The Sorrowing Tree (a parable)

An Easter to Christmas Story by Will Hackett

Long ago, a lonely seabird on the first leg of a great journey arrived at a distant land carrying a single cone from a fir tree. It was late autumn, and the cone was fully ripe with its pollen and seeds already mixed together within its scales. The bird, thinking he would be hungry after his passage, intended to eat the seeds, but he was now so very tired that he could hold on to his burden no longer. The cone plummeted to the earth where it came to rest on a sunny hill. Its seeds spilled forth and covered the ground where they would lay for most of the day until a distracted stag came rushing out from the nearby undergrowth and trampled them, pushing the seeds under the soil.

The winter was a particularly harsh one with frozen heaps of snow and ice that lingered into April, but the seeds relished in the cold—it softened their outer shells, and by late May a few seedlings could be seen pushing up through the soil seeking out the sun. Of these, most were eaten by forest animals, but one remained, and it burgeoned and flourished.

Read the rest as an e-text for only a dollar at Amazon:

The Sorrowing Tree

GK Chesterton & George Bernard Shaw in the Movies

 

I'm just putting this up for posterity sake. I found a halfway decent, if small, photo of Chesterton and Shaw on the outdoor set of a test film by J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame). They made two short films with Barrie in 1914, but this still photo is all that is known to have survived from either. It was western called How Men Love. (The other film short was called Rosy Rapture, the Pride of the Beauty Chorus.) Below is what Chesterton wrote in his autobiography of the event:

"We went down to the waste land in Essex and found our Wild West equipment. But considerable indignation was felt against William Archer; who, with true Scottish foresight, arrived there first and put on the best pair of trousers … We … were rolled in barrels, roped over fake precipices and eventually turned loose in a field to lasso wild ponies, which were so tame that they ran after us instead of our running after them, and nosed in our pockets for pieces of sugar. Whatever may be the strain on credulity, it is also a fact that we all got on the same motor-bicycle; the wheels of which were spun round under us to produce the illusion of hurtling like a thunderbolt down the mountain-pass. When the rest finally vanished over the cliffs, clinging to the rope, they left me behind as a necessary weight to secure it; and Granville-Barker kept on calling out to me to Register Self-Sacrifice and Register Resignation, which I did with such wild and sweeping gestures as occurred to me; not, I am proud to say, without general applause. And all this time Barrie, with his little figure behind his large pipe, was standing about in an impenetrable manner; and nothing could extract from him the faintest indication of why we were being put through these ordeals."

Remembering Ros

Ros 1961 to 2012

I distinctly remember a friend of mine—a good amateur paleontologist—back in the late 90s talk about going out of town to meet up some like minded people he had met through an internet group. I laughed until I cried. “You’re not actually going to meet a bunch of internet dorks!?”

I still dislike the notion of such a thing. I guess I never considered internet friends to be “real” friends. They were more like acquaintances. And I’ve had many such acquaintances over the years that I’ve met through my YouTube channels and blogging as well as my George MacDonald site. I’ve answered hundreds of emails from George MacDonald fans. But I never once considered having a cup of coffee with anyone I met on the internet. That is, until I met Ros.

Not that it would ever happen. She lived in England, and chances are I would never set foot in Europe, nor she in the States (although I think she did visit the USA once before I met her). Unlike many people I had encountered on the internet, Ros had a less than dorky way about her. She was a very fun loving Catholic girl who enjoyed everything about CS Lewis, and she was in love with the movie Shadowlands. She used the title as her internet handle for blogging. I think she could have watched it every day really. She bought a book I had out about George MacDonald, more of a study guide than anything really, and not a very good one at that. But she wanted to know more about the man who had inspired Lewis.

Ros wrote to me often over the years. She was always very encouraging and often knew just what to say when I was unhappy. She was the embodiment of effervescence. But her happiness came in the face of adversity. Her marriage ended some years ago, and two of her sons had terrible physical problems. Her youngest, who I believe is about 17 now, was homebound, and the doctors didn’t seem to be doing him much good. Then one of her older boys was jumped a couple of years ago and beaten badly one night, suffering horrible head trauma that might afflict him for life.

All this contributed to what Ros called her thorn in the flesh. She began drinking heavily and couldn’t seem to find her way out. I normally wouldn’t talk about this, but it’s on her blog for all the world to see. Rather than hide it, she sought the prayers of those who knew and cared about her. She fought with it and agonized over it daily. I recall at one point she drank in her garden one evening until she passed out and found herself covered with snow the next morning. Her drinking was that bad. I can safely say that I have never met anyone who tried so hard to rid themselves of an addiction. She wondered why God wouldn’t take it from her. It wasn’t for lack of prayers. Nor for lack of good deeds. She worked in homeless shelters and many charitable causes. It was something she couldn’t beat on her own.

Ros would sometimes get flustered with the internet and would sign off for months at a time. I hadn’t heard from her for quite a while though and searched around a bit today to see if anyone else had heard anything only to find out that she died back in September. Her brother left a blog page in tribute to her. He doesn’t mention the circumstances of her death, but those of us who knew her can probably surmise that it was alcohol related.

Why didn’t God take this compulsion to drink away from her? Yes, that’s the question isn’t it. I wonder, did St. Paul take his thorn in the flesh to the grave too? Actually, I imagine he did. One thing I can tell you from the writings of St Paul and St Ros both is that they loved their God in spite of it. Perhaps that's all God is concerned with. Will we, like Job, still love him in spite of our suffering?

Ros once told me that she had dreamed one night that I was standing at her door stoop. In fact, it’s why she read my book. She thought it was a message from God. She figured I was there to help her in some way. I guess it never dawned on her that God would bring me into her life so that she could help me.

I’ve had other “real” internet friends since Ros and will certainly have others. But she remains very special to me. I will be very proud to have a cup of coffee with her in heaven one fine day.

Looking after children at Norfolk County Council

Ordet - A 1955 Carl Dreyer Film

You can watch this film at YouTube (in a 12-part playlist) here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSojSt6Qlew&list=PL86E718012C52C419

And here is a snippet from near the end that I found on YouTube: Warning: This gives away the whole film, so if you think you might want to watch it one day, I would avoid watching this scene.



I've recently discovered the genius of Carl T. Dreyer, a Danish filmmaker who started with silent films in 1918 and made his last in 1964. No matter which of his films you start with, his style of framing and storytelling is unique and was developed early. The first thing you'll likely notice is how much Ingmar Bergman took from him. Their films look very much alike and move with a slow deliberation where the silence is as important as what's being said. "Haste" is simply not in their vocabularies. But where Bergman's films were full of questions, Dreyer's are full of answers.

Dreyer was born a bastard child and initially orphaned before being adopted at the age of two by a Lutheran couple who he felt mistreated him. He was a very bright child, and after taking his school finals at sixteen, he left home and never returned. He found a job as a clerk and after a couple of years managed to find a position as a journalist. In his spare time he wrote film scripts and eventually was hired by Nordisk Films to both write screenplays and to sort through those that were sent in by others. Of course this eventually led to directing.

Despite Dreyer's disdain of his childhood, his Lutheran upbringing seems to have played a very important part in his life, and his religious faith made its way into nearly all of his films. He was a perfectionist and this shows in his films where every shot is just the right shot with just the right lighting, and even his actors in bit-parts were carefully selected. His films were shot mostly in Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. Unfortunately, these were, even in those days, countries with a strong atheistic air that defined the spirit of the age, and thus, many of his films were considered flops. After German audiences laughed at his only horror film—Vampyr—Dreyer had a breakdown, checked himself into a clinic in Paris, and quit the cinema for a number of years, returning to journalism. He gradually got back into filmmaking with mostly documentary shorts throughout most of the 1940s and then went on to make two of his best films, Ordet in 1955 and Gertrud in 1964. It wouldn't be until after his death in 1968 that much of the rest of the world would discover his films and appreciate the underlying warmth of the message they contained.

