Thursday, September 29, 2011

The Apologist's Evening Prayer

About a week ago, I was defending the Trinity to my housemate, who is a kind of Unitarian. I offered the best arguments I could, and some of them seemed to at least challenge him a little. But in the silence as I went to sleep after the conversation (it finished very, very late) I found that I could not rest trusting in a God I could defend with my own words and arguments. But a God who was far beyond anything I could hope to understand, a God in no need of my defence: such a God had arms I could rest in.

While in the mountains over the past few days, I found this beautiful offering by C.S. Lewis, in a book of his poems. It struck a real chord with me, and I hope it can mean something to some of you:

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle's eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

If we had but world enough and time

There has not been much activity at Ideas From the North for the last few weeks. There has, of course, been much activity in my life, and much activity also in my head, but not much - actually, let's be honest, not any - of it has made it onto this site. There's a whole post simply on the topic of why I haven't been blogging. The biggest reason, though, is that, while I manage to think a lot while busy, I don't manage to write very much. Writing takes time, and reflection, and space, and I haven't had any of these.

But I did go into the mountains for two days with two good friends. We listened to classical music and wrote and read poetry. We even read all of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale", complete with accents, only to find that reading a whole Shakespeare play out loud takes quite a lot of time. But we had time, so that wasn't an issue.

There is no easy answer for being time poor. If I may brave some potentially absurd hyperbole, it is the most pervasive disease of the 21st century. But for now I can thank God for school holidays and for mountains and friends to retreat, read, write and recite with. I can also thank God that, whatever is going wrong with my time schedule, His is completely and utterly on track.