: )
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Merv, thank you so much for mentioning these lectures. So far they have done me good. I wish I had more time to really work through them and take notes!
It’d be neat, if we had time to work through them together as a group. Maybe one every second week.
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I’d love that! I have a former colleague I’ve been discussing them with - and he has called them nothing short of ‘revolutionary’ to his way of thinking (and he actually meant that in a wider sense too - as in he sees them as revolutionary to the entirety of modern Christianity!) There’s a lot there - in each and every one of the eight.
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Maybe “military sense” missed the mark. I had in mind the idea of him being a liege lord to whom one bends the knee. It’s no business of mine if some people miss having royalty above them but I’m not one of them. But I also don’t approach the sacred looking to exalt what I revere. It just isn’t in my background or culture.
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What about in the New Year? Christmas is coming, along with all the crazy busy-ness.
I can put a post together with a schedule and the link to the videos. If we do two weeks per video, I think it’s a good pace to let people really study and take notes as well as keep up with processing for themselves and reading replies. Does that sound ok? It’d take two months to do it, but some threads seem to go on into perpetuity.
Reverence is a really good word – one I think the brand of Protestantism I’m part of really lacks.
I’ll be there!
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I’ll make a reminder for myself, and set up the post in a few weeks.
Yay!
Thanks, Merv!
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Next quotes from Chapter One of A Hobbit , a Wardrobe , and a Great War : How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith , Friendship , and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918 , by Joe Loconte. The bolded is my favorite parts.
Born in 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, developed a deep attachment to his home in West Midlands, a county that was already a mix of rural countryside and urban development. …
Tolkien once told his publisher, the shire “is based on rural England and not any other country in the world.” The house of his famous hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, takes its name - “Bag End” - from his aunt’s farm in Worcestershire. “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size), he admitted. “I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking.”
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Clive Staples Lewis was born in 1898, just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. …
Lewis became as dubious as Tolkien of the promises of industrialization to uplift the human condition, a skepticism that he would carry throughout his life. …. Modern assumptions about “progress” that disregard the rhythms and traditions of the past will come under attack. “I care more how humanity lives than how long,” he wrote. “Progress, for me, means increasing the goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible idea.”
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Both authors regarded twentieth-century modernizations a threat to human societies because they viewed the natural world as the handiwork of God and thus integral to human happiness. As such nature was an essential ally in the struggle against these dehumanizing forces.
In the climactic battles for Narnia and Middle-earth, Nature herself joins in the war against tyranny. Tolkien’s humanoid trees, the Ents, are among the most memorable figures in Middle-earth. …
Lewis likewise viewed nature as an intrinsic part of human life. This is why Narnia novels give such a prominent role to its animals. … As biographer Alister McGrath writes, Lewis understood humanity’s relationship with animals, and with the rest of the natural world, as potentially ennobling and fulfilling.
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Oh dear, who else here is a fan of these authors? @Randy, @Merv, @Rob_Brewer, @Kendel, @SkovandOfMitaze … anyone else?
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Thanks. It sounds like a talented author. The anti- progress motif reminds me of the “Wind In The Willows,” with Toad’s noisy, noisome automobile set against Rat, Mole and Badger’s gentle, peaceful goodwill.
My grandfather had an old farmhouse on forty acres of woods that he had to sell because of taxes. We used to love e staying there, where it seemed so quiet, beautiful and peaceful. I was so sad to see the beautiful place torn down for a factory that I had a hard time rejoicing for those who got jobs for their families there as a result. Truly it is a struggle.
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As you know, Mark, I was brought up on a literary diet of the Narnia series, and later LOTR, and this fascination continued with numerous other novels throughout my life. I am also a lover of the English countryside, and as soon as I am in England, I cannot avoid going out, even in adverse weather to photograph its beauty. I am also a lover of the simple rural life, which I knew when I was a child, but we later moved into a more industrialised area when I was about 15 years of age, and I hated it. I can fully appreciate Tolkien’s and Lewis’ aversion to urbanisation, and even though it seems unavoidable, you don’t have to like it.
Having nursed people at the end of their lives, I can also sympathise with Lewis’ opinion that increasing the goodness and happiness of individual lives is paramount. In contrast, longevity at all costs is a “contemptible idea.” I have known old people who, when suffering an incursion in their mobility, said, “Okay, that was it. It was good as long as it lasted,” and prepared themselves for death. Although from experience, I knew that the process wasn’t as convenient as that and that a healthy heart often thwarts the hopes of a swift degeneration to death, I understood the sentiment.
My mother recently died, which is why I have been absent for a while, and after a long period of ailing health, she decided she’d had enough and refused her tablets. I understand that, and despite the pain of loss, it is her prerogative to say how long she wants to prolong her ailment. At the funeral, the Pastor read a wonderful poem, She Is Gone, by David Harkins:
You can shed tears that she is gone
Or you can smile because she has lived
You can close your eyes and pray that she will come back
Or you can open your eyes and see all that she has left
Your heart can be empty because you can’t see her
Or you can be full of the love that you shared
You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday
Or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday
You can remember her and only that she is gone
Or you can cherish her memory and let it live on
You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
Or you can do what she would want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on.
I started questioning what people refer to as ‘faith’ some time ago, and seeing people grieving, which I witnessed for a long time in my profession, I think it is only when we enter these existential moments that we realise what it is we believe, and what sustains us. These men seem to have understood that, and if you look for it, it is there in their works.