Carl Dreyer's movies are in my opinion among the best of all-time and well worth seeking out. He wrote some 49 scripts; several, especially among the earlier ones, were made into films by other directors. He directed only 14 features and 8 shorts himself:

The President (Denmark, 1919)
Leaves From Satan's Book (Denmark, 1921)
The Parson's Widow (Sweden, 1921)
Love One Another (Germany, 1922)
Once upon a Time (Denmark, 1922)
Michael (Germany, 1924)
Master of the House (Denmark, 1925)
The Bride of Glomdal (Norway, 1926)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1928)
Vampyr (France/Denmark, 1932)
Good Mothers (Denmark, 1942) short
Day of Wrath (Denmark, 1943)
Two People (Sweden, 1945)
Water from the Land (Denmark, 1946) short
The Danish Village Church (Denmark, 1947) short
The Fight against Cancer (Denmark, 1947) short
They Caught the Ferry (Denmark, 1948) short
Thorvaldsen (Denmark, 1949) short
The Storstrøm Bridge (Denmark, 1950) short
A Castle Within a Castle (Denmark, 1954) short
Ordet (Denmark, 1955)
Gertrud (Denmark, 1964)

Probably among the best of these are Leaves from Satan's Book, Love One Another, Michael, Master of the House, The Passion of Joan of Arc (often referred to as his masterpiece), Day of Wrath, and Ordet (which means "The Word" in English).

"Are You Ready?"

I wonder how many times I heard that sentence in church growing-up. Today when we say Evangelical we generally think of non or inter-denominational churches, and there are a ton of them. But when I was a kid there weren’t many independent churches, and the closest thing to an Evangelical was a body of churches that usually referred to themselves as Pentecostal. (That’s "Pennycostal" when you’re 10 though.) There was, and is, an actual denomination called the "Pentecostal Church," but the Assemblies and Church of God among others also referred to themselves as a Pentecostal "type" of church, basically meaning that they all believed in the "gifts of the spirit" such as healing and speaking in tongues and so forth. The Baptists were very much out of the same mold minus the gifts thing.

Pentecostals were very big on asking people if they were ready to die. "Where would you go? Are you right with Jesus? Will you make it into Heaven? Do you have that blessed assurance?" Pentecostal church meetings always were a bit of a cliché-fest I’m afraid. Personally, I felt like I was born ready. I always felt that death would be a homecoming of sorts long before anybody told me so. I simply didn’t, and still don’t, fear death at all. But when I was younger there was a part of this equation I was missing.

Now you would think that the Pentecostals, the people who have pushed this "Where would you go tonight if you died?" business the longest, would be the most fearful of death and all the fiery trappings of Hell that go along with that message. Not so. The Catholics are so afraid of death that they invented Purgatory just in case they needed one last chance to get their act together.

The fact is that most people fear death more than words can say. They don’t even want to talk about it. They don’t need any reminders that they’re going to die one day. Most people don’t want to know when their time is coming. They’d sooner be surprised by a conk on the head from a falling meteorite and never know what hit them. But there are some who do in fact know when their time is up and are given a specific time table in which to "get their affairs in order." I find these people ultimately die the best deaths. They’ve made their peace with God and the world. I wonder if this is God’s way of telling us that there is no Purgatory and that those who would have needed a second chance there are getting it now by way of the knowledge that their deaths are imminent?

My dad used to tell a story about a man named Carl who worked on the railroad in East St. Louis during the first half of the 20^th century. It was one of those stories about the fragility of life. The story goes that one day Carl was doing some kind of work on a the hitch of a train car. Train yards are usually very noisy environments and he couldn’t hear that the rest of the train behind him was backing up to connect with the car he was working on. It connected right through his mid-section. Amazingly he was still alive and conscious. A doctor was called. He said that there was nothing he could do. The man would soon bleed to death. And when they unhitched the car from the train it would only serve to quicken the man’s death since the gaping hole left behind would cause much of his insides to come pouring out along with more blood, and he would die almost instantly.

They called Carl’s wife and told her the situation, and that she had better get down there quick with the children if they wanted to say goodbye. And this she did. Of course they called his church pastor as well. The preacher said a prayer and Carl’s family kissed him farewell. The man in charge of the train yard asked him if he was ready. Carl said, "Go ahead," and they unhitched the car. He fell down and died. I guess Carl was ready.

Two weeks ago I was with a group of people, some were friends, other I didn’t know, trying to get a big house ready for a wedding as well as for the homecoming of the bride’s father. Kevin was in his last stage of cancer and it took a ventilator to keep him alive. But he wasn’t ready to die just yet. He wanted to see his daughter get married first. The following Saturday he did just that.

It was a happy event. It was a sad event. That night at the reception, everybody’s cell phones started ringing with the message that Kevin’s dad, in his 80s and in a nursing home, died unexpectedly. And Kevin had made arrangements to be taken off life support the next day himself. He got to see his daughter get married first, but also knew he and his dad were suddenly going to be dying a day apart. Despite his having been ready to go, it didn’t stop his little girl from having the saddest honeymoon of all-time with her father and grandfather both dying within 24-hours of the wedding.

Kevin was Catholic, but he didn’t need any Purgatory. He was ready. What does it really mean to be ready? Is there ever any really getting right with God? I doubt it very much. It’s mostly about getting right with our enemies. If we forgive others, God forgives us. Christianity is 90% forgiveness. No amount of prayers or kissing our loved ones goodbye will make us ready to meet our Maker. But can you love your enemy as much as you love yourself? Can you go through life without bitterness toward those who have harmed you and wish them the best? God doesn’t care much about all your accomplishments in business, art, sports, or anything else in life. There’s only one area he demands any real achievement in. It’s all about forgiveness.

Faithless

I watched a well made film today about, of all things, vampires. I dislike everything about the subject of vampires for the most part and avoid books and movies about them like I avoid taxes. I happened onto it by accident really. It was called Let the Right One In. It’s a Swedish film directed by Tomas Alfredson (who also directed last year’s box office and critical success, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and written by fellow Swede John Ajvide Lindqvist. Let the Right One In is about a boy, Oskar, and a girl, Eli, both 12-years of age. The boy is bullied in school and an outcast. When the girl moves in next door, he finally has a friend, but he has no idea that she’s a vampire or that her father has to go out at night to procure victims for her, bringing home their blood in a jug. In one scene, after her father fails to bring home provisions, she has to go out and do it herself. After lying under a bridge pretending to need help, a man comes to her rescue and she kills him, draining his blood. Then she sits over him and weeps for having done it. She almost seems to have a conscience at times. Later, however, she thinks nothing of taking the blood of her dying father after he tries to commit suicide. She then lets his body fall from his hospital window and watches with no emotion as he hits the ground several floors below. Eli is as hot and cold as it gets.

I routinely rate movies and other artwork by content and style. I’m now realizing that this is a flawed rating system. This film has plenty of style. The cinematography is quite good though dark and brooding, and the acting is pretty good considering how young most of the talent is. The content is strange and otherworldly, certainly unlike any other vampire film. Most people would say it’s not a vampire film at all. It’s a movie about the love between a boy and a girl who just happens to be a vampire. But style and content aside, something is missing.

While we’re still children, our lives are all about emotion, not so different from a dog or a cat except we express it differently. We generally don’t give too much thought to God or metaphysical ideas as children even if we go to church regularly. Kids are too busy having fun, or trying to have it. They live to make themselves happy and darn little else. A child mostly alternates between being very happy, very sad, very angry, or very afraid. Those are the four chief emotions of childhood. Even love is just something to make us happy. There’s seldom any real altruism in children. They only give in order to get. If we have someone to teach us about Jesus, then hopefully we’ll grow-up to be altruistic people with well balanced emotions of nearly every kind (at least every kind worth having). A child can get very sad, but seldom do they get extremely depressed to the point of hopelessness because they know they still have their whole lives in front of them and anything can happen. But if we don’t get any kind of spiritual training as children, we run the risk of having severe bouts of depression during our adult years. Life can at times seem very bleak to someone without a God, especially as he/she gets older. They no longer have the bulk of their lives in front of them, and soon they run out of hope.

This is what I see in so many Swedish films. So many Russian films. And the past couple of decades in British films. There’s very little belief in God in those countries. And there’s an undeniable bleakness in most of their art. This is not a coincidence. We were born to seek out the face and favor of God just as a tree stretches higher and higher to the sun all its days. A tree knows there’s nourishment in the suns rays. All it’s hope is in that sun, balanced of course with small amounts of rain and earth. Likewise there’s a nourishment to a human’s existence that only comes from fellowship with God. Christians talk about spiritual growth. God’s spirit flows to us and through us like the sun’s rays to a tree. Without it life is very bleak indeed. Man does not live by bread alone. He needs something to nourish his spirit as well as his body.

In watching Swedish films or listening to Swedish music, not only do I see that bleakness, I see people acting like automatons. Their musicians just go through the motions as though they’re painting by numbers. There’s no heart in their songs because there’s no God in their hearts.

