I thought of Mahalia Jackson tonight, for some reason. I don’t think she’s much remembered anymore, but in the Ancient Days she was the most acclaimed and respected gospel singer in the world. Here she sings “Just As I Am.”
The hymn is an English one, written by Charlotte Elliott (1789-1871) who spent much of her life as a semi-invalid. The story is that she said to the Swiss evangelist Henri A. Cesar Melan one day that she did not know how to come to Christ. He replied, “Come just as you are!”
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Columbus won out, as state capital, by only one vote over Lancaster, and ever since then has had the hallucination that it is being followed, a curious municipal state of mind which affects, in some way or other, all those who live there.
I had read bits of it already. I remember finding “The Night the Bed Fell On Father” hilarious when I was a boy. So I looked forward to reading A Thurber Carnival.
To be honest, I found it less funny, and more troubling, than I expected.
James Thurber is a classic American humorist, one of the founding fathers of The New Yorker. Some of his pieces, especially the story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” have become classics. Even legends.
As I worked my way through this collection of essays, stories, and cartoons, I was surprised how dark I found it. Not overtly – there was no obvious self-pity on display here. But I thought I felt the presence of a bitter spirit behind it all.
James Thurber, born in Columbus, Ohio, suffered the loss of an eye in a game of William Tell as a small boy. For the rest of his life, he lived with the fear – then the certainty – that the other eye was going to fail. He lost his sight entirely in the end, a terrible fate for a man of letters. For this reader, that unspoken fear seemed to form a background to everything. Here is not the lightness of Robert Benchley. Here is a humorist cracking wise on the scaffold.
Or so it seemed to me.
Or maybe it’s just that I’m not bright enough to appreciate the sophisticated gags.
Anyway, it’s a classic. You should probably read it. You might enjoy it more than I did.
I should perhaps warn that there’s some casual racism, characteristic of the time but not vicious, in descriptions of black people.
Dale Nelson, retired professor of English at Mayville State University, North Dakota, is a good friend of mine and one of the more frequent commenters on this blog. He is also a presence in the world of Inklings and fantastic fiction scholarship.
Linked here is a recent interview he gave to the Fellowship & Fairydust web site. The interview actually comes in two parts. This is the first, and deals mainly with horror literature.
A second segment, more about the Inklings, is coming soon. I’ll post that too.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any Sissel Kyrkjebø music. Here we have a Swedish hymn called “Day By Day.” (Not to be confused with the song “Day By Day” from the musical “Godspell.” Which is… a different song.) This is Sissel at the start of her career, when she was singing on Norwegian television.
It was written by Carolina (Lina) Sandell (1832-1903), a beloved Swedish hymn writer. Even we Norwegians loved her hymns. She started writing, we are told, in part to deal with her shock after watching the drowning death of her father. The Swedish evangelist Carl O. Rosenius featured many her hymns in his services, which increased their popularity.
The lyrics go (in English):
Day by day, God’s gracious love surrounds me
As a balm to soothe my troubled heart.
Countless cares and worries that confound me
Fade away or quietly depart,
For His heart is kind beyond all measure,
And He comforts us as He knows best.
Ev’ry day, with all its pain and pleasure,
Mingles tears with peace and rest.Day by day, the Lord is ever near me,
Granting loving mercies for each hour,
And my care He gladly bears, and cheers me
With His counsel pure and holy pow’r.
I’ll not fear for what may come tomorrow,
Though the path ahead I cannot see.
He assures that in all joy or sorrow,
“As thy days, thy strength shall be.”Help me rest in quiet consolation.
Help me trust Thy promises, O Lord.
When I’m faced with daily tribulation,
Help me find the strength to live Thy word.
Then, dear Lord, when toil and trouble find me,
Hold me steadfast in Thy pow’rful hand.
Day by day, Thy strength will bear me kindly
Till I reach the promised land.
This, I might mention, is not the translation I’m familiar with. I blame the liberals.
I now have an article available for your perusal over at the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Online.
Here’s something one of my Facebook friends brought to my attention. The Viking Museum at Ribe, Denmark, has unveiled its recreation of what they think a 9th Century Viking church in Denmark would have looked like. It is not – as you can see – exactly what you’d expect. And by you, of course, I mean me.
I’ve never bothered to describe Father Ailill’s church in detail in my Erling books. I assume it was built of wood, and I conceived of it of being similar to the average Viking house. In Hailstone Mountain, I describe it as having at least one tapestry hanging on the wall. It has an altar in front. Pews were not used in those days. I’ve kept it vague.
But here come these Danes now with their bright painted walls. I’m reminded of the church at Åkra, near Skånevik, Norway, an ancestral church of mine I visited two years ago. (Picture above.) It’s not as old as the Viking Age, but pretty old. There was one place where restorers discovered a bit of wall painting underneath a door frame, over the top of the sacristy door. They left that section of frame hinged, so you can lift the piece of wood and see the painting below. They believe it showed a scene of Samson killing the lion.