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Mark, thank you for sharing these. The evidence of what you quoted is all over the books!
Tolkien’s and Lewis’s love of nature and the rural life are strongly evident in the LotR and Narnia. In LotR it is a kind of life that maintains a humane pace of work tied to the rhythms of the land and seasons. It is healthful, wholesome, free, generous, and more.
But it is also idealized by men who didn’t endure the pain and exhaustion of the physical labor in all weather, the direct impact of economic change or weather or blight that could devastate a family, region or country all at once. There is much more to say about these things, and it would be valuable, perhaps, to contrast them with Wendell Berry’s thoughts, as he is a practitioner.
@LM77 and @beaglelady need to know about this series of quotes.
@Rob_Brewer , my condolences to you. Losing loved ones is hard. Peace to you.
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Love the poem. I hope you catch some sunlight while you’re back home. The book is hardly a page turner but interesting at least. Still waiting to hook up with a really good story while this is more like an historical account.
That is a good observation for we armchair rustics. I love puttering in my garden but I do not depend on it for my sustenance, so a very different experience. If I was a Hobbit I’d probably be a lazy dreamer.
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Sort of like Thoreau basking in the serenity of Walden Pond … while his mother did his laundry.
Which also gets captured in this great opening to one of the Sunday Calvin strips with his dad’s great discourse on color photography and the black-and-white world.
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They did both serve in WWI and knew the conditions of war. The weather 100 years ago was atrocious, as storms, rain, floods and snow made life utterly miserable in the trenches on the western front during the first world war. In savage fighting the British and French held off repeated German attacks until 22 November 1914, when torrential rains followed by snow brought the German assault to a halt. It was an allied victory but at terrible cost with the loss of 58,155 men, mostly professional soldiers, a loss the British could ill-afford. But worse was to come. December 1914 was one of the wettest Decembers and winters known for decades.
Whilst the country was in the grips of the First World War, severe blizzards hit both the United Kingdom and Ireland. In Ireland, the Weekly Freeman’s Journal in February 1917 reported on how ‘Railway traffic was interrupted in many places and roads rendered impassable by snow-drifts, ten feet in depth.’
Winter was to return with vengeance during 1932 to 1933. In 1947 Britain faced another severe winter, which The Sphere in March 1947 dubbed as ‘the great freeze-up, the most serious in Britain for a hundred years.’ The village of Stalisfield was marooned for six days, the snow threatening to overwhelm ‘a roadside signpost’ on its outskirts. Meanwhile, the former highest station in England, Barras, between Kirkby Stephen East and Barnard Castle, was completely covered by the snow, with only the ‘tip of the a platform lamppost visible,’ as the Illustrated London News reported.
CS Lewis wrote: "My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years. Military service, to be plain, includes the threat of every temporal evil; pain and death which is what we fear from sickness; isolation from those we love which is what we fear from exile: toil under arbitrary masters, injustice, humiliation, which is what we fear from slavery: hunger, thirst and exposure wh. is what we fear from poverty. I’m not a pacifist. If it’s got to be it’s got to be. But the flesh is weak and selfish and I think death would be much better than to live through another war. Thank God he has not allowed my faith to be greatly tempted by the present horrors. I do not doubt that whatever misery He permits will be for our ultimate good unless by rebellious will we convert it to evil. But I get no further than Gethsemane: and am daily thankful that that scene of all others in Our Lord’s life did not go unrecorded. But what state of affairs in this world can we view with satisfaction? If we are unhappy, then we are unhappy. If we are happy, then we remember that the crown is not promised without the Cross and tremble.
(Letters of C. S. Lewis)
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Rob,
Thank you for the details. The last time (3rd or 4th time) I read LotR, my husband had “The Great War” (a well-done documentary on WWI) on PBS sometime near the beginning of the first novel. It revolutionized the way I understood the books. I couldn’t help see the war in every nook and crannie of the novels. And I’ve written a fair amount about that in other threads here before.
The suffering Tolkien and his fellow soldiers endured as well as the blessedness of the simplist relief of it – a relatively safe place to get some rest, fresh water, a healing balm, a decent meal – come out in ever sharper relief for having recognized the war behind the writing. Obviously, there is at least one book to be written about it. Mark is reading that now.
My challenge, though, is to the idealization of an agrarian, low tech existance as if it is the very best of all. The suffering they went through during the wars was unimaginable for me. But it is different from generaltional suffering that can accompany (has accompanied) rural, agrarian poverty. The Earth is not always giving, abundant, fecund, wholesome or generous.
Neither am I a philosophical capitalist-industrialist. A high-tech economy has plowed over peopel who used to be able to pull a modest living from low skilled work. I don’t think that’s possible now, or at least not the same way. It doesn’t help that typical families are splintered in ways that do not allow for practical forms of communal living that allowed for the shared cost of housing and pooled income. For example, my husband’s unmarried aunts and their mother shared a house until their mother died. The aunts worked in low-level jobs that were common post WWII and lived modestly. That is not seen as a normal option in the U.S. now. So, I am not promoting the current options as ideals either.
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Definitely needed saying. Especially if all the advances in hygiene and medicine are seen as part of the alternative to the agrarian way of life. But maybe the real ideal lies in the direction of keeping the advances and striving to cut back on our population. Seeing all animal and other life thriving as part of God’s plan and " as potentially ennobling and fulfilling" for us as well. Though as Lewis also noted “For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible idea.” It can’t just be a numbers game, quality is what matters and what is pleasing to God as well.
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