We who live in nations that are primarily Christian produce most of the world’s greatest art and always have. Again, this is no coincidence. We know the purpose of life and live to fulfill it. That extreme happiness, sadness, anger, and fear we wallowed in as children becomes tempered as we grow-up by faith, hope, and love as St. Paul says. But there’s also a fourth item just as important, and that’s forgiveness. To forgive and to be forgiven is the key ingredient in all spiritual growth. Sometimes when people say they forgive someone, they may still look askance at them as if to say, “I forgive you, but I’ll never trust you.” That’s not real forgiveness. God’s eyes are not leery. Neither should ours be. But I don’t want to turn this into a sermon on forgiveness.

I want to end this little sermonette with a song from Ireland—one of the few remaining countries in Europe that still has a large amount of Christian believers. It was written by Francis McPeake around 1950 and is called properly “Wild Mountain Thyme.” (It sometimes goes by other names like “Will Ye Go Lassie Go” or “Bloomin’ Heather.”) McPeak’s song was largely inspired by a much earlier poem from Robert Tannahill, but McPeake took it to a different place. (He was Presbyterian I believe.) It may look merely like a song about romantic love, and that’s no doubt what Francis meant it to be. But like so much that comes from the art of the Irish, you can’t help but feel something of God in it too. And isn’t that as it should be? Shouldn’t the spirit of God permeate everything we do, even without us thinking about it? I often find myself singing this song at work when no one’s around, and I re-imagine it as God singing it to us the way the “Song of Solomon” is so often said to be a poem about the love of God for the church. Can you not see the Lord with his hand extended saying, “Will ye go?”

Wild Mountain Thyme

O the summer time is comein'

And the trees are sweetly bloomin'

And the wild mountain thyme

Grows around the bloomin' heather.

Will ye go, lassie, go?

And we'll all go together,

To pull wild mountain thyme,

All around the bloomin' heather

Will ye go, lassie, go?

I will build my love a tower

By yon clear crystal fountain,

Aye an' on it I will build

All the flowers of the mountain.

Will ye go, lassie, go?

And we'll all go together,

To pull wild mountain thyme,

All around the bloomin' heather

Will ye go, lassie, go?

If my true love she were gone,

I would surely find another,

To pull wild mountain thyme,

All around the bloomin' heather

Will ye go, lassie, go?

And we'll all go together,

To pull wild mountain thyme,

All around the bloomin' heather

Will ye go, lassie, go?

In Response to Thoughtlessness (or—The Atheist Mind)

The following is an excerpt taken from the transcripts of a lecture given by the famous philosopher, Mr. Billy Brightish, at the equally famous policy institute, WHATTHINKUM U, in the great Southwestern village of Albuquirky. The extract actually comes from the question/answer portion at the end of the talk (but before the widely reported police intervention) when one particular young man (and aren't they always young) came to the mic to challenge Mr. Brightish. The lecture presented an analytical breakdown of the spurious inferences and irrational suppositions of the atheist mind presented in its varied art forms today with a particular emphasis on television and film.

"You in the pink muscle-shirt and sandals. What is your question?"

Q: Sir, I'd like to know what gives you the right to criticize writing in film, television, or anywhere else? It's interesting to me when people who don't work in a particular field criticize the craftsmanship of an artist.

A: Hmm...(pause). I fail to see anything at all interesting in it. I don't make cars, but, like most people, I can easily tell you everything that's wrong with mine. I'm not a barber, but, I know perfectly well when my hair is cut right or when it's uneven; when it's been left too long or cut too short. You don't seem to know this, but I actually am an author. It wouldn't matter, however, if I was not. I would still be a conversationalist. I have thoughts and theories. I'm a philosopher. I'm a metaphysician. I'm a logician. I'm a dreamer. I am every man. And like most men, I know poor dialog when I hear it or see it. I know poor logic, poor sentence structure, whining, cliché's, theoretical impracticalities, a priori arguments, baseless conjecturing, opinions established on mere sentiment along with the vulgar sophistry that is so much a part of the atheistic mindset in the world of art.

Picasso used a fair amount of symbolism in his work. Unfortunately, his paintings and sculptures seldom said anything when reconstructed. Even a poor logician like Freud would agree that sometimes a nude is just a nude and a beggar just a beggar. Unless a work of art tells a story, it fails as art, but may please as mere esthetic. I find over and over that atheist artists either fail to say anything useful, or they say something worse than useless, and that is an untruth.

Let us consider the recent web series The Confession. You may think important questions are asked in the show. I say that the queries are childlike and the responses inconsiderate. Our doltish gunman played by Kiefer Sutherland posed a surmisal a few episodes back that came wrapped in the kind of irreality this series will be known for (if it's to be known for anything at all) when he suggested, no—declared—that there were more murders done in the name of religion that anything else. Even during the crusades Christians only killed 100,000—a drop in the bucket compared to atheists. Atheists have killed more people during the past hundred years than all the religions of the world combined during the past two thousand. Mao killed 70 million; Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev killed 66.7 million; Brezhnev 900,000; Mussolini 300,000; Pol Pot 1,700,000 for starters.

Q: People do not kill in the name of atheism. If an atheist communist kills a large number of people, he did not kill them because he was an atheist but because of ideologies.

A: What's in a name? How about if I say they kill in the spirit of atheism? What all those mass murderers had in common was atheism and Social Darwinism. Genocide is the logical outcome of Social Darwinism carried out to its conclusion. I've yet to see a genocidal Social Darwinist who was not an atheist. Some might argue that Hitler was one, but I would counter with the fact that he would claim to be a Pagan to one group of people and a Christian to another group down the road. It seems fairly obvious to me that he didn't really believe in anything but his own selfish desires.

Q: But atheism is not a belief. It doesn't tell you what is right or wrong, it doesn't have a moral conduct, and it doesn't tell you how to live your life. It is ONLY a rejection of a specific belief.

A: I disagree. It is no mere a negation. The only people it isn't a belief for are those who have never heard of it, nor of concepts of God. That might entail a few tribesmen in a remote village who have had no contact with the rest of the world. A person like that can be an atheist without knowing it. It's doubtful, however, that this would include anyone anywhere since every single known language in the history of the world has a word for God. At any rate, for anyone who has heard of a God concept, atheism is of course a choice, and you cannot make a choice without forming an opinion, which in this case is what you mean when you say belief.

Further, atheism is the worship of self. Its code of conduct is selfishness. And this is why every single known genocidal Social Darwinist has been an atheist. Both ideologies are completely egocentric.

You also cannot be an atheist without being an adherent of naturalism, empiricism, and humanism among other cockamamie beliefs. Atheism is an entire belief system. Naturalism, incidentally, makes no room for free will. And of course, since free will is obvious to all mankind, atheism is foolishness. Or do you really think that the reason people all over the world stop at a red light is because the random particles of the universe just happened to make them all do this?

Q: "It is an absolute failure of logic at best to suggest atheism kills people."

A: Atheism is a worship of self interest at the expense of all others. It's a philosophy that says, "Do what thou wilt." It's a philosophy that says, "Nothing matters." It's a philosophy that says, "There are no consequences for my actions." Atheism is nothing short of a recipe for murder and insanity.

Q: "I suggest you have an irrational hatred of atheism."

A: This is the way a child argues. He lies. He calls dislike—hate. He calls the rational—irrational. And it's exactly what I expect from an atheist. Atheism is the most childish and thoughtless of all metaphysical suggestions. It abhors science, and it abhors reason. Therefore it must lie to make even an artificial point.

Q: "Claiming atheists kill more people than anyone else is equivilant to...."

A: I gave a verifiable list of genocidal events carried out by atheists that amounted to well over a 100-million murders in the last hundred years alone. If there is a similar verifiable list of anywhere near that amount in a hundred year period pertaining to a religious person or group, I've never come across it, and you haven't offered one. Is there any chance you'll say something truthful at some point?

Q: "Social Darwinism is directly contrary to evolution"

A: Hogwash. Evolution is about natural selection in conjunction with survival of the fittest, part of which is the fighting to the death of organisms and animals. A Cuckoo Bird pushes eggs from other birds such as Warblers, out of their nests, and places her own eggs in it. After the chick hatches, it will push any remaining eggs and/or hatched Warbler chicks out of the nest and then spend its remaining days, before fledgling, imitating the call of Warbler chicks so that the Warbler parent will feed it. This kind of killing is a part of Darwinism. This is exactly what Social Darwinists do.

Q: How'd you like me to kill....

End of extract.

What CHRISTMAS means to me (CS Lewis)

About ten years ago I stopped giving and receiving Christmas presents. It seemed perfectly clear to me that the entire holiday had become nothing more than a swap-fest. I thought, people only give presents to other people who they expect to get one back from, so it isn’t really a present—it’s a swap. What could be sillier? I was very happy when I found the following essay.

