Reflections On Internet Engagement

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Each day we wake, new opportunities face us. The most important opportunities, however, are the relational ones.

We roll out of bed with our spouses, what words pour out first? Loving words, spiteful words, grudging words? Or we hit school or the work place, each step through the door, another opportunity to bite and bicker, love and encourage. 

And what about the virtual relationships, the social media interactions, the rogue blog-commenter, the public figures we read about, their lives now oh-so-public?

It occurred to me that our culture encourages an observational approach to maintaining and engaging our relationships. We watch and react. We observe and respond. We read and comment. We skim and tweet.

It's the way of it.  

But another way exists. 

It does not begin on the outside looking in. Rather, it originates from within. The most intimate of positions.

In a short essay titled "Meditation in a Toolshed" C.S. Lewis described a dark toolshed in which he was standing. The sun poured through a crack at the top of the door and into the shed. From his position outside of the beam he could easily say something about the shaft of light entering the toolshed. 

But then something changed. 

Lewis moved from his position and stepped into the beam. 

Within the beam his perspective changed. Through the crack he saw leaves swaying, and beyond that the sun shining 90 million miles away.

"Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences."

You and I, we're creatures of observations. We enjoy looking at the beam. It's much safer, and the view is great for we can see everything; at least we like to think we can. We can make keen observations about the beam of light and the surroundings. 

From our outside view we, then, create theories and rules about everything we see. 

Lewis was not fond of theories.

He did not think general laws (theories) could explain human behavior. We can't understand one another from the outside looking in. We can't create theories and psychological laws about one another and think we've solved the human conundrum of we-ourselves. 

Rather, we must daily strive to understand why a person acts a certain way based upon their explanation. And we must do this from within the relational experience. 

You let the kettle boil but do not make the tea. I ask, "Why?" to which you reply, "Because I did't feel like it." This may lead to an argument, or it may not. What it does lead to is the fact that we give ad hoc reasons for actions based on personal desire. Those desires, in turn, may hurt or help another person. But this is way of it, and no theory can determine our random actions within relationships. 

We may also not do something another person was expecting us to do because we thought it was wrong. Here we give moral reasoning for our actions based on reflection of the situation. 

Each day, then, on and on we interact based on personal desires and moral reflections of situations. "Soon," writes philosopher Paul Holmer, "we are all caught up in a web of everyday explanations by which we understand human actions." (Holmer, 26)

We're caught in the ad hoc everyday whim of explanations, the inside view, the inside interaction of being in the muck of it with those whom we encounter. This is how we know, how we climb inside one another. 

Rules break and fail, and what do we have? 

We must rely on our understanding of the person. And how do we achieve such an understanding?

We must be close enough, within the beam of relationship, to discern when the web of the ad hoc everyday explanations make sense, when our stated motivations are true, when our love for one another is real and not pretense.

This is understanding, and understanding begets wisdom. 

I suppose today's ramble is more for me than anything; a thinking through, a reminder:

I must adjust my position if I seek truth and wisdom about others and situations. And that is no small feat. What do I know about the co-worker in front of me, the school mate next to me, the public figure who messed up? If the answer is, "Not much," then perhaps I should hold my tongue, my pen, my blog post, my news article, my ___________. 

"Ah, but Tim, it's all well and good to desire intimate knowledge before we speak, but the public square is different. Hoist up the poles and burn the heretics, for we now have new means of accountability!" 

Do we, now? Does not the word itself presuppose a relational foundation: of friend to friend, of student to teacher, of husband to wife (and vice versa), of pastor to church and so on? 

Accountability cannot be divorced from understanding, from wisdom.

And that is what we find within the beam; not only the wisdom to truly see those we encounter, but also the grace afforded to us from others.

For there we stand, exposed in the sunlight and yet it is only from within the beam we find the ability, the grace and humility to truly understand, to truly know.

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Take a few moments and listen to my friend Joy Eggerich's thoughts regarding our online engagement. 

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Unsafe God

Today's Pipe Series draws us into a place of worship. I often find myself looking around when I attend gatherings of The Family of God. I catch myself wondering how odd it must be for visitors witnessing several hundred, even thousands, of Christians singing their hearts out to a God they cannot see.  

