Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

New Release: Philemon of Gaza Meditates Luke's Gospel

New Release: Philemon of Gaza Meditates Luke's Gospel 

"Turning the the other cheek is not enough: Luke 6:27-38"

The People's Seminary is delighted to announce the publication of the first English translation of 6th Century Philemon of Gaza's mediation on Luke's Gospel. Check out his inspiring reflection on Luke 6:27-38 below.

“To whoever slaps you on one cheek offer him the other.”

When we have received a slap, the first reaction that comes to us is most often to respond, slap for slap, we might say. The action of anger is rapid, so rapid in fact that it is, so to speak, instinctive. Also, what the Lord commands us regarding the slap becomes very difficult because we are to turn the other cheek before even responding to our aggressor. 

There are commandments that we can obey after careful consideration, but this is not the case with this one. We are to turn our cheek spontaneously, without even taking time to think. We barely have time to pray before turning the other cheek, and if we pray, then our prayer must be very brief, spontaneous, instinctive and precede any reflection.

Such rapid and instinctive obedience is not possible without long prior work on our part, without long practice of prayer, without long practice of obedience to the Lord, without such practice that our obedience has become our new nature. Then we can turn the other cheek without anger, without responding slap for slap. Anger is a fire that lights up very quickly; it is like a beast with rapid reflexes. Not responding to a slap requires having tamed anger and being its master. What is then necessary for us is self-control; it is also to have replaced anger with gentleness.

O my soul, you know that meekness and self-control are fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:23). The long preliminary work that we must do in order not to retaliate against a slap is therefore only possible with the help of the Lord and the precious gift of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. You also know that this help is granted to us in response to a long practice of prayer and unfailing obedience to the commandments of the Lord; thus, our obedience to the command on slapping will be spontaneous. 

Only the humble know how to obey in this way, those whose humility has been granted by the Lord along with meekness and self-control. I now understand the apophthegm where we are told that a hermit turned the other cheek and thus chased away an evil spirit, he lived so much in this perfect humility received from the Lord. 

However, after turning the other cheek, we may still not at peace, nor in love towards our aggressor, nor ready to forgive him. Why is that? 

Turning your cheek is not enough! O my soul, I give thanks for the enlightenment given by the Lord to Abba Joseph who explains to us that this absence of peace comes from the fact that our pride has also been slapped. Indeed, not only has our cheek received a slap, but our pride has received one too. So if the fire of our anger was extinguished when we turned our cheek, another fire remains in us, the fire of resentment, a fire maintained by our pride which refuses to forgive and love our aggressor. While anger reacts and retaliates quickly, without even thinking, resentment takes time to reflect and nurture revenge before responding to the aggression. 

This is why, Abba Joseph tells us, we must truly obey the Lord and turn the other cheek, not the left cheek when the right has been struck, but the other right cheek, the inner cheek of our pride. 

This in truth is the deep meaning of the commandment given to us by the Lord. How marvelous! The long work that it is good for us before being attacked is the work of humility which alone chases away pride and resentment and then allows us to forgive our aggressor and to truly love. This humility that is victorious over pride is that which only the Lord can give us, the divine humility which he grants to those who have already walked a long way down the path of human humility. It is this humility received from the Lord which allows us to obey spontaneously, this famous humility which allowed Mark, the disciple of Abba Silvanus, to interrupt the writing of his omega. It is the very humility of Jesus who was slapped several times without ever responding with a slap (Mt 26:7; Mk 14:65; Jn 18:22; 19:3). 

We are never told that he turned the other cheek, because in truth, it was the invisible inner cheek that he turned; this reaction escaped the eyes of men, but not the eyes of the Evil One who was immediately repelled and chased away. The Lord, meek and humble of heart (Mt 11:29), is the only one who can enable us to respond with meekness and humility to an aggressor. He only grants this gift to those who open themselves to it through long interior work in synergy with him. Then we are given to turn our inner cheek with true love to our enemy.

Order your copy of Philemon of Gaza Meditates Luke's Gospel here.

Philemon of Gaza Meditates Mark's Gospel, is now available as an Audiobook here, as is Daniel Bourguet's The Humble Divinity of Jesus in Mark's Gospel, Volume 1 and Volume 2 paperback, e-book and Audiobook versions.

Preface to Jordan Wood's "The Whole Mystery of Christ"

The Whole Mystery of Christ:
Creation as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor 
by Jordan Daniel Wood
Foreword by Fr. John Behr

A thoroughgoing examination of Maximus the Confessor's singular theological vision through the prism of Christ's cosmic and historical Incarnation.

Notre Dame Press has graciously granted Clarion permission to post Dr. Wood's PREFACE to the book here.  

Readers can also CLICK HERE to visit this 15-minute video introduction where Jordan Daniel Wood lays out the essence and purpose of The Whole Mystery of Christ.

Link to purchase the book

 

PREFACE

Perhaps the last serious Western reader of Maximus Confessor (580–662 AD), prior to the twentieth century at least, was the Irish monk, prodigious translator of significant Greek fathers (Maximus among them), and court theologian John Scotus Eriugena (815–77 AD). Eriugena attributes many insights to Maximus. He credits Maximus with special insight into the riddle of the world’s procession from God. And so he writes in the preface to his versio Latina of Maximus’s Ambigua ad Iohannem:

To mention a few of many points, [Maximus most lucidly explains] in what way the Cause of all things, who is God, is both a simple and manifold One: what sort of procession there is—and here I mean the multiplication of divine Goodness through all the things which are— which descends from the summit all the way down, first through the general essence of all things, then through the most general genera, then through less general genera, still further through more specific species right into the most specific species, even into differentia and properties. And again, concerning the same divinity, we see what sort of reversion of Goodness there is—I mean the gathering together, through those same grades, from the things that exist in infinite diversity and multiplicity right up to that simplest unity of all things, which is in God and which God is. So [we see] that God is all things and all things are God. And [we understand] indeed in what way this divine procession into all things is called ἀναλυτικὴ, that is, unraveling, but reversion [is called] θέωσις—deification.¹

Maximus taught Eriugena how the light of God’s ineffable transcendence most glitters when we see that and how God and the created world are “one and the same.”² And to see this you need the crucial lens Maximus cuts: the “primordial reasons” of all things not only find their eternal ground in the Word of God, they “are the very [Word] Himself.”³ God and world are identical because the one Word is both.