What CHRISTMAS means to me...
by C. S. Lewis
From God in the dock

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn't go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business too have a 'view' on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone's business.

I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to 'keep' it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself—gaudy and useless gadgets, 'novelties' because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance, for after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don't know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I'd sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

Just A Little Appreciation For Bob Bennett

Bob is in my opinion the best Christian songwriter of all-time.

I Survived . . .Beyond and Back

We’ve all heard near death stories, but I thought the three individuals in this particular show were quite convincing compared to many. One man talks to Moses, one girl goes to Heaven and talks with her dead uncle, and one man goes to the entrance of Hell and sees a demon.

A common question is whether or not people see things during NDEs that relate to their own background, including their religious beliefs. Unfortunately, this does seem to be the case the majority of the time. An American Indian may see forest nymphs, a Chinaman may see Buddha etc. However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something real and of great value happening during these experiences. Quite often the person involved will attain information about the future or about other people and situations that is accurate and exactly what they needed to know in order to live a better life when they return. While I believe Christianity is the closest thing we have to a religion God approves of, I think stories like these only go to prove that God is very different from what any of us think he is.

The following 45-minute TV program is embedded by way of Hulu and is set to expire in about one month, so don’t wait too long to view it.

A Very Short Discourse On Faith Healers

I posted this at Shadowland's (Ros) blog tonight and thought I would post it here too since I had never written anything on the subject of faith healers before. I guess I figured that anyone who had read me would already have a pretty good idea of how skeptical I would be of such people. The subjects of Smith Wiggelsworth and Nathan Morris had come up:

Smith Wigglesworth was in my opinion the Benny Hinn of his day. Like ALL faith healers since the apostles, he was a fraud. (His own daughter who assisted at his meetings was deaf until the day she died.) As is Nathan Morris. The very fact that he has allied himself with a mountebank like Bob Kilpatrick should tell you all you need to know about him. Delia Knox, incidentally, and despite numerous requests, has refused steadfastly to show any medical findings from her doctor (whose name she will not give either) that would substantiate any healing. Unlike most of you, I grew-up in a charismatic Assembly of God Church, the congregation of which personified the term Holy Rollers. Faith healers are a dime a dozen in those circles. I had to endure more faith healing rallies and revivals before I was eighteen than most people will their entire lives. Everyone from Ernest Angley to, well, name any faith healing evangelist who traveled the Midwest USA during the 60 - 70s and I probably saw them. Not one of them ever convinced me they had something real going on. It’s amazing how ALL their so-called healings happen internally where we can’t see them. I’d look around at people in the crowds, men who had come back from WWII or Korea missing hands, legs, and fingers, and not one of them ever grew a new one. Either God lacks the power to heal people of external afflictions or these faith healers are frauds. Or they may be something just as bad—self-deceived lunatics. When I see a hand grow where there isn’t one I’ll believe in them, and not one minute before. I’m not a Doubting Thomas. He had seen Jesus perform so many miracles (including restoring an ear that had been cut off) that it was more irrational NOT to believe Christ had risen from the grave like he said he would. We have every reason to be skeptical of modern day faith healers though, many of whom have been caught in outright lies and fraudulent activities. Some have even gone to jail for them. I approach faith healers with the same incertitude as marriage proposals. Either way, I’m a tough horse to rope.

The Cistaphasmatis by Charles Seper

Update: It's now available at the following Amazon locations in Kindle (mobi) format:

USA
UK
Germany
France

Epub format in the near future for those who own e-readers other than Kindle.

If you'd like to read this story long with others from Amazon that are in their AZW (mobi) format and don't have an e-reader, you can still read them on your computer by downloading the free Kindle For PC and Kindle For Mac apps from Amazon here:

Kindle For PC

Kindle For Mac

There are also Kindle apps for reading on iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android.

This is a novelette I wrote some months ago of around 12,000 words. It's been completely reworked recently and is now available on Horatio Press via digital download for only a dollar.

Book Blurb:
The Cistaphasmatis is about a young man from Nantucket named Clifford who feels compelled to try and contact his deceased girlfriend on the other side of death's door using an age old mirror gazing technique in a home-built viewing chamber called a cistaphasmatis. About this time, he also finds himself becoming quick friends with the sexton at the graveyard his girlfriend is buried at, a retired Episcopal Priest named Bud Buchanan. Clifford soon finds that this priest has knowledge of the way the world works that's rather unique among men as Bud tries to keep Cliff from getting in over his head in "the void."

Excerpt 1

The main branch library in Nantucket has a large number of books on occult subjects, and it was here (unfortunately) that I found the title by Mr. Seagraves. It was called: Visions of the Sybil (seeking advice from the dead). This book held the answer to what I was looking for.

In it he described how the ancient Sybils in Greece used to sit in caves, usually over a fissure where the ground had split open and left a deep gulf. They thought it went down to an underworld that existed beneath the surface of the Earth, and here the dead lived. It was said that those who were deceased had an uncanny ability to see the future, and this is why kings consulted Sybils before going to war. The Sybil would sit in the cave with nothing but a small, dimly lit torch and would stare into the void of that gulf until she began to have visions. Other Sybils would look into a mirror or a pool of water.

I gathered from this book that when attempting to do this it was important to allow your eyes to sort of go numb. It's not so different from the way you look at one of those Magic Eye books to see 3-D objects. If you try to see the objects you never will. The harder you concentrate, the less likely you are to see anything. You have to be unfocussed and allow your eyes be completely relaxed.

The contraption Seagraves invented in 1821 aided him in doing this. It was like a sensory depravation chamber, basically just a wooden box painted black inside and just big enough for a man to sit in comfortably. It was actually a box within a box. He glued blankets around the entire outside of the first box and then nailed a second round of wood around it. The blankets acted like a buffer between the two layers of wood to help keep out sounds. He left an opening for a door, and inside the chamber he had attached a mirror to one wall. He brought one small, solitary candle into the chamber with him and set it on a shelf that stuck out below the mirror. The mirror was positioned above him so that he couldn't see his own reflection when gazing into it, only the blackness of the wall behind him and the dancing flame of the candle just below the mirror. Also, if he wanted to contact someone specifically, he found it helped to bring some small item the deceased person had owned before they died, something that they were very attached to, a wedding ring for example.

I found that other people had built similar chambers since his and referred to them as psychomantiums. Seagraves called his a cistaphasmatis, which as near as I can tell is from the Latin words cista meaning box or chamber, and phasmatis which means ghosts or spirits. His differed in one aspect however, and this I found to be strangely interesting. He claimed that trees had certain properties which the ancients thought of as magical, and that, being living creatures, they held the memories of all that happened on the Earth, not only while they stood, but from the generations of trees before them from which their seeds had sprung. It's possible that all plant life held memories, but trees could grow to be very old. Some had stood for well over a thousand years. He surmised that the oldest trees had absorbed more of humanity into them as well as something of the divine (although the reasons he gave seemed vague to me), and this was why ancient man all over the world worshipped trees, especially the very oldest of the oaks. They made some sort of conduit between man and the spiritual realms. If one were to build a cistaphasmatis, it would be best to build it of the oldest oak lumber you could find.

Fortunately, this is Nantucket, home to some of the oldest whaling ships that ever sailed. The ones from the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries were made from large oak timbers that must have come from very old trees. Very few of the most venerable whalers are left, but their timbers were reused for all kinds of things.

I knew of an old farm up for auction not too far away where the owner had claimed that the wood used for his barn came from the wreck of the Sheraton Whaler. The farm was such a mess that no one bid enough to make a sale worthwhile. I contacted the owner and made an offer for the huge barn door. It was off its hinges and laying against the side of the building, and truthfully, the entire barn was slanted to one side so severely that it couldn't possibly stand much longer anyway. They let me have it for next to nothing. The following morning I began construction of my cistaphasmatis in the back of my aunt's garage. I only used the old oak wood for the inside chamber. I used pine for the outside so it wouldn't be quite so heavy in case I had to move it, but it still must have been a little hefty at four feet in height, four and a half feet in length, and three feet in width. Instead of a door, I made the top hinged like a chest lid so I could simply slide over the side to get in and then pull the top back down. I also left a small air hole on the backside for the candle smoke to escape through and stuffed it with a piece of black foam so it would hardly be noticeable. I placed a pair of locks on it to finish the project. If anyone asked about it, I would simply tell them it was a storage bin for some expensive tools. By the following evening it was ready for use.