It can feel so pagan at times; pagan in the raw sense of the word, ruddy and beautiful, haunting and mysterious. 

Last night at just such a gathering, my friend Mandy Joy Miller sang while her husband (and some friends) played. Caught in the moment I found myself staring out into the woods behind the house, remnants of day's last light filtering through. Mandy read from one of my favorite passages in Revelation, the one where the beasts with eyes all over their bodies cry out, "Different, different, different, is the Lord God Almighty." 

Mandy then spoke of her prayers lately, and how she'd been overwhelmed with a vision of a great lion; the kind of lion that is "strong and loving." (Psalm 62:11-12) 

I love the scene in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe where Lucy says of Aslan being a lion, "Then, he isn't safe?"

"'Course he isn't safe," replies Mr. Beaver. "But he is good."  

Lewis here appears to draw from Rudolf Ottos's theological classic The Idea of the Holy  in which Otto describes the numinous. The  numinous is the experience that underlies all religious experience, it's that something "wholly other" than experienced in ordinary life. It's made up of three parts: mysterium (evoking a sense of silence), tremendum (overwhelming power), et fascinans (attractiveness in spite of fear). 

In The Problem of Pain Lewis describes the numinous like this: 

Suppose you were told thee was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told 'There is a ghost in the next room,' and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is 'uncanny' rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread.

With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous.

Now suppose that you were told simply 'There is a mighty spirit in the room,' and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it. ...

This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.  

Last night, in our little gathering space, I felt what Lewis and Otto describe as numinous. I also felt it Sunday morning while singing songs of worship. 

But there are times when I don't feel it. I know I'm speaking a lot about feelings. And I know I need to guard myself from emotionalism, but I stand with Jonathan Edwards in espousing a religion that is based on positive affections for God. I want to be caught up in him; I want to dangle my heart over the chasm of his love and feel the gulping fear that accompanies.  

So it is, when my spiritual affections lack I then reflect on how my actions reveal their absence. I can feign true religious affections, but that veneer will invade my every day and draw me away into haughtiness, pride and fear. 

I find my spiritual affections grow when they stem from organic action, like frequent gatherings of free worship through song, discussion and testimony.

I remember one morning this past winter I was visiting my friends Josh and Lacey Sturm in Pittsburgh. We were finishing a project on a Sunday morning when Josh hit the pause button, picked up his guitar and began to lead us in a time of worship through song. I stood across from Lacey and just listened as she sang soft notes of praise. The quiet time of whisper-worship dangled me over the chasm of Christ's love. 

At once I was struck with a different fear; a wholly other kind of feeling that prompted tears, adoration and thanksgiving. We ended our time of song with lingering silence. I could almost feel the holy breeze of the Spirit passing through the chasm. 

I wanted, like Lucy, to throw myself into God's massive fury neck and cling to him while trembling. Indeed, Lucy, he is not safe. But oh, is he good.  

So give yourself permission to feel a bit more today. Expose yourself to the chasm of his glory and see if it doesn't just scare you further into his love. Let go of the cynicism that so defines our culture (even our Christian culture!) and clothe yourself in numinous. See what the great eyed-creatures saw and shout, "Oh God, how different you are! And oh, how I love you!"  

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The Lost Art of Reflection

I remember the daffodils, a beauty not astonishing. How they waved to me from a textbook page. How they bobbed in tetrametric dance. All week my thought rested on these daffodils as I tried to remember my first encounter with beauty. A beauty that I recognized as different; as referent to something other than what I was beholding.

It was in Wordsworth's poem, "I Wondered Lonely As A Cloud" I encountered an image I would not soon forget:

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

In Till We Have Faces Lewis describes Psyche's beauty by saying, "It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it."

I find resonance with Lewis's description of beauty with how Wordsworth defines poetry: "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from emotion recollected in tranquility."

Interesting how beauty and poetry find their origins in reflection. How the astonishment was not immediate, but expanded and grew as time tooled the image or thought into something transcendent.

