Why Science Needs Faith

My evening devotional reading over the last few weeks has involved delving again into the writings of George MacDonald.  MacDonald's the brilliant hard-nosed last 19th century Scots mystic who's been a substantial part of my adult spiritual development.  He's not light reading, not at all, but that he's best read and then carefully digested makes his work great for pre-sleep meditation.

I've been carefully moving through his "Hope of the Gospel," in which MacDonald has let his imagination wander into some fascinating places.   His reflections towards the end of that work on the nature of animal life go into some pretty esoteric places.

At one point in talking about the spirits of the simpler, less sentient living beings around us, his mystic's sense of the interconnection of all being goes so far as to almost be talking about reincarnation, or some peculiarly iterative view of the nature of the soul.

It's a bit hard to tell, as he's intentionally coy about exactly what he means.

But as he gets deeper and deeper into his talk about animals and their souls - a line of thinking that was stirred by the gentle question of one of his children - his fierce Scots temper turns in anger against science.

Now, I love science and appreciate its insights, so the sudden wave of invective against it from a spiritual teacher came as a bit of a surprise.   MacDonald didn't appear to have the benefit of an editor for much of his writing, so a full page or more of "science is monstrous" pours out of MacDonald before he explains why he's so cheesed off.

When the reason came to light, though, it makes sense.  MacDonald had clearly been in conversation with late 19th century biologists, and was aware of some of the scientific practices of that era.  He was particularly horrified at the practice of vivisection and the way animals were used in experimentation.

From his mystical inclination, all living beings had value.  Where the pursuit of knowledge objectified beings capable of suffering, and inflicted suffering for the sole purpose of expanding knowledge, MacDonald saw a horror.

That has always been the challenge for science.  Our efforts to develop an ever deepening understanding of creation are fascinating, but they have always been fraught with danger.  If we perceive existence as ultimately reducible to mechanics and process, life itself becomes less and less significant.  The first to fall are the simpler beings around us, the trees and the fish and the cattle.  But eventually, even sentient and self-aware life becomes meaningless, little more than the mechanism by which complex proteins replicate themselves.

MacDonald heard the arguments of scientists, that knowledge itself was the primary value, and rejected it.  If an action violates the integrity of another being, and radically devalues that living being, then the end goal of understanding is itself broken.  Without a deep sense of compassion for living things driving the process of seeking, one cannot seek the greater good.

Without compassion as a fundamental guide, science does not really deepen understanding.  It simply deepens our ability to project power.   And that isn't a good thing, either for the world around us or for the creatures who share it.

English, Dragonish, and the Problem with Fundamentalism

Yesterday, as I bumbled my way through a reasonably productive Monday, I encountered two things that got me thinking about faith and language.   The first of those two things was the video below, which was pitched out onto Facebook by the former head of the religious school at my family's synagogue.   It's a pleasant little bit of history, the history of the English language, presented by the inimitable Open University.   The Open University, in the event you haven't heard of it, is a British institution, one that allows easy access to quality, college-level coursework to anyone who has the desire to partake of it.   Back then I lived there in the late 70s, much British daytime programming during the day on one of the three television channels was dedicated to Open University lectures and course preparation.   Those wacky socialists and their educations!  Anyhoo, here it is, ready to sop up 10 minutes of your life.  It's a bit naughty in that wry British way, so thou art forewarned:



After this little excursus into the organic evolution of the English language, I took a break from FB and blogging, did a few chores, and then settled in for a bit of day-off gaming.  I'm playing my way through Skyrim on the PS3, and it's a remarkably entertaining, deep, and well-constructed game.  One of the elements that Bethesda Softworks has really nailed in both this game and others is a well-crafted soundtrack.  It's a contextual soundtrack, meaning the music shifts and varies depending on location, time of day, and whether or not you're blowing up zombies with balls of magical fire.

As I settled in with my controller yesterday, though, something caught my attention.  At the beginning of the game, during the initial load screen, there's a song.  It's a big bellowy hoo-hah song, all pomp and bombast, the sort of music that stirs the small Viking fragment of my genetic heritage.   In the midst of drums and blaring brass, a big male voice choir grunts and vocalizes, and then starts yarping gibberish in an MMA-meets-Glee testosterama.

