Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something, but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on “German Idealism.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald • “Head and Shoulders” (1920)
“‘Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.’”
F. Scott Fitzgerald • “Babylon Revisited” (1931)
“What I heard, and offer to you for testing, was that…”
— Brad Jersak • Can Your Hear Me? (2003) [emphasis mine]
A remarkable qualifier in book by a Christian teacher. It shouldn’t be remarkable. It should be normal.
I observed a prayer ministry session with a lady who would pray aloud and then the answers from God back to herself, out loud in continuous dialogue. I took notes during this awesome conversation and weighed carefully what was being shared. At times her grief and panic came through in the questions. “Oh dear, oh dear! What shall I ever do?” She would cry. Then the calm voice of the Lord would respond with gentleness and comfort: “My daughter, there is no need for fear. I am with you. Hold my hand, and I will lead the way.” This would continue for hours as God did his own marvellous [sic] therapy of the soul.
[…]
If you struggle with static when trying to listen, you might her simple method a try.
— Brad Jersak • Can Your Hear Me? (2003)
So there’s precedent for how I best hear Your voice!
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald • “The Rich Boy” (1926)
This made me think of Donald Trump.
The house loomed up suddenly beside him, and his first thought was that it had assumed a strange unreality. There was nothing changed—only everything was changed. It was smaller and it seemed shabbier than before—there was no cloud of magic hovering over its roof and issuing from the windows of the upper floor. He rang the door-bell and an unfamiliar colored maid appeared. Miss Jonquil would be down in a moment. He wet his lips nervously and walked into the sitting-room—and the feeling of unreality increased. After all, he saw, this was only a room, and not the enchanted chamber where he had passed those poignant hours. He sat in a chair, amazed to find it a chair, realizing that his imagination had distorted and colored all these simple familiar things.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald • “‘The Sensible Thing’” (1924)
There it was on the bureau, the letter—in sacred ink, on blessed paper—all over the city, people, if they listened, could hear the beating of George O’Kelly’s heart. He read the commas, the blots, and the thumb-smudge on the margin—then he threw himself hopelessly upon his bed.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald • “‘The Sensible Thing’” (1924)
A little sleep, a little slumber, A little folding of the hands to rest— Your poverty will come in like a vagabond And your need like an armed man.
Proverbs 6:10-11
“Feeling good about what you’re doing is no guarantee that you’re doing any good.”
— David Mesenbring
“And so climate politics has become the art of the impossible: a cycle of increasingly desperate exhortations to impracticable action, presumably in hopes of inspiring at least some half-measures.”
— Matt Frost
“[R]ecent sex research suggests, the sex drive is as much about the desire to be desired and to be close as it is about sexual release, for men and women alike."
— Sue Johnson
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
— George S. Patton
“Their question is haunting: Who will tell our stories well when we have forgotten who we are?”
— John Swinton, Dementia (23)
What I really want in this instance, as George MacDonald taught me, isn’t the forgiveness for the consequences of my sins (e.g., the wrath of God) but freedom from my actual sins. I’d like to become the father that doesn’t snap at his son. I don’t want an imputed purity. I actually want to be, myself, pure.
Good working definition of joy from Richard Beck: “great delight regardless of external circumstance.”
“[A] Christian sexual ethic is a process of transforming eros into agape.”
Shame and guilt can be healthy, life-giving emotions. There’s a reason we have them. Sure, shame and guilt can become toxic and debilitating. But let’s not think that there’s something unhealthy about feeling shame or guilt when you do something that violates your conscience. That’s called being a human being.
“In distinctive contrast in the midst of the ancient world, the Jews will sacrifice animals to God, but never their children. And that’s a moral revolution in the history of the world” (Richard Beck, “On Genesis 22: Give the Story a Little Respect”).
The death of a spouse after a long and fulfilling marriage in quite a different thing. Perhaps I have never felt more closely the strength of God’s presence than I did during the months of my husband’s dying and after his death. It did not wipe away the grief. The death of a beloved is an amputation. But when two people marry, each one has to accept that one of them will die before the other (xii–xiii).
Such insightful and poetic words from Madeleine L’Engle. It is true: Either Carla or I will predecease the other, and that will feel like an amputation.
Reading A Grief Observed during my own grief made me understand that each experience of grief is unique (xiii).