A few weeks back I started The Faerie Queen, a classic poem of enormous proportions. This poem influenced Lewis's imaginative shaping, and I can see why.

Only a few pages in, I stumbled upon a description of trees that demanded I reread, over and over. Each tree—the oak, laurel, pine and poplar all—was given human paint as they drifted beneath the stormy sky, dancing like the daffodils.

The faerie scene of growing tension not only demands several readings, but invites the whimsy of thought. I fall asleep to these scenes of waving daffodils and the swaying kings of the forest (oaks). Beauty absconds with our hearts but also rifles our intellect, holding it at melodic gunpoint.

What Beauty Demands

Our encounters of beauty turn us to certain realities we cannot neglect. In thinking upon the daffodils I faced a knowledge of something else beyond my capacity to explain. It drew desire from me, it resonated with what I understood to be a kind of goodness upon the earth, though I could not and still cannot articulate it.

In all beauty, it seems, we face a healthy bit of morality. And, as a Christian, this makes sense to me since I believe God to be the originator of all things good and true. Beauty resonates in us all and demands not only our attention but also the soulish side of our beings.

Am I hoisting up beauty as a proof for God? Maybe, I wouldn't be the first. But at a more popular level I think what we can learn from beauty (and poetry) is an art form lost in this world of instant publishing, opinions and hoo-ha. And that art form is reflection.

Reflection encourages a morality of heart and mind. If we simmer on something long enough, we will find what we did not want to find: our opinions laid waste. For reflection can house the grandest of notions and the deepest of beauties.

But, if we do in fact surrender our hearts and minds to God, reflection will show us how prideful our pens and thoughts can be—how lazy our opinions are formed. Lewis touched on this idea in his essay "The Seeing Eye." He writes:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully, but you’d be safer to stick to the papers. You’ll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or snobbish appeal.

 ​In today's world, it pays to be astonishing or provocative. But a holy beauty demands more from us. It demands the rights to our pride and our weak discernment; it demands we wait. It demands we sift through our reactions and realize our point of view can be selfish and wrong.

Let us, as Christians, strive to write pieces of beauty; pieces that demand reflection to produce and pieces that demand our readers to reflect as well. So much of what gets passed around in the blogsophere demands little from us.

Provocation and astonishment might garner large followings for a time, but in the long run they wither and are easily deleted.

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We March Unaware

If you read C.S. Lewis's collection of essays God In The Dock you'll find Lewis's final interview conducted in 1963 at Magdalene College, Cambridge University with Mr. Wirt from the Billy Graham Association. These exchanges stuck out to me and I think apropos for this short piece.

Mr. Wirt: What is your opinion of the kind of writing being done within the Christian church today?

Lewis: A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible.

Further on in the conversation Mr. Wirt asks Lewis about the use of the profane within writing as a means to make writing seem more authentic.

Mr. Wirt: Do you think filth and obscenity is necessary in order to establish a realistic atmosphere in contemporary literature?

Lewis: I do not. I treat this development as a symptom, a sign of a culture that has lost its faith. Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse. I look upon the immediate future with great apprehension.

Mr. Wirt follows up Lewis's response by asking if the culture has been de-Christianized. Rather than commenting on the greater culture, Lewis looks directly at the church.

Lewis: I have some definite views about the de-Christianizing of the church. I believe that there are many accommodating preachers, and too many practitioners in the church who are not believers. Jesus Christ did not say 'Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.' The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world.

I find Lewis's ideas on ecclesial accommodation, spiritual collapse and feigned authenticity poignant even now, fifty years later. We live in the age of the marketing-savvy provocateur pastor, the liberated speech of the blogosphere and the land where the obscene and profane point to shame and mock.

"The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness." 

Perhaps most surprising is our general lack of humility. Here I take Richard Fosters definition of humility as being aware of the truth of things: I am aware of the truth of others and myself and of the situation in which I find myself.

Humility demands we understand our position before God. Without him we are raging rebels bent on destroying. With him we become Christ himself—the archetype of the humble servant.

