heritage

Psalm 61 has always been a touchstone for me. The verses seem to shift and mold to my circumstances, covering my life with truth and grace as clothing adapts to fit the wearer's position.

One of my favorite verses of Psalm 61 has always been "you have given me the heritage of those who fear your name." I've taken that quite literally in the past, thinking of my parents and grandparents who have striven to seek the Lord. Recently I've come to realize how much of the world's Christian heritage is recorded in English--especially in the last few decades and centuries. I witness how many Christians around the world are spiritually fed by works originally written in English. Of course there are various socio-political reasons for this, but they bore me in this context, so I won't consider them (my blog, my right :).

I've been fighting culture shock by diving into Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and I have been blessed, through them, by "the heritage of those who fear your name." They are my heritage: ethnically, culturally, creatively, linguistically, academically, and faith-wise. They are the fathers of my thought-life. I believe it is impossible to be a thinking Christian in the English-speaking world today without being shaped in some sense by Lewis.

Lewis touches my heart--through Narnia, That Hideous Strength, and 'Til We Have Faces among others, and engages my mind through nearly everything of his that I've read. Tolkien, on the other hand, does not relate to my thinking self as much as to my soul and imagination. I have learned of myself and my world through Arwen and Eowyn, through Frodo and Sam, through Aragorn and Gandalf in ways that all of Lewis' exposition could not match.

This posting is already long, but I wanted to share some Lewis with you. I've been reading a collection of his correspondence, titled Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. These letters were written near the end of his life, and carry the weight of his experience along with his natural levity.

p.76 "No real belief in the watered versions [of Christianity] can last. Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee. You and I have both known happy marriage. But how different our wives were from the imaginary mistresses of our adolescent dreams! So much less exquisitely adapted to all our wishes; and for that very reason (among others) so incomparably better."

And then you know you're reading Lewis when you get to sentences like this: "All we can really subsitute for the analogical expression is some theological abstraction. And the abstraction's value is almost entirely negative. It warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical expression by prosaic extrapolations." (p. 51) HA--so there! :)