Seeing Grace

      This year I am so thankful for :
      A reminder of God's unmerited kindness  in the form of this secure marriage. My husband is a man I deeply enjoy, who loves the Lord and has his priorities right, which is not at all what I deserve.
      These children -- the visible picture of our one-flesh union, uniquely themselves and following Him faithfully on the paths you have set for them.
        The addition of our most precious Elizabeth as John's wife, our daughter, and Leah's sister, and the sanctification that comes with marriage and laying down one's life.
        For the renewed realization that the Lord is over every detail of Leah's life. He will give  my daughter what she needs and He will take away what she doesn't. I have a deeper understanding of His protection of her, and that she is His in a very special way.
       A fuller appreciation for both my parents and John's parents and for all they have done for us with each year that passes.      
       God giving Leah such a delightful job exactly when she needed it and her great attitude and work ethic in it. I love seeing her demonstrate Christian principles by working with all her heart as for the Lord, not for men, and by treating others as she would like to be treated. And I am thankful for the Lord's kindness in blessing her by giving her favor with her boss -- nothing makes me happier than to see my children walking with the Lord and to see His blessing because of that
     As a corollary, I find it very comforting that Leah works with dogs now after having loved them for so long. I know her heart is happy in her work.      
      All John's diligence and discipline rewarded in  the form of full scholarship and money for living expenses. This is another example of the Lord building faith by blessing obedience to biblical principles
     Elizabeth's quiet patience in weighing her job offers, God's goodness in giving her a choice between two such great options and His faithfulness to guide her to return to King's. So thankful for the day-to-day schedules that work better for the two of them, for coinciding school vacations and for a job that seems particularly suited to Elizabeth's gifts.      
     Getting to see John at work this summer as an intern for a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn -- oh my -- in a suit, knowing his way around the courthouse, explaining all of it to me, standing at the courthouse window with an amazing view and an American flag -- one of the golden moments of my life.
       The way that God gave John the summer associateship position for next summer -- making it so clear that this is directly from His hand.
      The way that God gave Leah her apartment -- better than we had hoped for, our price -- and the same landlord!! Again, He is kind to make it unmistakable that she is right where He wants her to be.
      God moving so many of our dearest friends from our immediate circle through the church plant and other means  -- growing in love for the new people He is giving us and teaching us that He will put His church together as He sees fit, choosing who He will and that our unity depends only on our mutual reliance on Him, nothing else.
     Seeing Emma grow in maturity and grace -- encouraged that God is at work in her and that His word does its work, realizing that the bond with her is stronger than I knew
     Time with Michelle R and seeing God give her the grace to face Stage 4 cancer. God has given me an overwhelming, authentic love for her.    
      This  refuge  tucked away in New York City, a suite of rooms in a brownstone for a fraction of the cost of a hotel room. This life that He has given me Every minute that I have -- to enjoy Him, to please Him to grow in knowing Him.

http://www.redeemer.com/redeemerreport/article/old_testament_law_and_the_charge_of_inconsistency

True Tales of Wonder Convey the Permanent Things

     In Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics , Russell Kirk points out that the duty to pass the torch regarding time-tested truths falls largely to the keepers of the written word. He singles out moral fantasy in particular as a great hope for achieving this lofty goal, and analyzes the enduring principles found in works by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. 

    ...The creative writer, the critic and the teacher of literature are heirs to an ancient civilized order. ... The real responsibility of the teacher of literature in maintaining the contract of eternal society is not that of a preacher of doctrines nor an agent of government. His duty is far loftier than this. Paul Elmer More describes the real function of the humane scholar as "a disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination to the end that the student may behold, as it were in one sublime vision, the whole scale of being in its range from the lowest to the highest under the divine decree of order and subordination, without losing sight of the immutable veracity at the heart of all development, which is only the the praise and surname of virtue." ...

    ... The work of recovering normality in letters has commenced here and there.  Its progress is most hopeful in ... the reviving art of moral fantasy, the ancient and persistent power of myth, fable, allegory and parable.  [These] are not falsehoods; on the contrary, they are means for penetrating to the truth by appealing to the moral imagination. ...

