back again

It's been awhile ...especially if a friend who doesn't necessarily read blogs all that much tells me I need to update. So I'll begin again with where I tend to camp in the fall semester, in the writings and life of C.S. Lewis. The sonnet below is one of my favorites, not because of the style or quality, but for what Lewis says. He expresses much of what I have been exploring in the last year, that our thoughts and words of God, about God, necessarily contain the lie, are "flashy rhetoric" because we are limited by ourselves; we are "self-imprisoned". Another reason why we need each other's stories. A postmodern calvinist tree hugger friend often says that God constructs our reality. And deconstructs.

As The Ruin Falls
-- C.S. Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love—a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek—
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give are more precious than all other gains.