Before Tolkien 4: Tolkien, Wager & SIEGFRIED - Ron Dart

Video 1 - THE RINGS OF TOLKIEN & WAGNER - Similarities & Differences

Ron Dart discusses the common themes shared by Richard Wagner's Opera, "The Ring of Nibelung" and J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." Ron notes the allure and perils of the ring, the two dragons, and how both Brunehilde and Arwyn set love as a greater good than even their own immortality. Dart then discusses differences, particularly in how Tolkien's series ends with a comedic or happy outcome while Wagner after the climax explores the tragic in the Nordic tradition of Ragnorok.

Video 2 - WAGNER'S SIEGFRIED

Ron then considers "Siegfried," the third part (or Act 2) of the four music dramas that constitute Wagner's "Ring of Nibelungen."

Previous Videos in this Series:

Before Tolkien 1 - Richard Wagner's THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG: Then and Now

Before Tolkien 2 - Richard Wagner's RHINE GOLD

Before Tolkien 3: Wagner's VALKYRIE

Before Tolkien 3: Wagner's VALKYRIE - Ron Dart

Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" is a cycle of four operas that tell the story of the hero Siegfried and a magic ring. In this third session on Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung, Ron Dart completes his talk on "The Rhinegold" (the preliminary scenes of the Opera cycle), then walks us through Act I: The Valkyrie.

The previous sessions can be viewed here:

Before Tolkien 1 - Richard Wagner's THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG: Then and Now

Before Tolkien 2 - Richard Wagner's RHINE GOLD  

Before Tolkien 2: Richard Wagner's RHINE GOLD - Ron Dart

Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" is a cycle of four operas that tell the story of the hero Siegfried and a magic ring.

These four operas are The Rhine Gold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods. Borrowing from German and Norse tales, poems, sagas, and mythology, Wagner's main source was a German poem called "The Song of the Nibelungs" (circa 1200 AD).

Wagner's opera is certainly a precursor and had an influence on Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." In this series, Ron Dart walks through the archetypal significance of the opera's themes and characters, beginning here with the first two scenes of the first opera, "The Rhine Gold."

Previously, Ron's offered this brief reflection to the whole work:

 

Foreword to Alvin Kimel's "DESTINED FOR JOY" - by Bradley Jersak

AIDEN KIMEL, DESTINED FOR JOY

Foreword by Bradley Jersak, Ph.D.

With great joy, I have for a decade followed Fr. Aiden Kimel as he forged a path of inquiry that unveiled answers, advanced an exploration that yielded discovery, and posited a hope that became deep conviction—for me and in many others. His biblical, historical, and philosophical posts have completely convinced me that the apokatastasis panton (the restoration of all things) is not merely a doctrinally tolerable idea—it is, as Kimel says, “the gospel of Christ’s absolute and unconditional love sung in an eschatological key.”

As he has faithfully posted his treasury of findings, I have come to believe without reserve in Christ’s bold claim that through his Passion he will indeed draw all of humanity and the entire cosmos to himself. For that reason, I now see apokatastasis as intrinsic and indispensable to proclaiming the ancient gospel in this fraught and faltering century.

In Destined for Joy, Kimel has gathered a “best of” collection of his insights that, together, paint a vista I cannot unsee, and wouldn’t ever want to!          

Even for those who follow Fr. Aiden’s posts regularly, Destined for Joy is well worth reviewing and having on hand as a definitive resource. The book faithfully and creatively reflects the faith of those great saints of the past (Origen, Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, Maximos the Confessor, Silouan the Athonite, and yes, George MacDonald) and the boldest minds of our era (Sergius Bulgakov, Robert W. Jenson, Thomas Talbott, Ilaria Ramelli, David Bentley Hart, John Behr). It also offers essential and sometimes startling corrections, revealing, for example, how the fifth-century anathemas against Origenism—long thought to have decisively condemned universal salvation—were never conciliar or even synodal. Kimel demonstrates that they amount to nothing but an imperial edict that has no doctrinal authority. He has at last firmly closed the door on centuries of misconception, divorced the anathemas from the Fifth Ecumenical Council, and removed them from the Infernalist arsenal. 

But by far, his most powerful contribution to me personally (by accumulated 'convincement') was guiding me to this very simple question: Does the New Testament foresee the salvation of all or doesn't it? Clearly, it does. Repeatedly. Unequivocally. And all the “But what about . . . ?” counterpoints fail to address these Scriptures directly. Regardless of the difficulties we have interpreting judgment texts or harmonizing them with ultimate redemption, Christ and his apostles tell us how it all ends: "God will be all and in all.” But nothing. Full stop. Amen and hallelujah!

The issue of 'the End' now boils down to these questions for me:

a. Do the Scriptures require a free and willing faith response to Jesus Christ? Yes! Many times.

b. Do the Scriptures forecast a final judgment? Yes! Many times.

c. Do the Scriptures foresee the salvation of all? Yes! Dozens of times.  