When the yarping began, I realized, suddenly, that they weren't singing nonsense words at all.  For the purposes of verisimilitude, the game has a language that was made for it, a language spoken by dragons.  The words in that tongue are spoken throughout the game, and in a moment of geekish epiphany, I recognized dovakiin, the Dragonish word for "dragon-born."  And then the word Anduin, the name of the great dragon who brings about the end of time.  It was a bit like that time I first attended a synagogue service after learning Hebrew.  Only geekier.

I went online, and found the...cough...English "translation," which goes like this:



So here's a language, or the framework of one, that exists solely in-game.   I'm not sure there's enough there there for the American Bible Society to attempt a translation into Dragonish, but I figure if you can translate the Bible into Klingon, anything is fair game.

Twice in one day, then, there came the reminder of the ephemeral character of human language.  It's one of the reasons I find fundamentalist literalism so completely bizarre.

Sure, the nature of God is unchanging, and the nature of the Being that God speaks is boundlessly, deeply real.  But words?   As much as I love 'em, words in human tongues aren't the thing itself.  They can evoke.  They can suggest.  They can point to, and lead to, the Holy.  But they are not the Real that rises from our Maker.

Perhaps that's why we find it so easy to fight over them.   As MacDonald puts it:

God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words; and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency in His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of the truth, but because He would not have them oppressed by words...even He must depend for being understood upon the spirit of His disciple.

Viva la Neoreformacion!

Worshipping the White Witch

As summer arrives, my first bit of reading for the season is some unfinished business from the winter.   I am, at long last, making my way through the rest of George MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons.  MacDonald, the Scots Mystic who was C.S. Lewises spiritual teacher, isn't exactly the most entertaining preacher.   His sermons bear no resemblance to the form demanded by the consumers of AmeriChrist, Inc. inspirational products.

There are no canned jokes to warm up the inadequately caffeinated crowd.  There are no stories drawn straight from 1001 Garfield Sermon Illustrations.  There are no nice neat bullet points that tell you how to apply the Three Lessons Learned to Your Life Now.  It's just smart, hard, bare-knuckled and uncompromising theology, applied directly to the forehead with all the merciless intensity of a Scots intellectual.   And if preached, they'd run for at least an hour.

I love 'em.  MacDonald burns bright like fire, and he gets God in a way that goes well beyond abstract knowledge.

Here's da ting.  The last of MacDonald's Sermons I've been reading is entitled "The Truth In Jesus," and after over 100 years, it remains as fiercely heretical today as it would have been then.  MacDonald, as a mystic, had no patience whatsoever for the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  By this, I mean the theological framework in which Jesus has to die because God's wrath against sinful humanity must be appeased.  A blood sacrifice is demanded, and so Jesus is killed, thus releasing those who believe in him from the heck-fire that we so richly deserve.

This is pretty roots-rock stuff for many evangelicals, but MacD viewed it as monstrous and essentially pagan.  He sees it as a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ's person and teachings,  the central teachings of the apostles, and the nature of God.  For MacDonald, God is ferocious, consuming fire Love, and there's no way to reconcile God's essential nature with this theology.  And Lord ha' mercy, he's gonna be tellin' ya 'bout it.

As I read through his intense polemic, I've been wondering about the relationship between this clear and strongly held position and the place where I first learned about substitutionary atonement.

That place was, of course, Narnia.   I first read Lewises' Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by myself back when I was five.  Hey, it was 1970s Kenya, and in the absence of endless screen inputs, five year olds have time to learn to read.  From the fire and magic that is the gift of children, my memories of that reading are not of reading about Narnia, but of being in Narnia, like you remember a particularly vivid childhood dream.

I remember the Stone Table, and the hill, and the dark path leading there.  I remember watching with Lucy and Susan from a cleft as noble Aslan was led to an innocent death at the hands of Jadis and her howling mob of monsters.     That story laid the groundwork for my own theology, and my understanding of what Jesus means.  It's meant to do that.

So I got myself to wondering:  C.S. Lewis acknowledges George MacDonald as his spiritual teacher, and MacDonald radiantly, relentlessly, and repeatedly rejects the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  If that is so, is there any connection between what C.S. Lewis teaches us as children and what MacDonald taught him?