I waited till Aunt Caroline went to bed before I entered the cistaphasmatis. I wasn't nervous because I didn't particularly think it would work. A couple of weeks had gone by since I had heard Diana's voice at the cemetery, and that's just enough time for a person to forget how real an otherworldly experience can be. By now I had begun to convince myself that the whole thing had been a simple hallucination (whatever those are). Still I lit the candle and waited. Everything I knew of that Diana owned was burnt in the fire. We did, however, each have a copy of a photograph of us together that was taken by my mother last Christmas. This was the closest I could get to bringing an item she owned with me into the box.

According to Seagraves, part of the trick was to blank your mind, and I found this to be much harder than it sounds. It's amazing how little time goes by, just a matter of seconds, before some thought enters your mind or maybe a song, and the next thing you know you're in deep thought again. It must have taken me close to an hour of practice before I could manage to keep my mind free from thought for periods of just a minute or so at a time. This went on for several hours. Seagraves had come up with another aid for this sort of meditation. He used seashells large enough to cover each ear and glued them to a scarf-like strap that he tied around the top of his head to the bottom of his chin. He found that the airy sound they produced helped take him to the trance-like state that was needed. It was easy enough to make a similar head strap, but even though I had brought it into the chamber with me, I was very reluctant to use it. After all, I felt silly enough sitting in this contraption to begin with without having seashells glued to a strap around my head! Eventually, around 3:00 o'clock, I finally gave in and put it on.

I noticed immediately the effects of the shells. It was like focusing on someone else's breathing. Then again I thought it was also like a steady rain. You know, the kind that can lull you to sleep so easily. In only a matter of minutes I started to see something coming into view in the mirror. It was the outline of a woman. The light was so dim around her that I couldn't make out much. She walked with a heavy limp and had a cane or walking stick in each hand. As she came closer to the candle, which seemed to illuminate both our worlds, and although she was still difficult to see, there was no mistaking that face—it was Diana.

Excerpt 2

"Do you think you're the first person to gaze into a mirror and see another world? Man, that stuff's old hat. That's along the lines of parlor tricks any first year adept could do."

"First year what?"

"Clifford, people have been doing this sort of thing since the world began. Diana herself made mention of the Eleusinian Mysteries to you. It's an art that can, and has been, taught since time out of mind. Any fool can jump into the nearest sensory deprivation chamber and have a vision. But not just anyone can have a vision from God Clifford, and that's what I want you to understand. There are visions, and there are visions, just like most people have a dream that comes true at some point in their life, but not all of their dreams."

"So the other million dreams are just hallucinations?"

"I didn't say that. Most are fiction. Maybe being a character in a fictional tale is the best way for us to learn some things. But not all those tales are sent from God. You have to test them."

"And the same goes for the things you see in a mirror I suppose?"

"No; you can never trust anything you see in a mirror Clifford! You cannot force true visions. It just doesn't work like that. Visions have to come to you, and they usually come when you least expect them. I'm not saying that proper meditation in conjunction with prayer is bad or that it can't lead to a true vision. No priest would tell you that. Opening your mind to God should always be a part of prayer. People think prayer is talking to God when in reality you can't tell God anything he doesn't already know. Prayer should mostly be about God talking to you. That's what the true Mystics have always done. You've spent so much time reading all this occult nonsense. Have you ever spent any time at all reading about the lives and visions of the Mystic Saints? If you ever do, you'll soon come to realize that all these goofy theosophists and the like are just children playing as men. They're the biggest know-nothings since the priests of those Eleusinian Mysteries. And what's worse, the leaders among them know it. Oh they'll gladly sell you their books and take your dues, but they themselves have been practicing meditation techniques long enough to know that it all leads to the same dead-end."

We fell silent for a minute as an endless stream of bicyclists came by, apparently part of some kind of organized event, and I was glad. I needed time to regroup. Once they were out of earshot I was ready to go on.

"There's one problem with all this Bud. I know Diana. I know her as well as I know myself. I can see no good reason she would want me to deliver that small handful of hair to her unless she actually does need it for what she says she does. Who else in any world would care about having that hair for anything? What could they possibly do with it? I guess you'll say they want it for some sort of magic spell."

"First let me tell you that I don't believe you. You say you're sure this is Diana because you know her so well. But didn't you also just get done telling me that she was saying some things and acting in certain ways in that world beyond the mirror that took you by surprise? Wasn't she rather quick to rid herself of all her former religious beliefs on the word of some boy she had only just met?"

"Well, yeah, but—"

"And didn't you tell me that she was suddenly being alluring in a sexual way, a way that made you want to jump through the mirror?"

"But I didn't mean it to sound quite like that."

"Secondly, there's no such thing as magic. At least not in this world, not today. And probably not in that one. But I'll tell you one thing. She was right about the thin places. I know exactly what she's after, but I'll not tell you."

"Why not? Why shouldn't I know?"

"Because you probably wouldn't believe me. And because, if you did, I'm afraid you might try to prove it to yourself, and I'm just old enough that I would like one of my last great pleasures in life to be that of proving it to you."

I shook my head again. "You've lost me. I have no idea what you're going on about. How can you prove anything to me?"

"By letting me be the one who gets in that box tonight."

"It's called a cistaphasmatis, and are you nuts?!"

Excerpt 3

He was a man of his word. Bud pulled up in his pickup truck at exactly two o'clock. I opened the garage door manually as slowly as I could, not wanting the electric motor to wake Aunt Caroline.

"I hope you won't mind if we put these on your invention here," he said as he held up a pair of padlocks complete with hinges.

"No need," I said. "I already have locks on it. But why do you want them on there?"

"Maybe I don't want to be disturbed. Now how about that photograph? And the candle and matches?"

"I keep all that in a bag inside there. You shouldn't need the photograph anyway since you'll be carrying some of her hair. I think we're good to go."

The cistaphasmatis was lighter than I thought it would be, but it was still plenty heavy, and we struggled to get it into the truck. As we pulled away, I still had no idea where he was taking me. I didn't know it yet, but the real struggle was yet to come.

"You look awfully chipper for two in the morning," he said.

"I just don't feel the need for sleep very much lately."

"That's understandable. They say some of the Mystics never slept."

"Is that what I am, a Mystic?"

"Not quite. What you did was for selfish reasons. You wanted to mitigate your conscience after your girlfriend died for having tried to manipulate her for your own lascivious purposes. Don't get me wrong Cliff, I'm glad you still have a conscience and tried to make a wrong right, but that doesn't make you a Mystic. A Mystic has no self. He doesn't meditate to try and contact the dead or to know the mysteries of the universe. He has no motive whatsoever but to seek the face of God."

"Okay, I'll buy that. But what's with the lack of sleep?"

"That's a byproduct of having transcended reality. Everyone does it when they sleep, but it's normally a slow process that can take as long as eight hours or more. The best way I can explain it is that we all have an attachment to another world. Let's think of that attachment as being something like a rubber band."

"Wait, another world?"

"Yes; nearly all religions preach that this world is not our true home. Our bodies may be part of it, but the portion of us that makes decisions and has a will is from much deeper in the heart of God. When we die, that part of us will go back to God in some way."

"What about Hell?"

"There are a lot of differing opinions about that, more than I care to get into at the moment. But the thing to remember is that, the part of us that's the real us was not made for this world and can only stand to be in it for just so long before it has to come up for air so to speak. That's what sleep does. It's like a whale coming up for air. He lives in the ocean, but he was not made for the ocean. The ocean was made for him.

"But let's get back to that rubber band. The bible refers to it as the 'silver cord.' Throughout the day it winds itself tighter and tighter, and the longer we stay self-aware in this world, the tighter it gets. It can only get just so tight before it has to unravel itself. And the only way it can do that is by loosing the ties of consciousness in this world and going back to where it came from."

"Which is where?" I asked.

"To the timeless void, the great sea which is God and which is everywhere and nowhere, the place from which all things have their first form (as Plato would have put it). Before anything was anything, it was a thought in the mind of God, and it still is. 'In Him we live and move and have our being,' Epimenides said, and he couldn't have been far wrong even if his own concept of God and reality was a bit skewed. There are probably many worlds. A creator is always about the business of creating. But he not only creates, he sustains what he creates or there'd be no point in creating it. Think of all the worlds, however many there are, as horses on a carrousel ride and God as the hub in the middle to which they're all attached and which continually spins because he makes it so. The void is the closest thing to the imagination of God we can conceive of (and we can't conceive much). It's a place where anything can become anything else just as a particle can become any other kind of particle in the material world after it first enters the place scientists call 'nonlocality' where time and space cease to exist, and even that I surmise is just another word for the void. But even that world, the void, is not without its rules, though I suspect many of its inhabitants don't know them, and their dreams and visions are as false and phony as the church doctrines which came from the sword-tip of Constantine.