I must remember that as I age and my friends’ spouses die.
Like Lewis, I, too, kept a journal, continuing a habit started when I was eight. It is all right to wallow in one’s journal; it is a way of getting rid of self-pity and self-indulgence and self-centeredness. What we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends (xiv).
I appreciate her recognition that, as Carla has taught me, it is important to vent so that we don’t hurt those around us.
I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God with angry violence. This is part of healthy grief not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C. S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul’s growth (xvi).
Geez. Had I only known people were so comfortable with their own doubts about God and Jesus and the whole shebang when I was going through my throes of existential doubt!
And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? (5)
Warning! When Carla dies, still take your walks. Call people to hang out. Do your work. Unless you want to just die, too.
The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. (11)
Lewis is not outshone in poetry by his formidable foreword writer. I am certain Carla’s death will seem just like he describes. It will (dis)color everything.
But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment into a whimpering child. (16)
Again, I suspect the same will be true of me when Carla dies.
‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? (27)
The poor Calvinist!
Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive God.’ Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn’t. He crucified Him. (28)
Wrong.
Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can’t escape. Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. (28)
No, it’s not.
Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite [of God being good]? (29)
No.
Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.’s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned—I had warned myself—not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing I haven’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No, And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards (36–37).
Crucial, both for those who know they are doubting because of the problem of evil and for those who think they aren’t.
In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, our because I only dream that I believe them? (39)
That’s an important distinction of which I’d never thought.
They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal? (41)
An excellent one-liner. Ah, but it was Lazarus’ experience that brought us the Gospel according to “John”!
A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made brighter (42).
Who knew belief in purgatory existed among Protestants? Certainly not I. But now I do: Richard Beck, Jerry Walls, C.S. Lewis, Brad Jersak—heck, all the universalists, I suppose. Thinking of the afterlife makes so much more sense with a purgatorial hell.
What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never been to a dentist? 43
I love it when Lewis zings.
You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately; anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when think about our dead? (45)
I remember those October laps around the Holiday Inn in Orlando.
For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. :perhaps more. (47–48)
This is how I view Carla, and I told her so.
Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis in one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again. (52-53)
My, but does his man has a knack for finding the right metaphors to explain his thoughts! L’Engle and Lewis agree: Losing a spouse to death is an amputation.
The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. (62)
God, You equipped me to not repeat Lewis’ mistake here. Thank You.
An incurable abstract intellect
Excuse me, Mr. Lewis. Did you call me?
To me, however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images—sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? (66)
Sure seems like it.
And now that I come to think of it, there’s no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them. (69–70)
Amen, preach it, Brother.
To make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a ‘spiritual animal.’ To take a poor primate, a beast with never-endings all over it, a creature with a stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, ‘Now get on with it. Become a god’ (72)
Indeed. Thanks a bundle, God. No really, I mean it: It’s absurd and exactly what I want at the same time.
My overall takeaway: It scares me a little that I have read this and Dementia in the same year. Carla may very well predecease me, and I appear to be attempting to get ready for that contingency.
The main way to be ready: Remember to continue to live after she dies! But remember to grieve ferociously in order to do that!
“…[w]ith humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves…” (Paul). This is a crucial verse for me if I’m going to bear the fruit of love. It’s this regard of others as more important than myself that is going to turn up my inner hearth of love for others. Without that phrase, my love risks being too mechanical, too principled. If I can honestly regard others as more important than myself, I will fulfill the second Great Commandment.
“Given the issue is so fundamentally important to our view of who we are, a claim that our free will is illusory should be based on fairly direct evidence. Such evidence is not available.”
— Benjamin Libet, in a 1999 quotation I found via a current article in The Atlantic today that blows away the Goliath in the room of the question of the soul
“‘Come near to God and he will come near to you,’ wrote James, in words that sound formulaic. James does not put a time parameter on the second clause, however.”
But consider what Rabbi Abraham Heschel said to the members of his synagogue who complained that the words of the liturgy did not express what they felt. He told them that it was not that the liturgy should express what they feel, but that they should learn to feel what the liturgy expressed.
— Ben Patterson, as cited in Philip Yancey’s Prayer
“Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God.”
— Philip Yancey
My new motto in life is: If it’s not worth doing for free, it’s not worth doing!
— Carla, to Frank