The connection, I think, comes in who insists upon the sacrifice, on blood shed as punishment for sin.  

It is not Aslan.  It is not his ever unseen father, the Emperor over the Sea.

It's Jadis, the Last Empress of Charn, the White Witch, the emblem of worldly power and control and the form of "justice" that is written in fear and the horrible balance of suffering.

No wonder I have so much trouble with that way of understanding God.

Faith and Self Love

In a post over at thehardestquestion, Carol Howard Merritt recently pitched out a really solid reflection on 1 Corinthians 3:1-9.   The essence of her reflection revolves around the contrast between Spirit and Flesh that the Apostle Paul glances off of in this section, but develops more fully elsewhere.  She then uses that to reflect on the toxic approach our culture takes towards the flesh, particularly the flesh of women who look at themselves and find that they are not the airbrushed perfection they're told they're supposed to be.   It's open, honest and thought provoking, as her writing tends to be.

In response to a comment I left, Carol said:


"How do you understand/explain the nuances between loving oneself and self-seeking?"

This had the unfortunate effect of sending me off into a conceptual cascade that was waaay to long for a comment, which I'm going to subject you to here.   Just warnin' ya.  There's still time to escape.

Honestly, when I went a-parsing down that road, I found myself mightily struggling with the idea of "loving myself."

Love, as I understand it both conceptually and from the ground of my faith, is relational.  It's something that exists between selves.  In it's highest form, it bridges the chasm of existential separation that divides us, as in it we share in the joys and sorrows of the beloved.  Not to mention it being both the Most Excellent Way and the essential nature of God.

But when I look to the heart of Christian faith, to the Great Commandment, self-love is hard to find.  Love of God?  Check.  Love of Neighbor.  Check.  But of self?  Hmmm.  It's the measure of how you love your neighbor...but...um...there's not much else there.

Meaningfully saying "I love myself" requires a fragmentation of being, a separation of self from self.  You can only love yourself if you are not at one with yourself.  This is the odd actuality of our existence as sentient and self-aware creatures.  In self-awareness, the self reflects on itself, and is aware of itself as a being relative to other beings.  There is, in self-awareness, the capacity to look at who you are and be either pleased or horrified.   It's an essential characteristic of being human.

I'd insert a Sarah Palin joke here, but my self awareness tells me that wouldn't be gracious.

Oh.  Oops.

But unlike loving others unconditionally, loving yourself unconditionally often results in sociopathic unpleasantness.   That's Narcissus in a nutshell, forever poring over his beauty and the wonder that is him, trapped in a recursive feedback loop of self-regard.  It's true for self-hate, too.  Dark Narcissus can sit by that bleak pool, forever lamenting his thin lipped pimply visage and his stammering incompetence at all things.   That form of self-seeking-self-love is a closed circle prison, harming not just an individual but also those around them.

For self-love to be transforming and liberating, it needs to be both rational and ecstatic.   The rational part springs from our self-awareness as a thinking being.  Presbyterians do this great.  Ecstasy, though, comes harder for us.  The term "ecstasy" means essentially to "stand outside" of oneself.   Love does this.  And the love of God that is the first element of the great commandment does this best.  Pouring all your heart and all your mind and all your soul into the Love from which we all spring is the highest form of human ecstasy.

This love, as I see it, is also a form of love of self.  That's not to say that we are God.  Not at all.  Do I look like Feuerbach?   Yeah, ok, maybe a little, but I don't think like him theologically.

Rather, this comes from the rather theologically basic statement that God knows us completely, and that God knows what we would be were we fully conformed to God's grace.  It is that self that is worthy of love.  That's not a love of the self you know.  Not the love of the self whose value is defined by your sociocultural context.  But a love of the self God sees, a self transformed as you empty yourself into God, and the love of God fills you and transforms you and heals and completes you.  George MacDonald, C.S. Lewises master, described this as your "True Name," your identity as you would be were you perfected.  As, in the knowledge of my Creator, I already am. 

That is the self that I am not.  And as I love God, that is the self that I love, unconditionally. 