"They say that St. Francis, and others like him, never slept. When a man transcends the material world, it's as though he unravels that rubber band in the blink of an eye—that same rubber band that most people have to sleep all night to loosen. It's not only holy men who do this, but only the holy men find the Divine during their moments of transcendence. You'll find more instances of it in the bible than just about anywhere. Men to whom the heavens were opened, and the light of God filled them with a lifetime of truth in an instant."

"That's quite a sermon," I said, not knowing how much of it, if any, was accurate or simply conjecture.

"That's what you get for inviting a priest to come along."

"The priest invited himself, but I'm glad you're here just the same."

He had no sooner said this than we pulled up onto a sandy beach. I had been listening so intently to him that I hadn't paid any mind to where we were going. I had to spend a moment taking in my surroundings before I realized Bud had driven us clean out to the other side of the island, out to Coskata Pond.

The Outer Limits - "The Conversion"

If you have 44-minutes to spare, you could do a lot worse than to use it watching this particular episode of The Outer Limits. A lot of the second generation Outer Limits shows weren't particularly good, but this one was exceptional. There have been several films about angelic intervention changing people's lives over the years but none quite like this. The angel is played to the hilt by John Savage, who shows a troubled man, played by Frank Whaley, that his actions affect everyone and everything. Pointing upwards he indicates that even the angels are not immune from those effects. Indeed, if all the angels in heaven rejoice when there's a soul saved, perhaps they also share in out sorrows and cares. In the end, this angel shows what it truly is to take on the burden of another, and that from an angel's point of view, this is a joy to do and not a hardship at all. Perhaps taking on the burdens of others should be a joy for us as well.

"Apparitions" with Martin Shaw

First let me say there seems to be some debate as to whether "Apparitions" was a mini-series or whether it was intended to be an ongoing series that was cancelled after just six episodes. I can only tell you that after the sixth episode, I felt it had ended, and ended well, but also felt it could go on if they wanted it to. So if it was meant to end at six episodes, I was well satisfied. If it was meant to continue, it's a crying shame it didn't. Don't be afraid to watch the six as-is though because it's like watching six 1-hour movies of the best religious programming I've ever encountered.

"Apparitions" appeared on the BBC in 2008. It starred Martin Shaw as Father Jacob, a Catholic Priest who has the job of advancing people to sainthood. However, he is friends with the priest who is in charge of performing exorcisms. He more or less takes over the job (unofficially) after this friend is forced to relinquish the position following strange and diabolical circumstances.

This is not an official trailer. It was edited by some kid on YouTube who put some music to it by his favorite band or something. It actually works pretty well though and will give you some idea of what you're missing.

This is not some corny horror series with projectile vomiting and heads spinning round meant to appeal to children. It's more along the lines of "The Omen" but with better acting and great scripts. Never have I seen the forces of good and evil so clearly brought out and shown for what they are in a story of any kind. A story-line in the first episode involving a young priest who's troubled by homosexual lust manages to perfectly show the profoundly wicked and perverse essence at its core, so much so that even the most adamant homosexual could not help coming away questioning his choices. It manages to put onto the screen exactly how I've always felt about homosexuality but could never quite put into words. However, this is just one short story-line in one episode.

Each episode connects to the one before with a subtext pertaining to a coming calamity of irredeemable quality. Among his Catholic family, only Father Jacob sees it coming and is prepared to meet the opposition head-on as every new episode finds him battling the same evil in a new form.

I've been reading amateur reviews of the show at both Hulu and the Internet Movie Data-Base, and one thing that testifies to the greatness of this show is how many atheists and agnostics can't help but love it. Their reviews generally start saying, "I'm an atheist, but...." The following short review at Hulu is my favorite:

***
Devout Agnostic Almost Converted

"This show almost...Almost converted me to Catholicism. No joke. Just saying. It's that good."
***

The only place showing this show on the Internet that I've seen is Hulu, but you must live in America and have a paid membership to Hulu Plus. See it here: Apparitions

You can rent this show on DVD if you're a member of Netflix. They have it here: Apparitions

Blockbuster doesn't carry it yet. I'm afraid the show may be impossible to find at local video stores in the USA, although people living in England can likely find it all over the place. If you're game to buy it, Amazon has copies listed in both Pal and NTSC format.

Thoughts On Dispensationalism

Some people think that the Old Testament God and the New Testament Christ are so different in word and deed that they believe God may change the way he deals with mankind during different eras. It seems to them as though God reveals certain aspects of himself, and blesses mankind with particular gifts "when we're ready for it." That is, when we've more or less evolved to a certain state.

Now there are some people who believe just the opposite. They think that mankind has devolved over the years. That he once had certain gifts and abilities (usually psychic phenomenon are mentioned) which he has now lost. They often point out that the human race now uses only a small portion of our brains, and this is especially true of the frontal lobe of which little is known, and very little brainwave activity emits from that region.

I for one would also point out that anyone who has truly studied Greek, Chinese, and Jewish philosophy will recognize right away that those ancient super-thinkers were way ahead of anyone who has come down the pike since. Reading Kant, Berkeley, Descartes, and Kierkegaard may be a pleasure. But reading Plato, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Aristotle, and the words spoken by Jesus Christ is a revelation.

I probably fall into this latter camp of unbelievers for the most part. Still I hold onto the possibility of what may be called limited dispensationalism. But I see no big changes in mankind or God's relationship with man that appear to be in an ever evolving manner. I'm going to include the following letter to a gentleman named Adam who recently wrote to me, asking what both George MacDonald and myself had to say on the subject.

Hi Adam,

Nice to hear from you again. I don't remember GMD ever actually using the term Dispensationalism or anything like it. I may be wrong, but I really don't think he ever thought anything along those lines. But then again, I don't think it was a very widespread teaching until the 20th century (you probably know better than me though).

There are times I've wondered if perhaps God had carried out such stages in a sort of evolution of man, but it seems that every time I begin to think along those lines, something will happen to swing me back to where I started. For instance, I recall skimming through a book at the store one day by what I believe was an anthropologist who said that it seemed clear to him that mankind didn't become a self-conscious being until around 13,000 years ago. And this is about when the first civilizations that we know of came into being. People started farming and breeding livestock. Villages were built. Building projects as a group began for things like ziggurats and mounds. It sort of made sense that it took some kind of self-consciousness to allow people to think like this, and I wondered if it was a stage of development that God put into the mind of man.

But then I remembered GK Chesterton's comments in The Everlasting Man about the 35,000 year old cave paintings found in Lascaux and what wonderful works of art some of them truly were. Some were indeed quite good and showed that "feeling intellect" which Wordsworth so aptly named. These paintings weren't the work of a person or persons without self-consciousness. They showed a great ability to reflect on one's emotions, particularly one painting that showed a bison looking back over its shoulder.

I found The Everlasting Man online and copied what I thought was pertinent:

"They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognize; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.... So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane.... When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things."

So, to bring an end to a long winded letter Adam, it seems to me that mankind has not really changed all that much no matter how far back we look. We might be a little less violent now, but that's about it. I see changes in science and its influence upon culture in every age, but I don't really think this has touched the heart of man. We certainly see a NT Jesus doing things very differently from the OT God, but I'm not convinced this has to do with the development of mankind and any sort of special dispensation. I have a lot of thoughts on that, but it's too much to go into presently.

I don't think I'm a believer in dispensationalism just yet. But who knows what the future may bring?

Bill

The Mom I Never Knew

I was on my way out to the back-roads and wooded areas Friday night looking for something interesting to videotape when I noticed there was some kind of parade about to start in town. I had no idea what it was about but decided to stick around and shoot some video of it, partly for kicks, and partly with the hope of selling some footage (that's always the hope!) to one of the local TV networks. Well, I wasn't able to get any of the news stations interested in my footage this time, but the outing wasn't completely wasted.

I parked a couple of blocks away from the city square and walked the remaining distance to the front of the courthouse lawn which sits right across from it. Actually, "square" is a bit of a misnomer since ours is a roundabout with a large fountain at its center. There were people lined up all around the fountain and main street, most with beach chairs they had brought, while others just sat on the curb or used blankets spread on the sidewalk.