How can all three of these statements be true without marginalizing any of the pertinent biblical texts? They can only all work if: 

a. Death has been defeated so that a free and willing post-mortem response is possible.
It has been. 

b. The judgments of God are restorative and penultimate rather than retributive and ultimate.
They are.  

 c. The human will is healed and freed from its delusions so we can freely respond to perfect Love when we see Christ face to face. I call this a 'freed will' response. 
It will be.

While we can pile Scripture upon Scripture to verify these truths, I repeat, we have Jesus Christ's overt claim in John's Gospel: "If I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself." 

And we have the End described in expressly inclusive ways . . . every eye shall see him, every knee shall bow, every tongue will confess, God shall be all and in all. What others regard as exclusive conditions to this outcome, apokatastasis enfolds as the necessary means. The Incarnation, the Cross and Resurrection, faith in Christ, restorative judgment according to the first Christians—these are the means by which the foretold glorious, all-inclusive End will surely come about.

I can make these audacious assertions without presumption because whatever warrant our faith needs to embrace them, Destined for Joy offers in abundance. Over to you, Fr. Aiden. 

CLICK HERE TO ORDER AIDEN KIMEL, DESTINED FOR JOY

Review of Monika B. Hilder's "Letters to Annie: A Grandmother’s Dreams..." by Ron Dart

Monika B. Hilder, Letters to Annie: A Grandmother’s Dreams of Fairy Tale Princesses, Princes, & Happily Ever After (FriesenPress, 2022).

Review by Ron Dart

“And I must say, girl, I can’t think of a more exciting field of study than the one of theology, imagination, and the arts”—and so ends Monika Hilder’s beauty of a book, Letters to Annie, 33 letters written by Omi Barbara from the time Annie was born to her 25^th birthday, Omi being eighty-eight when the final missive was penned.

There is a wise and generous, gracious and kindly way that Monika weaves together the perennial wisdom of multiple fairy tales, the layered life lessons packed into such tales, and the careful knitting together of Biblical insights and fairy tales in this must-read of a book.

I was reminded, as I sat with each letter, in a different way of more than Erasmus’ 4000 adages (with commentary and annotations) and Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes by Louis Markos. Both Markos and Hilder draw deeply from the grace-filled wisdom of myth and fairy tales, and both are substantively grounded in the mother lode of the Inklings (mentors and friends), MacDonald, Lewis, Sayers, Tolkien, Chesterton, and L’Engle, given their needful nods and due. We are also, given their significance in the fairy tale genre, walking side by side with Grimm, Andersen, Wilde, and Perrault, and the timeless beauty of Shakespeare and Milton offering us their epic vision in tales told.

There is an underlying theme and thesis in Letters to Annie that needs to be pondered and unpacked in a needful way. We dwell in an ethos of much cynicism and deconstruction—such a path walked too far can and does lead to soul and life paralysis and impotence. Most cynics are not cynical of cynicism just as most deconstructionists lack the courage to deconstruct deconstructionism. The epic vision of life that myths, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Milton, the Inklings, and the Bible offer has been marginalized and is held with a great deal of suspicion in our ethos. When we turn from the large macro-vision of the human journey, we often shrink to micro-tales in the culture wars just as when the secular negates the sacred, the secular becomes the sacred—therefore the human soul, mind, and imagination, shrinks and goes round and round in the smallest circle turns, as Rilke rightly noted when such moves are made. Letters to Annie comes as a challenge to such an approach to thought, word, and deed, and does so as a thoughtful grandmother kindly and sensitively shepherds her ever-growing granddaughter throughout her first 25 years of life, a dream vision of enchantment via fairy tales: the sacred and magic key.

There is in fairy tales, as in myths, the notion that the journey is fraught with challenges and perils, “Agon” is the Greek word from which we get agony, protagonist, antagonist, or Milton’s Samson’s Agonistes. The future path of each protagonist and antagonist (princesses, princes, witches, ogres, dragons, etc.) in fairy tales and myths is about growing into the challenges (“agon”) of the journey and, for the most part, overcoming, and in the overcoming of the challenges becoming a fairer, finer, and more mature princess and prince, “happily ever after,” the oft contested ending when real life meets fairy tale. Monika, to her credit, visits, again and again, this “happily ever after” ending to many fairy tales, such approaches more comedic than tragic. There is much massaging of such an approach to the life-fairy tale tension as more nuance and refinement is pondered in Letters to Annie, no flinching from the hard questions of sadness, suffering, and the tragic on our all too human journey. Letters to Annie does cover many of the disappointments, betrayals, and confusions of the faith and life journey and the dangers such challenges pose to the aspiring (or not so aspiring) princesses and princes—many discerning insights can be gleaned, when read wisely and well, from fairy tales—Monika certainly asks of her readers much deeper and layered reads of such classic tales, tales sadly so domesticated and sanitized by the Disney industry.    

I worked with Amnesty International for about 15 years, and in those years I met many a noble princess and prince who for a variety of reasons faced into the unjust political context of their time and suffered terribly (some tortured to death, others years of solitary confinement, some freed from their cells but psychological damage for the rest of their years)—in short, decidedly no “happily ever after”. I’m married into a family of German Roman Catholics who opposed Hitler in the 1930s, many within the family were sent to death camps and exterminated, some slowly starving to death, others housed with those who had multiple illnesses and diseases—good people but goodness crucified with no resurrection in time or history.  Most of us have favourite novels—Doctor Zhivago is in my top ten. The finale to Zhivago is Zhivago’s tender poems, and a poem that is repeated is “Fairy Tale” about the perennial prince who is meant to slay the dragon and rescue the princess. “Fairy Tale” by Zhivago, though, has the dragon unseating the prince, the horse charging the dragon, both damaged beyond repair, prince and princess, future unclear and unsure, in an ambiguous place—certainly no “happily ever after”.  I have also watched many dear friends die slow, slower and sad deaths, years of physical suffering, drugged to prevent intense pain.

