Sunday, 27 April 2008
We're all going on a....
... spring holiday! I'm shortly off on holiday to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. Hoping that it lives up to expectations, since it feels like I've been planning this trip for years. Flying in to Quito, the capital, then up to the cloudforest for a couple of days, back down through Quito for a flight to the amazon rainforest, 5 days in an indigenously owned lodge in the rainforest, back to Quito for a couple of days, and then 8 days sailing round Galapagos. Preparations have mostly consisted of running round Millets throwing random items into a basket and frantically searching for my mysteriously vanished spare camera battery - possibly would've been more useful to learn some spanish/become an expert on amazonian wildlife but I've been a bit distracted by my need to systematically review 40,000 potentially relevant abstracts before I went. Tried to read Darwin's Beagle diary but it was the unedited version and rambled on for pages and pages about his preparations for the voyage, Southampton, the size of his cabin, what he ate for breakfast etc. He should've published a blog...
Monday, 14 April 2008
Seeing is believing?
Annie Dillard: “Seeing, is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.”
Monday, 7 April 2008
Prisoners of hope
Recently I've been thinking about the phrase 'prisoners of hope' (it comes from Zechariah, a slightly obscure book in the Old Testament). What would it mean to be a prisoner of hope? Came across an interesting article on a similar subject, bits of it are copied below:
http://www.rzim.org/resources/jttran.php?seqid=89
Lewis characterizes Sehnsucht as an “intense longing” 3 for union with beauty and transcendence through a desired object—such as a “far-off country”—which is partly realized in the incarnation of hope and especially, Joy. Such an experience, though, leaves one trembling with an acute awareness that one is ultimately separated from the object for which one longs. This sense of separation leads Lewis to reason, “The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined—in our present mode of subject and spatio-temporal experience.” 4
Just a few days after my Ash Wednesday dream, and yes, after reading Jesus’ pointed reply to the blind men, I had another dream: A troubled young woman failed her exam and went to seek help from her professor. The teacher responded with kindness and then asked her a question, but I awoke before she answered. The question? “What is it that you want?”
In Lewis’ allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress and Augustine’s biography Confessions, the authors depict the power of longing, both for God and for God-substitutes—those things they sought to fill the void that they would discover only God could fill. Augustine and Lewis recognized that our longings can lead us to God. Conversely, our blindness to them actually directs us away from God, for if we cannot see what it is we seek, how will we know if we’ve stumbled upon it? Indeed, “What we do not long for,” observes Augustine, “can be the object neither of our hope nor of our despair.”
It has been my experience that for the follower of Christ, our blindness to what it is that we want, and ultimately, what it is that satisfies, is rooted either in fear or in submerging our persistent longings under the temporarily tranquil waters of “godly contentment.” I do not mean to suggest that contentment is not possible or even desirable, for the Scriptures, and particularly the Psalms, offer us a view of rest. One thinks, of course, of Psalm 23: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want…. He leads me beside still waters,” where the Hebrew reads literally, “beside waters of rest.” Yet only two chapters later, David is pursued by his enemies and cries out, “The troubles of my heart have multiplied.” So though we may find rest beside tranquil waters, they are “streams in the desert,” and their source flows from a far-off country. 5 ....
And so it is that we are pilgrims in Narnia, prisoners of hope 13 spying dreams of dawn in a far-off country, and its Light pierces us even in the Shadowlands. Like those before us, we are given signposts as reminders along the way and invitations to rest beside still waters, or to wrestle with God till daybreak. So who of us, half-hearted creatures though we often be, would hunger for anything less?
http://www.rzim.org/resources/jttran.php?seqid=89
Lewis characterizes Sehnsucht as an “intense longing” 3 for union with beauty and transcendence through a desired object—such as a “far-off country”—which is partly realized in the incarnation of hope and especially, Joy. Such an experience, though, leaves one trembling with an acute awareness that one is ultimately separated from the object for which one longs. This sense of separation leads Lewis to reason, “The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined—in our present mode of subject and spatio-temporal experience.” 4
Just a few days after my Ash Wednesday dream, and yes, after reading Jesus’ pointed reply to the blind men, I had another dream: A troubled young woman failed her exam and went to seek help from her professor. The teacher responded with kindness and then asked her a question, but I awoke before she answered. The question? “What is it that you want?”
In Lewis’ allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress and Augustine’s biography Confessions, the authors depict the power of longing, both for God and for God-substitutes—those things they sought to fill the void that they would discover only God could fill. Augustine and Lewis recognized that our longings can lead us to God. Conversely, our blindness to them actually directs us away from God, for if we cannot see what it is we seek, how will we know if we’ve stumbled upon it? Indeed, “What we do not long for,” observes Augustine, “can be the object neither of our hope nor of our despair.”
It has been my experience that for the follower of Christ, our blindness to what it is that we want, and ultimately, what it is that satisfies, is rooted either in fear or in submerging our persistent longings under the temporarily tranquil waters of “godly contentment.” I do not mean to suggest that contentment is not possible or even desirable, for the Scriptures, and particularly the Psalms, offer us a view of rest. One thinks, of course, of Psalm 23: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want…. He leads me beside still waters,” where the Hebrew reads literally, “beside waters of rest.” Yet only two chapters later, David is pursued by his enemies and cries out, “The troubles of my heart have multiplied.” So though we may find rest beside tranquil waters, they are “streams in the desert,” and their source flows from a far-off country. 5 ....
And so it is that we are pilgrims in Narnia, prisoners of hope 13 spying dreams of dawn in a far-off country, and its Light pierces us even in the Shadowlands. Like those before us, we are given signposts as reminders along the way and invitations to rest beside still waters, or to wrestle with God till daybreak. So who of us, half-hearted creatures though we often be, would hunger for anything less?
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