In any case, I do have quibbles. The brightness of the photos in the article should not be taken to indicate what churchgoers saw in the Viking Age. The building would have been illuminated mostly by lamps. There would have been a lot of shadows. The brightness of the images would have been necessary in part (I think) to make them visible at all in the general gloom.
Speaking of light, I’m curious about the windows in this reconstruction. My own understanding is that glass windows, in that period, were rare and extremely expensive. I expend quite a few words, in my work in progress, The Baldur Game, in having Father Ailill describe, on a visit to England, how amazed he is to see a modestly large glass window in the palace at Winchester. And Erling is quite proud of one small window in one of his halls. I imagined no windows at all in Ailill’s church.
However, the people at Ribe are experts. They undoubtedly know a lot more than I do. (Though I’m not sure Norwegian churches would necessarily have followed Carolingian fashion.)
In any case, those windows look pretty extravagant to me. I wonder what archaeological evidence there is for them.
And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?” (Matthew 8: 23-27, ESV)
My Heaven-sent translation work continues. I had a good day yesterday and got a little ahead of my quota. This is good, because I translated nothing on Saturday (and I don’t write for money on Sundays if I can help it). I need to translate 100 pages each month for the next five months to deliver on time. I’m 50 pages in now, and the month isn’t half over yet, so I’m doing just fine.
But it never hurts to run ahead of schedule. Impress the client, and if I finish sooner, I get my final payment sooner.
The laborer, as the Good Book says, is worthy of his hire.
Speaking of the Good Book, I was struck by the passage printed above during my devotions last week. I wrote about the Sermon on the Mount not long ago, and now I’m in the early passages that follow the sermon. I’ve read the Bible a number of times since I was a kid, but I never noticed until recently how much context means.
I wrote about it in my earlier posts – how counterintuitive Jesus’ teaching is (none of these thoughts are original to me, of course. I’m coming to them from the back of queue). The bottom line seems to be, “Build your house on a rock.” But what’s the rock like? It has nothing to do with a good job, or saving money, or investing in bonds or real estate. The rock Jesus is talking about seems to be solidly anchored in mid-air. Invest in Heaven. Step out onto the stormy waves – that’s your real security.
And Jesus demonstrates this in Matthew 8:23-27. Immediately after He delivers the sermon, He’s confronted with human chaos – he meets a leper, the very embodiment of disordered health. He heals the leper. He heals a centurion’s servant – the centurion, interestingly, doesn’t need to observe Jesus performing the miracle; he believes without seeing, earning approval. Then Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, and then he’s mobbed by a multitude of “many who were oppressed by demons.” That’s the disordered state of the world – exactly what He’s been preaching against; exactly what He came to fix. Then a couple of disciple wannabees show up, offering to follow Jesus, but with reservations. Jesus puts it on the line – it’s all or nothing. They can’t handle the apparent insecurity and back off.
And then what does Jesus do? He gets into a boat and starts across the Sea of Galilee.
I think I’ve written about this before. I allude to the theme frequently in The Baldur Game (it’s coming, it’s coming!). The Jews thought of the sea (any sea) as Chaos, as Sheol, as Hell. The place of maximum insecurity, maximum danger. The opposite of the Rock we’re supposed to build our houses on. And Jesus just sets out to sail on it. Not only that, but He’s headed for the Decapolis — pagan territory, where demons dwell.
And as they’re crossing the Sea (or lake), a storm blows up – which I understand is common on Galilee. And the disciples are terrified, and (one assumes) they’re running the sail down and bailing and rowing like mad…
And Jesus is sleeping like a baby. They wake Him, and He says, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” And he snaps His fingers (so to speak) and the storm turns over on its back like puppy wanting its belly scratched.
What Jesus is saying, I think, is “Buckle up, boys, this is what it means to build your house on a rock.”
The church, I think, is built by people who see faith as an adventure. It withers under people who see it as a job of work.
I thought, since it’s Friday, I’d post some music consistent with my overheated musings in yesterday’s post. So here’s a lovely arrangement of “This Is My Father’s World,” one of my old favorite hymns. It was originally published in 1901, with lyrics by Rev. Maltbie D. Babcock (1858-1901), a sadly short-lived Presbyterian pastor who published several popular hymns. The tune is Terra Beata, based on an English folk song. (And I’m pretty sure they cribbed the first line for the Shire theme in the Lord of the Rings movies.)
Here’s an interesting item from the latest issue of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. It’s all the better for being written by our good friend Dale Nelson:
Pages 22 and 23 feature Dale’s article on Thomas Dewar Weldon (1896-1958), with whom Lewis had a variable relationship. They came to Oxford at the same time, and were good friends for a while. But even before he stopped being an atheist, Lewis grew weary of Weldon’s relentless, materialist cynicism. As a tutor in Moral Philosophy his teaching method (according to R. W. Johnson’s book, Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age) was to first demolish his students’ conventional beliefs, and then to demolish whatever new beliefs they constructed, until they were left “in a state of free-floating agnostic cleverness.”