I agree with Monika that cynicism is a cul-de-sac, and it is essential when facing into the dire tragedies that war, poverty, political conflicts, and much else create that we seriously know how to tell fairy tales that discern how to live within the comedic-tragic tension, God the Shepherd and Father (to use but two classical Biblical metaphors) often silent, eclipsed or seemingly absent. And we can’t only explain the tragic by a flaw in the character of those who suffer as did Aristotle or many of Shakespeare’s tragic characters.

How do we, in short, infuse the tragic into the “exciting field” of theology, imagination, and the arts that includes the comedic and the tragic, that includes “happily ever after,” but prevents such a position from becoming a bromide that ignores the stubborn and obstinate nature of the tragic? Such is the future of fairy tales and myths.

Ron Dart               

David M. Odorisio (ed.), "Merton and Hinduism: The Yoga of the Heart" review by Ron Dart

David M. Odorisio (ed.),  Merton and Hinduism: The Yoga of the Heart, Fons Vitae, 2021.

Thomas Merton, like the proverbial fox, rambled across much terrain and in such roaming saw and revealed much in a variety of challenging areas. Merton was not the only Roman Catholic in the 20^th century to see and articulate the need for deeper interfaith contemplative dialogue, but he was certainly one of the most evocative, accessible and articulate in doing so. Fons Vitae, to their courageous and hard-won credit, deserve many a kudo for bringing together in a splendid collection of tomes, Merton’s fox-like landscape traversed. But, Merton was also very much like the hedgehog, deeper burrowing and much wisdom gleaned from such burrowing. The latest and final text on Merton and his contemplative interfaith dialogue, Merton and Hinduism: The Yoga of the Heart, edited by David M. Odorisio, is a beauty and bounty not to miss. 

The portal of Merton and Hinduism is opened by David Odorisio’s lengthy and incisive “Introduction,” the path and direction of the book made plain and clear for the curious and interested reader. Part I “Hinduism and Christianity in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives” threads together six superb essays that reflect on Merton, Hinduism, Yoga and Hesychasm (3 of the essays are on Hesychasm). Part I provides a general overview of the larger topic of Christianity and Hinduism, Merton more in the shadows and offstage. Part II, “Merton and Hinduism: Dialogue and Deep Learning in the Cave of the Heart” has thirteen essays that drill and bore into Merton’s varied engagement with forms of Hinduism from an variety of varied angles, including his friendship with different scholars and practitioners of Hinduism. Part III, “Merton on Hinduism: The Yoga of the Heart”, for the most part, includes many articles by Merton on Hinduism (10 to be sure). Part IV, “Appendix: Reading Thomas Merton Reading Hinduism and Yoga: A Bibliography of Sources” is a fit and fine ending for those keen to delve deeper and further into Merton’s burrowing and probes. There are six black-white photographs in Merton and Hinduism that add to the, mostly, textual book.

David M. Odorisio has walked the extra mile not only to synthesize material that many know about by Merton on Hinduism but he has also unearthed much that has not been written by Merton on Hinduism and articles about Merton on Hinduism—this makes Merton and Hinduism a motherlode and gold mine of sorts that will set new standards for further studies on Merton on Hinduism, Indian religion and the East.  Many of the essays in Merton and Hinduism have been published before but the bringing together of such articles into a polished and needful tome makes this a must read text for Merton keeners. I was fortunate, when younger, to correspond with Bede Griffiths and I was somewhat disappointed there was not an article that dealt with Merton and Griffiths in a fuller and more comprehensive way and manner, Griffiths a more mature and deeper thinker, in thought, word and deed than Merton on Hinduism. An article on Merton, Griffiths and Hinduism could have revealed much about both Merton’s fox like approach and, at times, his lack of hedgehog depth. There is, also, a fine photograph of Coomaraswamy and Tagore in Merton and Hinduism (p. 201) and although Dekar’s article on Merton and Gandhi covers much needed terrain, Merton, in many ways, had more affinities with Tagore than Gandhi. In short, an essay on Merton and Tagore just as an article on Merton and Griffiths would have enriched and fleshed out this timely and, in some ways, timeless volume on Merton’s explorations into the Indian and Hindu soul.   

I suppose a small yet insignificant quibble I have about this expansive book is the lack of an Index, and Index making it possible to navigate more nimbly topics, themes and people that interest the curious reader. But, this is but a fret and misstep in an otherwise superb book. 

There is no doubt that Fons Vitae and David M. Odorisio have excelled, yet once again, in articulating Merton’s fox like traversing of the terrain of Hinduism. As mentioned above, Merton did do his hedgehog like burrowing, but when Merton is compared with those like Griffiths, his leanings are decidedly more fox like than hedgehog. And yet, Merton and Hinduism: The Yoga of the Heart brilliantly illuminates the compelling reality that Merton also had distinctive hedgehog tendencies, ever burrowing in many needful and necessary places---truly an “A+” gift of a tome. This will be a standard source book for future studies on Merton and Hinduism.

Ron Dart  

Cole Arthur Riley's "THIS HERE FLESH" - Review by Felicia Murrell

In crafting This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley says she knew she wanted the book to end at liberation. And that she wanted to start at dignity, to ground people in this belief that this is a journey, something that feels most true about the black origin. “The origin story of the world,” Cole writes, “and the dark and stars that hold it is one of dignity. The divine is in us.”¹

Cole believes this journey of inherent worth is one we all deserve to take. And I believe This Here Flesh, Riley’s brilliantly poignant debut book, is a worthy guide.