      "Fantasy" or "fancy" originally signified the enlightening imagination.  In fantasy, things are represented strangely, so as to rouse our wonder; yet the shock of the fantastic is intended to wake us from dullness and complacency. ... [Fantasy writers] show us the norms for man and society through conjuring up fanciful episodes in which our virtues and vices glimmer as in a looking glass. Were it not for the mirrored reflection, we should not take thought. ...

     And in a  time when professors in seminaries inform us that God has expired, and that we must be utterly demythologized, disenchanted, desacralized and deconsecrated -- why, these learned doctors are undone by the Christian fables and allegories of Clive Staples Lewis. ... For our fabulists will not permit us to become disenchanted, desacralized, and deconsecrated.  Imagination, given time, does rule the world ... and for every doctrinaire secularist who swears by Cox, a hundred young people will have read of Aslan, the lion-Christ of Narnia. ... The twentieth-century fabulist may or may not be orthodox in religious convictions. .. But he loves the permanent things. If we are arrested in our march toward Logicalism and its inhumane universalism, our rescuers may be the authors of true tales of wonder, not the theologians of our schools. To make myself clearer, I present to you Mr. Ray Bradbury, of Hollywood, a person in most matters very unlike Carlyle or Macdonald, yet a man who overthrows idols by the power of imagery. .....

    "Soul,"  a word much out of fashion nowadays, signifies a man's animating entity.  That flaming spark the soul is the real space traveller of Bradbury's stories."I'm alive!" -- that exclamation is heard from Waukegan to Mars and beyond, in Bradbury's fables. Life is its own end -- if one has a soul to tell him so.

      The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man's power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of any events.  Without the moral imagination, man would live merely from day to day, or  rather moment to moment, as dogs do.  It is the strange faculty -- inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only -- of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest.  And the moral imagination, which shows us what we ought to be, primarily is what distinguishes Bradbury's tales from the futurism of Wells' fancy. For Bradbury, the meaning of life is here and now, in our every action; we live amidst immortality; it is here, not in some future domination like that of Wells' The Sleeper Awakens, that we must find our happiness. ... Perpetual youth, and therefore, perpetual hope, defy in Bradbury's pages the fatigue of this century and the ambitions of exploiting scientism.

    If spirits in prison, still we are spirits; if able to besmirch ourselves, still only we men are capable of moral choices.  Life and technology are what we make of them, and the failure of man to live in harmony with nature is the failure of moral imagination. That failure is not inevitable.  ...

      To understand Bradbury's disquietude and his high hopes, we may look at his [works]. ...What gives these stories their cunning is their realism set in the fantastic: that is, their portrayal of human nature, in all its baseness and all its promise, against an exquisite stage-set.  We are shown normality, the permanent things in human nature, by the light of another world; and what we forget about ourselves in the ordinariness of our routine of existence suddenly bursts upon us as fresh revelation.

    Wells would have had man usurp the throne of God. Bradbury's hope is that man will let God work through him; for it is not the dead universe which is divine, but "God fleshing himself in sentience" -- the living God making Himself felt through human energies.  "I speak of no errant usurpation from the Deity. I speak of no paranoiac illusion of mythology which would supremacize man to the detriment of the Supreme Being. I seek only to weld the two. I seek to fuse them in religious fervor until they cleave, entwine, are bound so feverish tight no light can be seen between them; they are light." ...

     Bradbury discovers... ancient truths beneath the surface of existence in Waukegan, Illinois, say, about 1928 ... in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

     A carnival comes to a small town; and two boys, thirteen years old, Jim and Will, are fascinated by it.  But this particular carnival is not merry. Its master is the Illustrated Man, Mr. Dark, seeking whom he may devour. His captive freaks are sinners whose monstrous bodies are the personifications of their sins.  His carousel, running forward or backward at great speed, will give human beings their desire of youth regained or age attained -- and send the iron into their souls. His Mirror Maze will entrap the folk who seek what is not in nature, and will convert them into caricatures of themselves.  Mademoiselle Tarot, the Dust With, can murder with a whisper. For centuries, preying upon frailty and folly, this carnival has wandered the world, its proprietors setting teir snares for the unwise and the unwary, and often with success.