That, as I still struggle my way through it, is the difference.

Leashes and Magical Thinking

This week, my efforts to come up with an interpretive/metaphoric frame for my sermon kept frustrating me. It wasn't that my Tuesday morning scripture reading and meditations didn't yield anything. It's just that I didn't like the result. The operating metaphor that kept surfacing in my head to articulate the role of the Holy Spirit was...a leash.

A leash? Me no like! Controlling! Authoritarian! Annoying! But no matter what I did, I couldn't come up with anything else. It bugged me, nattered at me. I read, reviewed commentaries, and still...nothing but leash.

Gah.

During my morning meditation on Thursday, I thought to myself, you know, my daily readings in "The Diary of an Old Soul" (Mystic George MacDonald's book of spiritual poetry and conflict) have often proven oddly reflective of what a day is like. So, like a shaman reading entrails or casting the Ummim and Thummim, I flipped forward to the poem intended for today, Sunday the 23rd of May, to see if there was any language in the spiritual poem of the day that might..err...lead me away from the language of the leash. This is what I read:

Ever above my coldness and my doubt
Rises up something, reaching forth a hand;
This thing I know, but cannot understand.
Is it the God in me that rises out
Beyond my self, trailing it up with him,
Towards the spirit-home, the freedom-land,
Beyond my conscious ken, my near horizon's brim.

Sigh. So leash it was.

Middle Earth Meditations

I have, for the last month or so, been engaging in a slightly different pattern of morning devotion. First thing upon waking, I do what I typically do, which is stir my sleep-addled mind to wakefulness with the Lord's Prayer. Well, sometimes it's the second or third thing, but I make a point of getting to it before I get to my coffee, which is saying something. It's a balanced part of my spiritual breakfast...and, honestly, the linchpin of my prayer life. Yeah, sometimes I prattle on like the Gentiles do, pouring my monkey-chatter worries into the glory of the numinous. But mostly, I just pray the one way the Master actually bothered teaching.

The second thing I do is read a poem. I'm following a year-long discipline of reading through George MacDonald's "Diary of an Old Soul," which is 366 connected poems that lead one on a meandering journey through the faith. I've found they resonate in strange ways with my life, with the world around me, and with the particular struggles I'm having personally and spiritually. It's been a fruitful addition. I'll read today, mull over it, and then peek at the next day..you know..just because I'm nosy.

Tomorrow's poem struck me as interesting for a range of reasons. Here it is:

Fair freshness of the God-breathed spirit air,

Pass through my soul, and make it strong to love;

Wither with gracious cold what demons dare

Shoot from my hell into my world above;

Let them drop down, like leaves the sun doth sear,

And flutter far into the inane and bare,

Leaving my middle-earth calm, wise, and clear.

Though this poem works on a range of levels for me in my own spiritual walk, I was struck by that last line. MacDonald is a stated influence over the lives of many writers, most significantly C.S. Lewis. But he was also formative for Lewises close friend and drinkin'/smokin' buddy, J.R.R. Tolkien.

It may just be a random happenstance. It might just be a random turn of phrase. But hearing the words "middle-earth" from a known late 19th century influence over Tolkien just doesn't feel random.

I love those serendipitous connections between things, seeing the places where words and ideas have their root. It's like encountering a forgotten picture of your home 50 years ago, when that tree was just a sapling. Or being filled with a memory of a tiny boy child, who now stands nearly as tall as a man.

Staring Into The Fire

One of the more paradoxical things that one encounters in the reading of mystics like George MacDonald is the juxtaposition of their earthy, grace-filled and open-minded faith with a rather ferocious and intimidating view of the mysterium tremens of the Creator. Though mystics glory and delight in the created order, the One from whom all things spring isn't presented in terms of butterflies and bunnies and huggy bear Jesus, all viewed through a warm fuzzy filter of wuv, sweet wuv.

God, as MacDonald says again and again, is a consuming fire:

He is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God.

In this, MacDonald resonates with Merton and all those who have perceived the nature of God's love, including those few, brief flickers of presence that have formed my own faith. As I meditated on this yesterday, I found myself musing over how the Fire articulated by MacDonald relates to the teaching of the Dark Philosopher Heraclitus.