Paraphrasing the author’s own words: In the trajectory between dignity and liberation, Cole Arthur Riley shares the immediacy and lasting effects of pain filtered through fear and expressed in lament and rage. Then the book cycles back through repair, memory and joy.

Dr. Barbara Holmes calls This Here Flesh “a tapestry of memories and invites people in.”² And like Dr. Holmes, I was “completely swept up.” Enthralled. Enchanted.

The journey through remembering can lead to our liberation. But it will require our participation and our surrender. “…we are worthy of tending to the pain of the past,”³ writes Cole in This Here Flesh.

Paul Young says, “the unexposed is the unhealed.” There is no trajectory to liberation that does not chart a course through Truth. “You will know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth will set you free.”⁴

“… I think every act of fidelity to a truth in you is an act of liberation,”⁵ writes Cole.

Denial does not liberate. Liberation unfolds in our moment by moment, daily participation with Love - seeing ourselves through the eyes of Divine Love, believing what Christ believes about us, aligning the ways that we live and move and have our being with Love’s truth.

“…contemplative spirituality is a fidelity to beholding the divine in all things.”⁶ …even in yourself. The journey through re-memberance begins with your own origin story, your inherent dignity. Remembering that you are the very good of Creator’s workmanship.

In every place within your being that you have labeled yourself as ‘not’ or ‘less’ or any measure of comparison rooted in scarcity and inadequacy, may you once again be re-membered to your significance, to the truth of your being. You are good. You are good. You are very good.

“… name the truth of [your] dignity like a mercy new each morning,”⁷ invites Cole Arthur Riley.

“How can anyone who is made to bear likeness to the maker of the cosmos be anything less than glory? This is inherent dignity,”⁸ she writes.

“…we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us.”⁹

“If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means that God’s wholeness is in a multitude.…the individual, collective, and cosmic journey is the path of unearthing and existing in our liberation. …To answer the question of how one becomes attuned to liberation, I think we must ask ourselves: What sounds are drowning it out?”¹⁰

We can never be whole alienated in our separate selves. Our wholeness is intricately bound in a symbiotic relationship to the circle of life. Who or what is drowning your sound?

Cynthia Bourgeault uses the etymology of the Latin word personare: to resonate with and describes personhood as one through whom the whole resounds.¹¹

How is the whole resounding through you? How are you taking your place in our collective belonging And if you aren’t, what’s holding you back from the Circle? Where do you need to be re-membered so that you can liberate your unique expression of Love?

“I don’t know if liberation depends on our reconciliation with others,” writes Cole Arthur Riley in This Here Flesh, “but I am certain it at least depends on our reconciliation with ourselves.”¹²

Reconciling myself to myself leads to shalom. “…like the ancient ritual that precedes the Eucharist,”¹³ travel around yourself, she invites, and pass the peace, grounding yourself in “embodied declarations of dignity and worth.”¹⁴

Wholeness

• As I participate with Love, I live and move and have my being in ways that are congruent with my inherent dignity.

• I honor and behold the divine in my humanity. Both are worthy of my compassion.

Peace be with me

Soundness of mind

• I no longer imagine vain things about myself.

• I believe what Love believes about me.

Peace be with me

Safety

• I treat myself with non-judgment and tenderness.

• I will not participate in my own self harm. I am safe with myself.

• I am a safe place for myself.

Peace be with me

Exemption from havoc, rage or war

• I am not at war with myself.

• I am no longer driven by or addicted to chaos.

• There is no rage or tempest within.

Peace be with me

“What is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?”¹⁵

Pause and think about it. How did repeating those declarations feel? Did you note any tension or unease? Was it comforting (or awkward) to pass the peace to yourself? Where has the instrument of peace been withheld from you? Might this journey be an invitation from Divine Love to reclaim it? What embodied declarations would you add to those above?

“…dignity,” Cole writes, “was not and is not something that can be taken. Glory can’t be unborn. The devil didn’t make anyone, and I don’t think he has the power to unmake anyone. Our walk to liberation requires us to parse truth from trick. And to ask ourselves, What does evil have to gain in tricking us into believing we are anything less than glorious? I would venture to guess it swallows our belonging first; and then it colonizes our body.…And last, I believe, it steals our love. For who can accept love that they do not believe exists for them?”¹⁶

Start at your origin story. But don’t start at the pain, don’t start with negation. Start with the profound depth of Love. Start with Divine Love singing over you and rejoicing over you with shouts of joy. Remember who you are and where you come from… Remember the Love. Let it resound in every part of who you are until the whole resounds through you.

“To be human in an aching world,” writes Cole Arthur Riley, “is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us....Everything should be called by its name.”¹⁷

In the beholding of our own liberation, may we participate with Love as agents of justice in the restoration of dignity and freedom for all. Say their name.

 

FOOTNOTES

1 Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh Convergent Books (2022), pg. 5

2“The Cosmic We Season 2, Episode 5 podcast, “Exploring the Power of Story with Cole Arthur Riley,” Hosts: Dr. Barbara Holmes & Donny Bryant

3 Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh Convergent Books (2022), pg. 136

4 John 8:32, ESV

5 Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh Convergent Books (2022), pg. 188

6 Ibid. p. x

7 Ibid. p. 5

8 Ibid. p.7

9 Ibid. p.7

10 Ibid. p.7

11 Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart, Jossey-Bass (2003).