      Only one man in town -- Will's father, the library janitor, growing old -- recognizes the carnival for what it is. The carnival is Death. "But I think it uses Death as a threat," says Charles Halloway, the janitor, to the terrified boys.  "Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, tying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy.  All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we're more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something."

     This carnival is the evil that men do to one another, and to themselves; it is fed by pain and fear. What Cooger and Dark's Carnival desires is not worthless dead souls, but ulcerated egos, given up to will and appetite.  "A dead soul is no kindling. But a live and raving soul, crisped with self-damnation, oh, that's a pretty snoutful for each of them." Enslaved to freak-masters, such souls in agony supply te fuel for the carnival's perpetuity. For every need, want and desire the carnival proprietors promise a satisfaction beyond the bounds of nature. But their victims fall instead, into madness and ghastly distortion.  There is no need for devils to buy souls, for "most men jump at the chance to give up eveyrthing for nothing." This carnival has traveled "a long way on an easy map, with people handy by every crossroad to lend it lustful pints of agony to power it on.  Soaybe hte carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets."

    This carnivals' power is mighty, and it converts the ligntning-rod salesman into a hideous crumpled dwarf, old Miss Foley into a lost child. Jim, who would grow up too soon, stands on the brink of being whirled by the carousel into monstrosity. By lusting after the abnormal, by flouting the nature of things, old and young betray themselves into the freak-masters' clutch.

     Yet one power is stronger than the temptations and threats of the carnival; and that power is laughter. We laugh at the incongruous, at the absurdity of the unnatural. Rediscovering the weapon of humor, Halloway first baffles the Dust Witch, and the shoots her dead with a bullet on which he has printed a smile. Evil, after all, is ludicrous; and though God is notmocked, thse creatures who batten upon tormented souls are aghast at healthy mockery.

     Just when all had seemed lost, Halloway and the boys destroy the carnival by mirth. But other creatures who prey upon warped souls will come to town presently, in some other disguise, and the fools who want everything will become their freaks.

     Evil, in essence, is the appetite to undo the natural order of things. It is the glorification of abnormity. And the price one pays for clutching at the unnatural is metamorphosis into a freak,or into a freak-master.

    In Bradbury's fables...,, fantasy has become what it was in the beginning: the enlightening moral imagination, transcending simple rationality. The everyday world is not the real world, for today's events are merely a film upon the deep well of the past, and theywill be swallowed up by the unknowable future. The real world is the world of the permanent things, which often are discerned more clearly in the fictional dead cities of Mars or the fictional carousel of Cooger and Dark than in our own little private slice of evanescent experience.  ...

    The trappings of science fiction may have attracted young people to Bradbury, but he has led them on to something much older and better: mythopoeic literature, normative truth acquired through wonder.  Bradbury's stories are not an escape from reality; they are windows looking upon enduring reality.
 

What are the Permanent Things?

    In 1969, Russell Kirk wrote a book entitled Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics. Here are some excerpts from that work, which remains relevant as we march blithely against common sense and wisdom of the ages.


      [When we speak of the "permanent things," we speak of norms.] A norm means an enduring standard. It is a law of nature, which we ignore at our peril. It is a rule of human conduct and a measure of public virtue. ... A norm exists: though men may ignore or forget a norm, still that norm does not cease to be, nor does it cease to influence men. A man apprehends a norm, or fails to apprehend it; but he does not create or destroy important norms.