Heraclitus is the dude who came up with the idea that everything is change. "You can't step in the same river twice?" Heraclitus said that twenty-three hundred years before Disney Pocahontas sang it. He argued that nothing is constant, that everything is dynamic and ever changing, and that it is impossible to make any meaningful statements about being, other than that it changes. He's the father of postmodernity.

In his philosopical poetics, Heraclitus declared that underlying all being was an all consuming, all devouring fire, which he called the logos. Yeah, that logos, the same Greek term that English versions of John's Gospel translate as "Word."

I puzzled over this juxtaposition. There is nothing in mysticism that points to God as the engine of impermanence and meaninglessness. Nothing at all. Quite the opposite. Yet the imagery is so similar...so close...and the influence of Heraclitus on Western Philosophy so huge...that it felt like a non-random connection.

Perhaps it's a question of perspective.

We are creatures of change. As we view and perceive ourselves, we are ever changing. The organic processes of our bodies. The fleeting impermanent moment in which the light of self dwells. We are not the same being from one instant to the next...and yet, paradox of paradoxes, we are, and we cohere.

In our encounter with the One who formed us and in whose love we dwell, we are entering into relationship with that which does not change. As beings who are ever changing, we look at our Maker, and see that glory from the perspective of our own changing. Observing that endless, timeless presence in which lies all potentiality, we see terrible fire and change because we are changing. The Word is not flux and change. We are.

Perhaps, perhaps, we encounter God as we might view the tarmac beneath us as we book along on our motorcycle at 200 klicks per hour. "Wow, the road is moving fast," we might think. But it is not the road that's moving.

Though we perceive God as fire, that may just be...relative.

Mystic Bling

Another of the ways that mysticism tends to get spun in our consumption-addled culture is as a means to the acquisition of more stuff.

Why should the mystic walk barefoot up the mountain, when they could instead float...on the buttery smooth suspension of their eco-friendly Lexus RX450h, their holy tushie coddled warm against the heated leather seats, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan serenades them through the astounding 330 watt Mark Levinson 15 speaker 7.1 surround sound system? Ah...such inner peace....

When you're connected to the universe in profound and mysterious ways, why shouldn't those connections result in the universe serving up some schweet, schweet schwag? After all, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And if you know the Creator of the Universe on an existential level, then why shouldn't you leverage your connectness, making Oneness with Being serve up some Oneness with Bling?

This approach to "mystic" faith can be found everywhere. It seems to have almost completely hijacked Kabbalah in the popular imagination, as folks traipse about imagining that the little red threads they wear somehow connect them with a future McMansion, or at a bare minimum will allow them to download Madonna's music for free.

This is, to use a delightfully archaic word, balderdash.

Though mysticism is earthy and practical and woven into the fabric of being, possessiveness is utterly alien to any true mystic. The desire to acquire is meaningless to those who yearn most deeply for God. As George MacD puts it:

The man who for consciousness of well-being depends on anything but life, the life essential, is a slave...

and:

But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.

and, here sounding remarkably like a Scottish mystic Yoda:

If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or things you have not?

The mystic renounces desire for power in all of its forms, be it economic or coercive. They simply cease to seem meaningful. The unsatisfied, ever-empty hunger of the consumer is unknown and unwanted. That doesn't mean living a joyless, stale, or austere life. It simply means a different way of standing in relation to creation, one that is far richer and more abundant. As MacDonald puts it:

He who has God, has all things, after the fashion in which He who made them has them.

Next to the touch of a breeze, or the smell of the honeysuckle, or the laughter of your children, or the bright moon on a clear Spring evening, the cloying cornucopia of consumerism seems a rather empty nothing.

Mysticism and the Word

One of the ways mystics tend to get themselves into trouble is in their tendency to be... well... oblivious to the siren song of doctrinal purity and textual inerrancy. If your faith is grounded in the experiential and in deep contemplation, texts seem rather less satisfying.

It's a bit like having someone describe to you what it's like to spend a long evening eating steak fondue at the end of a beautiful summer day overlooking Lake Geneva. Hearing it is wonderful. But the hearing is not the thing itself. Neither are those symbols anything other than an imperfect vessel for conveying the heat of the oil, or the tenderness of the meat, or the cool breezes that played across the restaurant patio, or the way Mont Blanc stayed bright before the dimming sky.