12 Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh Convergent Books (2022), pg. 144

13 Ibid. p.144

14 Ibid. p.125

15 Ibid. p.8

16 Ibid. p. 9

17 Ibid. p.134

“YOU ARE GODS” – A COIN FROM HART’S TREASURY – Reflection by Bradley Jersak

 David Bentley Hart, YOU ARE GODS: On Nature and Supernature 
(Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2022) – Reflection by Bradley Jersak

Based solely on repetition in every one of David Bentley Hart’s books, articles, lectures, and podcasts, his most scathing condemnation of any opposing argument is that it’s incoherent—i.e., confusing, incomprehensible. Given this savant’s comprehensive genius for language, philosophy, theology, history, mythology, literature, music, and baseball (a shortlist of his expertise), it’s not inexcusable if he seems to be the offender-in-chief of incoherence. But bear with me (and him)…  

HART’S UNINTELLIGIBLE PATOIS

In his efforts to reteach peons the English language, Hart’s penchant for using precise, inaccessible, archaic, and invented vocabulary can seem self-defeating, if not self-indulgent. That’s aside from the dozens(?) of foreign languages he can use.

But I want to learn from him, so I keep track of words and ideas he thinks I should know. I’m reading You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature right now. I’ve recorded the following terms for further study since I could only guess what they meant and wouldn’t dare define, much less use in polite company. Please, repeat them aloud:

These are just from the Introduction and Chapter 1: dessicating, repristinated, recrudescence, fustian, theogonic, contrapuntal, fugal, pleonasm, patiency, goetic, leporine/leporinity, rapitude, ship of Theseus conundrum, mereological, deictic, patois, asperous, necrophile, adventitious, velleity, cyclophoria, inchoate, conduced, irrefrangible, aetiological, proleptic, incommiscible, quiddity.

Even my spell-checker was bewildered by seven in the list! But so what? My omniscient cell phone is within arm’s reach. Using a dictionary isn’t just time-consuming; it’s educational—learn or do not! If discovering new words and new ideas is not your thing, Hart’s not your guy and theology is not your passion. Far better to bypass this gibberish about God and get right to talking directly to God. And please pray for us while you’re there.  

HART’S INCOHERENT OPPONENTS

Hart’s assaults on opponents’ ideas and reasoning can also feel convoluted, but from my vantage point, that’s largely because he’s right—whether their logic is incoherent or morally repugnant (Hart’s other big slam). His main targets, Calvin/Calvinism and the Manualist or Two-Tier Thomism are a case in point.

I’m not so sure the sane man is to blame when diagnosing a disorder. Sometimes the doctor must enter the fantasy world of his patients to beckon them out. Remember how the prisoners in Plato’s cave of delusion ridiculed their newly freed companion when, compelled by love, he returned from the sunlight back into their world with good news. He was judged as deluded and disoriented, when really,… well, you get it.    

HART’S INCOMPREHENSIBLE TOPICS

But aside from their disagreements, Hart and his interlocutors are debating topics that can seem obscure, irrelevant, and a bit silly all on their own. Eye-rolling is not always out of order. Yet Hart’s concerns may also have pastoral consequences, especially where the gospel has been perverted by errors (e.g., eternal conscious torment, limited atonement, original sin) and the flock suffers spiritual abuse under toxic teaching. So, what he does kind of matters, if indirectly, even to the casual ‘believer.’

That’s where we rely on the patient souls who will wrestle through his words, debates, and topics (and even enjoy it) to bring back a sample coin from his treasury. Distilling Hart can be as hard as understanding him, and when one presumes to interpret him, the odds of misrepresenting him are high. Nevertheless, I occasionally dare to give it a go because he’s worth it and so are those who can’t read him. I can bear the guilt of saying it wrong. Or better, I’m happy to offer an imperfect reflection that makes sense to me.

For today, I’ll share just one coin, but it’s good and important. I hope readers find it helpful. If so, credit to Hart. If not, my bad.

ON “FINAL CAUSE”  

 In You Are Gods, David Bentley Hart advances five premises (p. xvii), the first of which reads,

“The sole sufficient natural end of all spiritual creatures is the supernatural, and grace is nothing but the necessary liberation of all creatures for their natural ends.”

The essays in his book expand on this thesis, which, once you see it, shouldn’t be unseen.

To begin with, let’s take a moment to learn about “final cause.” The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought about different ways we talk about “cause.” He named four types of cause in our world:

• Material cause: that from which something is made. The material cause of a wooden chair is the tree from which it is crafted.

• Efficient Cause: the agent that interacts with the object to change it. The efficient cause of the chair is the carpenter, who makes the chair what it becomes.

• Formal Cause: the essence or form of a particular object that makes it what it is. This would be like a blueprint or design that makes a chair a chair instead of a table.

• Final Cause: the ultimate end (telos) or purpose of the object, what the object is made for. The final cause of a chair is to be something we sit on.

I want to focus on this fourth type of cause. The wonderful thing about “final cause” is that the end goal of a thing actually causes its creation. Chairs allow for sitting, they don’t create sitting. The desire to sit causes and creates the chair! That’s how the end can cause the beginning.

Now let’s take a living thing, like an acorn that grows into an oak tree. The final cause of the acorn is… the oak tree! That is, acorns are created to produce and become oak trees. And so oak trees cause acorns so that acorns grow to maturity as oaks. It’s like the ultimate purpose or end of a thing (the oak) is calling what it causes (the acorn) to become what it will finally be.        

Further, Aristotle taught that the ultimate purpose or telos of a thing (the oak) is already somehow internal to what it has caused (the acorn). That is, the properties of the oak tree are already there in that little acorn, intrinsic to it. We now know this to be true from DNA and genome studies. The longevity of an oak tree is already baked into the DNA of the acorn.

ON “NATURAL ENDS”

What Aristotle called the “final cause” is, therefore, also the “natural end” of that thing. The natural end of an acorn is the oak. The end is there in the beginning, so that acorns don’t magically become something else… they become what they were always to become by nature.