Weldon declared, in a 1944 lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, near Oxford, that the carpet bombing of German cities was justified because it would shorten the war and save lives. Lewis was already on the record, along with a number of Anglican clergy, as rejecting that argument categorically.
Weldon was (according to George Sayer) that “hardest-boiled atheist” who remarked to Lewis in his rooms one day that the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ was remarkably good, saying, “Rum thing,” as Lewis recalled in Surprised By Joy.
Weldon was also the model for the Dick Devine, the cynical, flippant character who’s so annoying in Out of the Silent Planet and (promoted to the title, Lord Feverstone) in That Hideous Strength.
Thoughts from my devotional time:
Part 1: Building on a rock
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24-27, ESV)
Whenever I read the Sermon on the Mount, I’m struck by the surreal nature of the whole message. It’s as if someone told us, “Well, obviously the sky is green, and the quickest way to get from New York to San Francisco is by way of Hong Kong.” Look at the Beatitudes – “Lucky you if you’re spiritually poor! The Kingdom belongs to you! Lucky you if you’re mourning, because you’ll be comforted! Lucky you if people push you around, because you’ll inherit the whole shebang!”
These things are – very obviously – not factual, at least about life as we experience it. Jesus is turning our expectations upside down. The world doesn’t actually work the way you think it does, He’s saying. You need to zig when everybody else zags. You need to do take dangerous path instead of the safe one. Where there’s smoke, don’t expect fire. Don’t plan ahead. Don’t budget sensibly. Live like the birds of the air.
Live an impractical life.
And then, here at the end, He comes out with this metaphor of a rock. Which seems an obvious contradiction. He’s been telling us to build castles in the air, and now He’s saying, keep your feet on the ground, No, more than that – build your house on a rock. You need solid foundations.
The point, it seems to me, is this – Jesus is telling us not to believe our lying eyes. The world is not what we think it is. Everything that seems solid is in fact nebulous (a preview of modern Physics, perhaps?) while the really solid things are invisible and counterintuitive and have to be taken on faith.
Part 2: Emotion in faith
I’ve been thinking recently about the problem of emotion in our Christian faith.
I was raised, as I’ve told you, in the Pietist tradition. We believe in having what’s sometimes called an “Ah ha!” moment, when we receive Christ personally, often in a very passionate way. Much in our tradition is aimed at keeping that passion worked up. We’re warned against growing lukewarm, losing our first love.
The more high church tradition, against which my ancestors reacted, dismissed such thinking as “enthusiasm” (a negative term for them). They recognized – very sensibly – that it’s not only difficult, but ultimately self-defeating to try to live with our emotions perpetually amped up. It wears you down, emotionally and spiritually. (Remember how C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, describes abandoning his faith as a boy with great relief, after having worked very hard at keeping his fervor up?)
But the high church approach, to us Pietists, seems cold and lifeless.
It occurred to me that imagining the created universe as music, an idea I’ve been playing with recently, might help resolve this conundrum.
If you think of the Kingdom of God as a musical masterpiece, a symphony or an oratorio, then we believers are members of the orchestra, or the choir. If you don’t feel like playing or singing today, it doesn’t matter. You perform your part anyway. Just do the work. The music is the main thing.
And quite often, the music takes you by surprise and you get caught up in it spontaneously.
So when I pray or go to church or serve the in my vocation and “I’m not feeling it,” I do it all the same. Because the music is the main thing.
If my mind is on the music – the Kingdom of God – the religious ecstasy comes on its own timetable. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)
[This is an irregular, unscheduled Saturday blog post. I got the idea this morning during my prayers, and I liked it too well to keep to myself.]
I caught a short video clip where a guy was ridiculing the idea of Heaven.
“Isn’t perfection kind of boring?” he asked. “I mean, if everything’s perfect, what’s left for anybody to do?”
The answer to that, I think, starts with C. S. Lewis’ response to those who laugh at images of wings and harps in Heaven – “People who can’t understand books written for grownups shouldn’t read them.”
Is there a more common truism than the statement, “I began to grow wise when I began to understand how little I knew”?
As we grow and learn in this life, we never reach a point where we can say, “Now I’ve got it all. Now there’s nothing left for me to learn.”
On the contrary. The more we learn, the more we grow aware of all that’s left to learn. Sometimes the material is just not available at the moment – unrecorded history, scientific discoveries not yet made, mathematical formulae that haven’t been worked out yet.
It never ends.
And that’s just in this world.
Suppose you were suddenly transported into the Infinite. Do you think you’d run out of things to discover? Do you think you’d run out of truth and beauty, when you’re face to face at last with the very Source of truth and beauty, who is infinite?
It sounds more like an everlasting Quest to me.
This might be why Pride is the greatest sin. If we approach the Ultimate Truth with a prideful, know-it-all attitude, we won’t be capable of enjoying Heaven at all. We might think it dull.
Maybe that’s what Hell is.