It was really, really good, recalls now-vegetarian I, as the memory evokes a Pavlovian response.

That's one of the reasons that mystics are utterly unphased by the application of historical-critical method to the texts of our faith. As I continue my encounter with Scots mystic George MacDonald, I find he carries that same approach to texts. On the one hand, he respects them and is caught up in the story they tell. On the other, he acknowledges their limitations. They are limited in terms of technical accuracy in conveying an event. They also have within themselves the potential for spiritual danger, as he articulates here:

God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words; and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency of His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of the truth, but because He would not have them oppressed by words, seeing that words, being human, therefore but partially capable, could not absolutely contain or express what the Lord meant, and that even He must depend on being understood upon the spirit of His disciple. Seeing that it could not give life, the letter should not be throned with power to kill.

Human language is a marvelous thing. But the patterns of vibration produced by our vocal cords, the marks of ink on a page, and the patterns of pixels on your screen are intended to point beyond themselves. They are words, not Word. When we worship them and the patterns they form, and not the thing to which they attest, then we have wandered off the Way.

The Practical Mystic

Mysticism is typically construed as being the faith of the esoteric, a faith full of odd chants and visions, of obscure dreams and convoluted ritual. Mystics are the folks who sit upon mountaintops wearing loincloths, muttering mantras in an ancient language as they delve into the stern and secret truths of the universe.

As I read through the writings of George MacDonald, I'm reminded again of how totally inaccurate that perception of mysticism is. Mystics are earthy folk. Thomas Merton certainly was, as was the delightful Jallaladin Rumi. For all of his passion and all of the depth of his engagement with Spirit, Christ, and Creator, MacDonald's deep sense of the reality of his faith does not pull him from connection with being.

Instead, it grounds and centers him, in both creation and in the practical needs of day to day existence. Take, for instance, the way he counsels those who are feeling distant from God:

"Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise. God love thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last...for the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go to do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feeling: Do thy work."

As someone who has experienced many times that dark night of the soul, MacDonald has the way out quite exactly right. Don't anguish. Don't navel-gaze. Don't force it. Just do what must be done. It's an approach to faith that speaks to the here and now, to action in the meatspace reality of our being.

His delight in things as they are extended to his view of miracles. He doesn't reject them, mind you. He just sees such glory in the created order as to view all being as miraculous:

In all His miracles Jesus did only in minature what His Father does ever in the great. Poor, indeed, was the making of the wine in the...pots of stone, compared with its making in the lovely growth of the vine with its clusters of swelling grapes--the live roots gathering from the earth the water that had to be borne in pitchers and poured into the great vases..."

That fundamental wonder at all being is something that mystics of all religious persuasions seem to share. It is, once again, a pleasure to find a brother who shares my joy in experiencing the First Book.

George MacDonald

As I fumble my way through the endless supply of stuff I Really Should Read, I've finally gotten around to George MacDonald.

MacDonald is a mystic Scot from the 19th century, one who was driven from the one church he ever served for his heretically open-minded views. He lived the life of a pauper and remains somewhat obscure.

His influences, though, are deep. Lewis Carroll might not have published Alice in Wonderland were it not for MacDonald. J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledged some of MacDonald's work as being formative. But it was C.S. Lewis who was most intensely changed by his intersection with MacDonald's writing and theology, to the point of declaring MacDonald to be his spiritual teacher. Given the influence Lewis had...and still has...over my own faith, it was high time for me to check out MacDonald's writings.

MacDonald was mostly a novelist, who spun tales of magic and mystery that were suffused with his faith. I'm intending to get to those later. No, really. I will. Phantastes and Lilith are going to work their way through my consciousness in the very near future.

Two of his books now grace my nightstand. One is a collection of devotional poems entitled "Diary of an Old Soul," intended to be read daily over a year. The second is C.S. Lewises own anthology of MacDonald's key teachings, the ones the were most formative to his thought.

I'm looking forward to it. A bit of reading is good for the soul, particularly if it's the right reading.