Now Hart turns to spiritual beings, such as people. What is your natural end as a spiritual being? To discover this our final cause, we look to the Scriptures. Paul says that we are being “transfigured from glory to glory into the image of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 3:18). Peter says that we are “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). John says that when Jesus appears, “we shall be like him” (1 Jn. 3:2).

Paul called this transformation metamorphosis (transfiguration). The church fathers called it theosis, divinization, or deification. Their formula was, “God became human [Incarnation] so humanity could become divine [deification]… that’s right: in Christ, we are prospective “gods.” Hence Jesus striking claim that became Hart’s book title: “You are gods” (Jn. 10:34/Ps. 82:6).   

Shocking, yes, but here’s the math: Jesus is, by nature, the image of God (fully human, fully divine). You are, by nature, created in that image, and by grace, being transformed into that same image (fully humanized, fully divinized). And what you will become (your natural end) is intrinsic to who you are now. You are, in the words of Gary Best, naturally supernatural. Your “final cause” is calling you into this transformation, from acorn to oak, caterpillar to butterfly, natural to supernatural, because that is your natural end.

A NECESSARY LIBERATION

Now back to Hart’s premise:

 “The sole sufficient natural end of all spiritual creatures is the supernatural, and grace is nothing but the necessary liberation of all creatures for their natural ends.”

If I understand him, Hart is saying that as a spiritual creature, your natural end can be nothing less than supernatural. That by necessity, grace will free all creatures, all people, you and me to our natural ends, without fail. In fact, in premise 3, he says,

“No spiritual creature could fail to achieve its naturally supernatural end unless God himself were the direct moral cause of evil in that creature, which is impossible. Conversely, God [since God is good] saves creatures by removing… impediments to their union with him.”

In other words, your transformation from acorn to oak cannot not happen in a universe where God is good and not evil, because saving grace removes every impediment to that end. A God that could, but would not, so free us, would be immoral and not a savior at all.

Note too that Hart further specifies our natural end and final cause: the final cause of our supernatural end is union with God. Union with God inexorably draws humanity (and all creation) to its telos (end) where “God is all and in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). And that ultimate union is, again, intrinsic to our humanity because God has already united Godself to humanity in Jesus Christ—(1) from the creation of the cosmos, (2) in the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, and (3) through his Passion and resurrection.

See for example Colossians 1 (the italicized all and everything are my emphasis):

¹⁵ The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. ¹⁶ For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; allthings have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. ¹⁹ For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, ²⁰ and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

THE HUMANITY OF GOD

Now with the words of Jesus, his apostles, and the church fathers behind him, Hart’s radical 4^th premise may resonate:

“God became human so that humans should become God [a la Athanasius]. Only the God who is always already human can become human. Only a humanity that is always already divine can become God.”

Wait, what? I was ready for the first and third elements of this premise. If our natural end (divinization) is intrinsic to humanity, then it follows that something divine already appears in us now in seed form. Hart identifies that seed as our natural desire for the Transcendent Good (even when our desires are obviously disordered). He argues that we cannot have a natural desire for transcendence unless that desire is internal to who we are—spiritual beings whose first cause is our supernatural, divinized end.

But what does Hart mean by saying “Only the God who is always already human can become human?” Very odd, right?

Yet maybe no more odd than John calling Jesus Christ “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).

The key here is the divine humanity of Jesus Christ, the God-man—in eternity and in time. Where “through the Passion, Jesus Christ, as man, becomes that which, as God, he always is” (Fr. John Behr). As Behr teaches it, it’s not that there was an eternal "pre-incarnate Word" who was not human, then later became human. Rather, we must always start with the One Lord Jesus Christ, human and divine, crucified and risen, and then we say, “This One, the cruciform Lamb, is the eternal Word and Son of God, Creator of all things, whose image was the pattern for humanity, and in whose image, humanity is becoming.”

Why? Because eternity is not “before” anything. Eternity is not on some “before and then later” everlasting timeline. Eternity is timeless and every point in time is immediately present to the eternal now.

When Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I AM,” who is talking? The human God who descends from above time, from eternity, from outside of time. And eternity is forever indivisibly and directly united with time through the Cross. On this, see John Behr, The Mystery of Christ.

So in Hart, perhaps the humanity of God “is already” as for Behr, “As God, he always is,” as for Jesus, “Before Abraham, I AM.” The grammatical clue is the present tense of eternity (as in "Christ IS risen), the union of the eternal God to his human life in space and time, so that God always IS the human Lamb slain from both the foundations of the cosmos and outside Jerusalem, at once.

This is a Mystery. Don’t worry. Be at peace. If I sound incoherent, be gracious. I’ve been reading David Bentley Hart. We’d covet your prayers.

"How Will You Show Up?" Response to Valarie Kaur's "See No Stranger" - by Bradley Jersak

How Will You Show Up?

“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and don’t do what I say?” (Luke 6:46).
- Jesus of Nazareth 

It’s disconcerting when our discovery of God’s everywhere-present grace leads us to inaction in that grace, rather than motivating and mobilizing us to be instruments of grace in our world. "Revolutionary Love" activist Valarie Kaur calls us to find our way to “showing up.” Kaur relates what it is to "show up" through stories and lessons in her profound must-read book, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. It expands on the teachings she conveys on her site and in her talks. She summarizes the call to "show up" as follows:      

The only way we will survive as a people is if we show up… I believe that you are the midwives in this time of great transition, tasked with birthing a new future for all of us.

So I’ve come to ask you, how will you show up? How will you let bravery lead you? And how will you show up with love?... the greatest social reformers in history have built and sustained entire non-violent movements to change the world that were rooted, that were grounded in love; love as a wellspring for courage, not love as a rush of feeling, but love as sweet labor, fierce and demanding and imperfect and life-giving, love as a choice that we make over and over again.