   For the most part, our norms are derived from the experience of the species, the ancient usages of humanity; and from the perceptions of genius, of those rare men who have seen profoundly into the human condition -- and whose wisdom soon is accepted by the mass of men, down the generations. I turn first to custom or what we call common sense. ... [These] are the practical expressions of what mankind has learnt in the school of hard knocks. There exists a legitimate presumption in favor of venerable usages; for our or my private experience is brief and confused but the experience of the race takes into account the consequences suffered or the rewards obtained by multitudes of human beings in circumstances similar to yours and mine. Custom and common sense constitute an immemorial empiricism, with roots so antique and obscure that we can only conjecture the origins of any general habit. One we we do know: it is dangerous to break with ways that have been intertwined so intricately in human longings and satisfactions. Those who toss the cake of custom into the rubbish-bin may find themselves supper-less.  And if common sense is discarded -- why, it is supplanted not by a universal intellectualism, but by common nonsense. ...

     Real progress consists in the movement of mankind toward the understanding of norms and the toward conformity to norms.  Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms and away from obedience to norms. The decay of the Greek civilization in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ; the decline of the Roman order in the four centuries after Christ; the collapse of the medieval world in the fourteenth century; the decline of culture and the eruption of dark powers in our own twentieth century --- these were times in which norms were forgotten or defied. The disintegration of moral understanding was at once cause and consequence of confusion in the social order. ....

...An abnormity, it its Latin root, means a monstrosity, defying the norm, the nature of things. An abnormal generation is a generation of monsters, enslaved by will and appetite. To recover an apprehension of normality, then is to acquire an understanding of one's real nature.. The alternative to such recovery is not a piquant pose of "nonconformity," but monstrosity in the soul and in society. ...
Modern temper's inclination [is] toward the abnormal, the enormous, the monstrous -- often disguised in the garments of humanitarianism, amusing innovations or delusive security.

   

Labor of Love

     "And a sword shall pierce your soul, too."
 
      Those words, spoken by Simeon long before Mary had to witness her beautiful boy tortured and mangled, carry a weighty message for all mothers. Mary's case is, of course, unique in all history. But  the truth is: motherhood always brings soul-piercing pain, even when children are God-honoring, fruitful and obedient.

   What is the piercing?  The unavoidable fact is that there is a point when motherhood ends, at least in a certain sense.  God gives mothers the privilege of being the primary means of nurturing, training, discipling, protecting and teaching helpless little people. She gets to be the most important person in the world to these little someones. She gets to fan flickers of talent into flame, see this old world through their new eyes, tell them all her stories and read them other people's. God entrusts her to do as she sees fit, ordering their days and filling them with what seems wisest to her.

  But at the end of it, inevitably, they grow up. They may leave or they may not. But they grow up and they don't need all of that in quite the same way.

    Motherhood, as we have known it from the moment we learned of that little life inside of us, ends. It is not enough to call it a change. It is too radical.

    But it ends in exactly the same way that pregnancy ends.  The baby is safe and comfortable in the womb, all his needs met. Then labor begins.  Great, violent, heaves disrupt the cozy little world. The spasms start out small, but then cannot possibly be ignored. It hurts the mother. But not the baby. It may alarm him, but it doesn't hurt in the same way that it hurts the mother.

     But all of this is necessary for the baby to become what he must become or die -- to breathe air, to eat food, to see and hear and smell, to have room to grow and use his limbs. And all of this also creates a new relationship between the mother and the baby -- she can relate to him in a new way, she can look at him and talk to him. She can now communicate with him in a way she never could before and tell him about things as he sees them for himself. All of that pain is forgotten because now there is a new relationship.
 
    And so it is for mothers. For a time, we have our children in our homes and we know everything about them. We get to talk to them as we walk, as we work, as we lay down.  We get to do for them as we think best. We lay aside our lives and give all we have to raising these.

   And when it is over, we are stunned. But during the labor, we can take heart that these birth pains will give way to a new creation -- an adult child, a beloved friend to whom you can relate to in a different way than before but still different from any other person in the world.

    Like the end of pregnancy, motherhood's "end" brings completely different joys and challenges  as we go even deeper in  learning what it means to love.

    The pain of the loss, of letting go, drives home the beauty of God's promise: love never ends. And He is Love.