We seem to forget who we are or worse, fabricate a humility and authenticity by way of our crassness and snark, writing it off to the gods of the hip and the real. And in the midst of our forgetfulness we ramshackle shame and stand blind to the notion and importance of hiddenness.

Part of our awareness of self lies not in our pathological need to expose everything in our lives in the name of "being brave" and "getting it all out" but in the realization that shame helps us see ourselves as we truly are. It helps us stay humble.

"When men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin," writes Lewis in The Problem of Pain, "the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one who is always making impossible demands and always inexplicably angry."

Lewis does not claim to be a 'worm theologian.' On the contrary, he does not even believe in total depravity. He does not think we should be afraid of our true selves. He suggests that in order to know our true selves we must learn through the lens of shame and right position before God.

The Alter of Self promoted by our culture looks inviting. It says that shame is a dangerous game—liberate yourself and find your true voice.

But Christ says something completely different. He says, "If you lose your life, you will find it." Perhaps it is time we return to lostness. A lostness in Him and in so doing, finding the trueness of ourselves.

Introducing // The Pipe Series

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Hello Friends, 

Today I'd like to invite you to step into, well, a wardrobe of goodness. Many of you receive The Prayer Series each Friday(ish), and for that I thank you and pray that it continues to encourage you.

Today, I'm adding a new series: The Pipe Series. 

The Pipe Series will deal with all things C.S. Lewis. So many of us love his writings, are intrigued by his theology and admire is honest original mind.

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The Pipe Series will be bi-monthly, and will post on Wednesdays. It'll contain random facts, interesting quotes and maybe even a bit of commentary or myth busting. 

So get out your pipes and sign up for The Pipe Series today! Look for the first one next Wednesday. 

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The Pipe Series // Imagination Man

Editor's Note
Greetings, and welcome to The Pipe Series. Pack your pipe and settle in for a bi-monthly endeavor into the world of one of Christianity's most beloved storytellers, hack-theologians, apologists and all around jocund fellows: C.S. Lewis.

Expect most posts to center on a theme, offer an off-the-beaten-path quote and some random facts that don't surface in the popular feed. I'm not quite sure Professor Lewis would approve of such an email. He'd probably dismiss the mere notion that we'd waste our time climbing up and down his words. Or, perhaps he'd get a kick out of it. Either way, let's get on with it.

Imagination Man

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898. He was Irish. Yes, Irish. In fact, he loved Ireland—Northern Ireland to be more precise and County Down was his favorite. He and Joy Davidman spent their honeymoon in Ireland in 1958.

Though he was, no doubt, born with a unique imagination, it was fueled by a life of books. When he was seven years old his family moved to a new home on the edge of Belfast, in "Leaboro." Piles and piles of books filled this new house and Lewis was granted free reign to read what he liked. Like any child with open space, books and free time, Lewis' imagination grew in the halls of his youth.*

Imagination doesn't follow a rigid set of laws. It operates according to the unique make-up of each person. And, not all imaginations are equal. Our environments affect how our imaginations fire. Alister McGrath suggests the emerald green of County Down and other parts of Northern Ireland shaped the wonderment of Lewis' imagination.

Makes me wonder how he wrote his stories?

"With me the process is much like bird-watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures. Some of the pictures have a common flavour, almost a common smell, which groups them together. Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up. If you were very lucky (I have never been so lucky as all that) a whole group might join themselves so consistently that there you had a complete story; without doing anything yourself. But more often (in my experience always) there are gaps. Then at last you have to do some deliberate inventing …"**

Lewis paid little heed, from what I can tell, to what people thought of his stories. First reviews of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe did not offer praise. And yet the floodgates opened the next two years as Lewis hammered out the series.

Lewis encourages me to seek originality; to stay away from what's popular and to cling to what's waiting to erupt out of my imagination. Today, it's all about audience awareness and psychographics and market. But what directs the market? That one book or writer brave enough to "keep quiet and watch" and follow their imagination.

Nuggets

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was written in just two months.

The Silver Chair was written in about three months.

Quote

"Writing is like a 'lust' or like scratching when you itch." —God In The Dock

Question

Which Lewis book was his least favorite to write?

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