I couldn't believe my luck! The courthouse front lawn rises above the sidewalk some ten feet or so, giving a perfect view down upon the street below. It's beautifully landscaped and shaded (this proved to be of some importance since it was over 90 degrees that evening) and has about a half dozen benches along with a most pleasant little water garden. For some odd reason, most folks had taken to the street and left the courthouse lawn nearly vacant but for a few young people mulling around. I noticed a pair of benches facing one another at just the right spot to set up my tripod. There was an elderly couple seated on one of them, and I began to chat with them as I set-up the rest of my gear.

The parade turned out to be one for the Shriner's Circus that will be here over the weekend they told me. They had a nephew who would be in the parade, but I think they mostly were just looking for a night out and something to do. They were quite friendly, although the woman was a little on the quiet side and seemed content to let her husband do most of the talking. I soon found out that this man, Bob, was originally from the same nearby town that I was from and where my dad grew-up as well, so we had a lot in common and did a good bit of reminiscing about the old days. At some point I made mention of something that one of my uncles used to do, and Bob realized I was talking about someone he knew. Once he realized what my last name was, and then found out who my parents were, his face began to beam a bit.

(Bob accidentally steps into a frame.)

It turned out that Bob knew almost everyone in my family from childhood and was once very good friends with both my mom and my dad when they were all three just teenagers. Actually, Bob and my mom were much more than friends. Apparently she was the "one that got away," and Bob was very nearly my father. Mom was very young at the time. He knew things about her childhood that I didn't. But there were also some things she didn't tell him.

My mom's parents divorced while she was very young. Both remarried. Her dad was a poor Tennessee share cropper and remained in the same small town all his life. Her mother remarried a man from Indiana and they eventually made their home there. But immediately after WWII, they lived in some other parts of the country, and one of them happened to be the same nearby town that my dad grew-up in. After a series of events (which I'll get into momentarily), mom decided to move in with her mother and stepdad here in Illinois when she was fourteen, while her brothers and sisters stayed behind in Tennessee. She had dropped out of school and was working as a cashier in a big St. Louis department store. It was during this time that she met Bob.

It was easy to tell that Bob really loved my mom. They dated for about a year until he joined the Navy and had to ship out. He wanted to pursue the Navy as a career (which he did) and was too young to get married he thought. So it was best to break thinks off and leave mom behind. I'm not sure how old he was then, but he told me that mom was still only fifteen. He said she cried and cried and begged him not to leave her there alone. He said the reason she felt alone was because both of her parents were terrible drunks. To make matters worse, they weren't getting along at the time. He told me that when they came home from work, grandma would leave the house headed for a bar in one direction, while Renos (her husband) would head for a different bar in the opposite direction, while mom was left to herself. They also had many terrible fights.

Mom had told me that her parents spent a lot of time in bars when she was younger, but I had no idea how bad it really was. Bob said it was about as bad as it gets. Quite honestly, I never knew what to believe half the time. Mom could embellish the truth with the best of them. But the more I learn about her, the more I can see that her lies were a defense system for her. She had a lot to be embarrassed about, including one important thing that she never told Bob.

Mom quit school in the 9th grade after she turned fourteen and ran off to get married to a Tennessee boy. It only lasted a couple of months and the marriage was annulled. I guess mom felt foolish and wanted to basically get out of town, and that's why she moved to Illinois with her mom and stepdad. Bob looked genuinely shocked when I told him that. Apparently she wanted to keep her short-lived marriage a secret. Who cold blame her?

The following year, mom started dating my dad while Bob was away, and the rest is history as they say. The one thing I can't get over is Bob sitting on the bench next to me, shaking his head, saying, "I felt so sorry for her." I never I my life heard anyone say they felt sorry for my mom before. She could be your best friend or your worst enemy. She had a temper and could be as selfish as any other woman, but she could also be very compassionate at times. She had a bad side, but I'm slowly beginning to see how the events in her life brought that out in her. The older I get, the stranger the world is.

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. That's an absolute lie. A day doesn't go by that I don't learn something new, or see an old thing in a new light. If it's like this now, I wonder what it will be like in Heaven where all things hidden are revealed? I'm sure that the afterlife will be full of new things and many surprises. But I suspect seeing the world we left behind through the eyes of God will be the biggest revelation of all.

The Cream Of Whose Jest?

During the early 1900s, James Branch Cabell wrote a long series of books throughout his life that were all tied together as part of a whole. The series is known as "The Biography of Manuel," and in it, at least one or more of the main characters is always a descendant of one Dom Manuel from the first book who thought he lived on through them. In the book I'll be commenting on here, The Cream of The Jest, it's his youngest daughter, Ettarre, who shows up, as she does in many of Cabell's other works. Speaking of characters, another who is nearly always present (as he is in this book) is Horvendile. In Cabell's other stories, Horvendile represents the author himself entering the tale. In Jest, however, Horvendile represents a fictitious author by the name of Felix Kennaston (who in turn may represent Cabell). These are the only two characters we're going to concern ourselves with because the others only play small supporting roles and have little to do with Cabell's philosophical and spiritual outlook, and this is what I'm mainly concerned with.

The main theme in all the stories from "The Biography of Manuel" is a quest for an object of beauty or happiness (usually a woman, and usually Ettarre) and almost, but not quite, attaining that goal. Thus, every book ends in loss but with the hope that some day happiness may yet be found.

Jest is a story about the dreams of a famous author by the name of Felix Kennaston and his then using those dreams as the basis for the stories he writes. These dreams take place in several different geographic locations, but most of them are in the land of Poictesme—a fictional province somewhere in Europe. When Kennaston enters his dreams, he does so as a different man, a much younger man by the name of Horvendile. Kennaston always finds Ettarre waiting for him in those dream worlds. And once there, he is never eager to return to what he perceives as a the mundane life of a middle-aged man in a loveless marriage during waking existence:

Thus he walked in twilight, regretful that he must return to his own country, and live another life, and bear another name, than that of Horvendile.... It was droll that in his own country [waking life] he should be called Felix, since Felix meant "happy"; and assuredly he was not pre-eminently happy there.

Kennaston invented the province of Poictesme and it's characters just as any writer of fiction invents the people and places in his books by way of imaginative day-dreams, the substance of which may be found in the heart of God as George MacDonald suggested. But Kennaston hasn't learned this yet, and he still believes that he himself is the force behind the world of imagination just as many inconsiderate people often do.

Imagine that you are wide awake in your dreams (as I have often been) and that you try to make the people who populate your dreams understand that you are from another world and that they are mere creations of your inner self... as many foolish psychologists have claimed.

"I will tell you," Horvendile replied, "though I much fear you will not understand—" He meditated shook his head, smilingly. "Indeed, how is it possible for me to make you understand? Well, I blurt out the truth. There was once in a land very far away from this land—in my country—a writer of romances. And once he constructed a romance which, after a hackneyed custom of my country, he pretended to translate from an old manuscript written by an ancient clerk—called Horvendile. It told of Horvendile's part in the love-business between Sir Guiron des Rocques and La Beale Ettarre. I am that writer of romance. This room, this castle, all the broad rolling countryside without, is but a portion of my dream, and these places have no existence save in my dreams, and fancies. And you, messire—and you also, madame—and dead Maugis here, and all the others who seemed so real to me, are but the puppets I fashioned and shifted, for a tale's sake, in that romance which now draws to a close."

This statement appears early in the book during a day-dream as Kennaston walks through a garden. He is apparently thinking about his book and the things he will write in it and how he will end his story. It seems very odd that he would say such things to characters in a mere day-dream, a reverie. But at this point reality and imagination cross paths. Before he left his day-dream, Ettarre gave him half of something along the lines of a brooch which she wore as a pendant around her neck. (How she managed to break it in half is unknown since it's made of metal.) This brooch/pendant is called "the sigil of Scoteia." Of course a day-dream character can't give you an object that you can take back with you to waking reality. But as Kennaston walks in the moonlight he spots something glowing in the path and stoops down to pick up what is obviously the same half of the pendant which Ettarre had given him in the day-dream. He decides that he must have glanced at it much earlier in the day and then incorporated the likeness of the object into his reverie. Of course, this doesn't exactly turn out to be true as you'll find out later in the story.

One thing you need to know, however, is that Kennaston finds that if he lies in bed and allows light to shine on the sigil at just such an angle, he will soon find himself in another world with Ettarre. The book never refers to the phrase "out of body," but we may assume that some such thing has happened. In any event, Kennaston finds himself, or at least his consciousness, in a different kind of reality, and unlike his day-dreams, he has no control over his destination, nor much of anything else.

"Things happen so in dreams," he observed. "I know perfectly well I am dreaming, as I have very often known before this that I was dreaming. But it was always against some law to tell the people in my nightmares that I quite understood they were not real people. To-day in my daydream, and here again to-night, there is no such restriction; and lovely as you are, I know that you are just a daughter of sub-consciousness or of memory or of jumpy nerves or, perhaps, of an improperly digested entree."

"No, I am real Horvendile—but it is I who am dreaming you."

And thus he comes to understand that this world is very different from the day-dream worlds he created, for here he surely is not the creator. But is she just teasing him? Is he really part of her dream? How does a dream character have the power to dream us into their worlds? He finally decides that neither is dreaming the other into existence, but rather, they are somehow equally a part of the same dream, and that the sigil has something to do with it. He also quickly comes to realize that something else is quite different from his mere day-dreams. In those, he could touch Ettarre. Here he cannot. If he tries to, the dream ends, and it's the same in every dream he has of her thereafter. This woman whom he thought he had invented through sheer will applied to imagination, and who he grows to love as such, has become untouchable. Even his travels through other worlds with Ettarre is something he believes he has unwittingly invented through that psychological fiction called the subconscious. He even begins to show some excitement about this newfound power he has.

"He looked at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many delicate clarities of color—so young, so quick of movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal,—but the heady knowledge that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce him to desist from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his being, nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for it was as though he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he found that the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been at need to invent any terms wherewith to express this sense's gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and men's affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him; and that the exultance which possessed him was the by-product of an unstable dream.

It's not long after this that twice Kennaston is queried about his book—Men Who Loved Allison—both times by men who might be considered influential and/or powerful. They seem concerned about the sigil of Scoteia (Kennaston has written it into the story), and they talk of white pigeons (essentially doves) and hold small mirrors in their hand. One of these men is a Church Bishop by the name of Arkwright.

"Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid—a very beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise white pigeons, my son?"

Kennaston saw that the prelate now held a small square mirror in his left hand. "No, sir," Kennaston answered...

"The pigeon has so many literary associations that I should have thought it would appeal to a man of letters," the prelate continued. "I ought to have said earlier perhaps that I read Men Who Loved Alison with great interest and enjoyment. It is a notable book. Yet in dealing with the sigil of Scoteia—or so at least it seemed to me—you touched upon subjects which had better be left undisturbed. There are drugs, my son, which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot without danger be entrusted to the vulgar."

He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a threat was voiced.

. . .

"Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the identical words you employed this evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allusion to white pigeons which the personage too made, and the little mirror which he too held as he spoke.... I could find it in my heart t o believe it the cream of an ironic jest that you great ones of the earth have tested me with a password mistakenly supposing that I, also, was initiate. I am tempted to imagine some secret understanding, some hidden co-operancy, by which you strengthen or, possibly, have attained your power.

"Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad instant, that your wild imaginings were not wholly insane? suppose that you had accidentally stumbled upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler to tell you the whole mystery? Cannot a trained romancer conceive what you might hope for then?"

Very still it was in the dark room....

Kennaston was horribly frightened....

So into the mix comes the suggestion of a secret society with an occult power that enables them to be in power the world over.

Upon first reading of the sigil I was taken aback at the name because typically I think of a sigil as a symbolic drawing used in magic. It later dawned on me however, that a sigil can also be something used as a seal like the signet rings kings used in ancient times, and that's what this pendant in the story is for. It's three inches in diameter (when both halves are together) and has a long line of reverse writing on it which will be read forward after the seal is stamped with the sigil. There's an illustration of the sigil on the book's frontispiece. The writing reads:

James Branch Cabell made this book so that he who wills may read the story of man's eternally unsatisfied hunger in search of beauty. Ettarre stays inaccessible always and her loveliness is his to look on only in his dreams. All men she must evade at the last and many are the ways of her evasions.

So Cabell is just having a little fun with the sigil's writing. There is some talk about the material that makes up the sigil, who manufactured it etc., but none of that is important. What's important is the fact that Kennaston eventually finds the other half of the sigil in waking life, and it belongs to a woman he knows quite well and whom he never would have suspected it belonged to. This discovery changes everything, as you will see, and reality takes yet another bizarre turn.

Cabell may owe something to Mark Twain's short story—My Platonic Sweetheart—written in 1898 (though not published until 1912, well after Twain's death). Cabell claimed to have written Jest sometime between 1911 and 1914. Both stories are essentially about a man who meets a woman during recurrent dreams who is the love of his life, (though not necessarily in the way you may be thinking). They always look a little different from dream to dream, yet they always find one another, and each knows the other straight away even though their names may have changed as well. In Twain's story, the man (Twain himself) is always seventeen and the girl fifteen no matter what Twain's age was in waking life. In Jest, Horvendile and Ettarre are also young in all of Kennaston's dreams except for one (as I recall anyway), while Kennaston is in late middle-age during waking life. We also find in both stories that our young couples occasionally travel to exotic localities in the Earth's past and meet historic figures.

While Twain is able to hold his dream sweetheart and kiss her (though nothing more is mentioned), Horvendile cannot touch Ettarre. If he does, the dream ends and he awakens. Thus, while Horvendile deeply loves Ettarre, he can never have her as anything more than something like a friend, and yet something more special and quite uncommon than merely a friend. This may sound different from Twain and his dream girl, but Twain makes an odd remark in his account:

The affection which I felt for her and which she manifestly felt for me was a quite simple fact; but the quality of it was another matter. It was not the affection of brother and sister - it was closer than that, more clinging, more endearing, more reverent; and it was not the love of sweethearts, for there was no fire in it. It was somewhere between the two, and was finer than either, and more exquisite, more profoundly contenting. We often experience this strange and gracious thing in our dream-loves; and we remember it as a feature of our childhood-loves, too.

Journalist, Burton Rascoe, wrote in his introduction to the 1921 edition of Cabell's book—Chivalry: Dizain des Reines—the following:

It is perhaps of historical interest here to record the esteem in which Mark Twain held the genius of Mr. Cabell as it was manifested as early as a dozen years ago. Mr. Cabell wrote The Soul of Melicent, or, as it was rechristened on revision, Domnei, at the great humorist's request, and during the long days and nights of his last illness it was Mr. Cabell's books which gave Mark Twain his greatest joy.

So we know that late in the life of Samuel Clemens, he befriended Cabell, and even had some influence on his stories before he died. It is perhaps not unreasonable to consider that Jest may owe something to My Platonic Sweetheart.

What Jest has to say to us is really nothing more than the echo of what every great mystic had said before him—that reality isn't what we think it is. That there are binding strands which link waking existence to both the worlds of dream and imagination. At first Felix Kennaston's love for Ettarre is such that all he can think of are those dream worlds and being with her as a man loves a woman. But by the end of the tale, he begins to think more deeply about things like creation, life, and a creator. His dream lover becomes for him, just as those dream lovers did for so many other writers before him, a personification of God, for that's what the Helen of Troy motif represents for writers, dreamers, and lovers. She's the object of desire who symbolizes all that is beautiful, good, and perfect. She's always to be admired, but never to be owned. She was Beatrice to Dante. She was the Marble Lady to Anodos in George MacDonald's Phantastes. She was Mark Twain's Platonic Sweetheart.

She certainly takes center stage in many of my own dreams and probably in many of yours. I've been dreaming of my Helen for at least a decade now. I've never quite been able to have my dream lover either. We're always playing cat and mouse—always a little leery of one another. And yet we're always together. Not lovers, but more than friends. Yet the relationship is deeper than either lovers or friends as Twain said. It's only been during the past year or so that I've come to realize that she represents...well, many people at times, but on the highest level she's symbolic of the "Holy Other". Hers is a love we must all strive for, and I believe it is a love we will find if we keep knocking at love's door long enough. She is nothing less than God calling out to humanity saying, "Come and dine."

I'm not sure if Cabell's story expresses this in quite the way I would have hoped. For a time in his life, he did become interested in magic and secret societies. (The episode about the white pigeons and mirrors surely owes itself to the "magic mirror of Solomon" to some degree.) He seemed to move away from all that rather quickly though, and when none other than freemasonry's class clown, Aleister Crowley, tried to correspond with him, Cabell was cordial enough, but in private seemed very put off and had very little use for Crowley and his type. (Crowley did write an essay on Cabell that appeared in a Virginian publication called "The Reviewer" that was actually pretty accurate in most ways, but failed to truly understand what Cabell was trying to say on a deeper level.)

Mostly I find in Cabell's Kennaston someone whose search for Helen hadn't quite reached fruition yet. But, does anyone's this side of Heaven?