Revolutionary love is the choice to enter into labor, for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves. The first practice: See no stranger. All the great wisdom traditions of the world carry a vision of oneness; the idea that we are interconnected and interdependent, that we can look upon the face of anyone or anything and say as a spiritual declaration and a biological fact, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.ⁱ

Valarie is an American Sikh who champions the transforming power of love in the traditions of Jesus, Guru Nanak, Gandhi, and MLK. I share the bare bones of her vision here because when it comes time to reconstructing or reorientating our lives, our faith, and our practice toward the Light of Love, her voice and her mission draw me deep into the heart of the Jesus Way. 

Christians and ex-Christians alike would do well to sit at her feet for a season. Kaur’s learning hubⁱⁱ guides readers and educators into the practice of “revolutionary love.” Here she develops a three-fold strategy for “showing up” around the words (1) wonder, (2) grieve, and (3) fight.

To wonder is to cultivate a sense of awe and openness to others’ thoughts and experiences, their pain, their wants and needs. It is to look upon the face of anyone or anything and say: You are a part of me I do not yet know. Wonder is an orientation to humility: recognizing that others are as complex and infinite to themselves as we are to ourselves. Wondering about a person gives us information for how to love them. You can practice wonder for all others – animals, trees, living beings, and the earth. Wonder gives you information for how to care for them. Wonder is the wellspring of love.

To grieve with others is to share their pain, without trying to minimize or erase it. Grieving with others requires a willingness to be transformed by their experiences, especially those who have suffered trauma and violence. Grieving collectively and in community gives us the information to build solidarity, to fight for justice, and even to share in one another’s joy.

To fight is to choose to protect those in harm’s way. To fight with revolutionary love is to fight against injustice alongside those most impacted by harm, in a way that preserves our opponents’ humanity as well as our own. When we fight for those outside our immediate circle, our love becomes revolutionary.

If the fog deconstruction has left you feeling lost and vulnerable, I commend Kaur’s story, life, and training as a compass for the disoriented. As a teaser, I've embedded one of her inspiring talks here:     

i. Valarie Kaur, Keynote talk: “Valarie Kaur: Breath! Push! The Labor of Revolutionary Love,” Bioneers (Nov. 13, 2019). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIrl_Ob0jvg>.

ii. https://valariekaur.com/learninghub/

Becoming Neighbors" - Kinship with Refugee Claimants - Anika Bauman with Ron Dart

CLICK HERE to order your copy of Anika Bauman's Becoming Neighbours: Five Values for a World of Welcome. 

CLICK HERE to visit kinbrace.ca.

Jim Forest’s “Ladder of the Beatitudes” & “Loving Our Enemies” – by Sarah Anderson

Analytical Review: Jim Forest’s “The Ladder of the Beatitudes” and “Loving Our Enemies” – by Sarah Anderson

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus details how undergoing an internal transformation moves us from poverty of spirit to become peacemakers, willing to undergo harm to themselves for the sake of love towards the enemy. The Jesus Way, laid out in the Beatitudes, is a way of living and being, not simply a checklist of behaviors. This embodiment of the Spirit allows for both the flourishing of the individual and the ushering in of a new kingdom, a kingdom of God that presents an alternative structure for society than the one we participate in now.

Jesus’ Program for the Individual Disciple

Jesus begins the Beatitudes addressing the crowds—not just the religious leaders/elite—suggesting this was meant for everyone (Ladder 15), and encouraging poverty of spirit. The Beatitudes consist of a sort of progression (Ladder 2), meaning that in order to fully embrace this Jesus Way, there are steps that serve as foundations and must be built upon in order to become fully transformed “little Christs.”

To begin with, poverty of spirit is similar to Step 1 in twelve-step recovery. Before recovery in any sense, there’s an acknowledgment of a problem, something we have to recover from. It’s a revelation of our lowliness and an acknowledgment of God’s largeness where we discover the central tenant of Jesus’ economy: the way up is down, and this wound is the means of healing. It diagnoses the problem while simultaneously offering a solution. Jesus knows in order to be transformed, first comes the awareness of needing to be transformed. From there, we mourn our brokenness, while hungering for the virtues of God’s kingdom, working towards displaying mercy towards even those who have mal intent towards us. But even this is not the final objective.

Forest writes, “we would do well to pray not only for the conversation of our adversaries but for our own conversation. We ourselves may be harder to convert than our adversaries. The most needed conversion may be my own” (LOE 98). In this way, the ladder of the beatitudes and progression of the individual disciple is more circular than a straight line. We end where we begin. In praying for our enemy, we are exposed anew to the problem of ourselves, a need for change in our own heart that feels even more pressing than a change in the other. Back to poverty of spirit, to begin the journey of blessedness through the Jesus Way again. 

Ultimately the program for individual disciples is rooted in the tension of existence: potential for transformation coupled with deeply rooted resistance to it. But Jesus reminds us that when we recognize the lack in ourselves, while moving towards acknowledging the blessedness of others, a new kingdom is ushered in, transforming the human experience.

Essential Components of the Jesus Way

The Jesus Way invites us towards mercy, instead of vengeance (Ladder 34), insisting on “tender lovingkindness” (Ladder 79) and not just mercy in the judicial sense.  In addition, our capacity for mercy is directly related to an awareness of our capacity for evil (Ladder 82). In other words, our showing of mercy soon becomes a display of self-righteousness if it isn’t also coupled with an understanding of how often we too need mercy because of our wronging of others. Partnered to this fundamental self-awareness, the Jesus Way also embodies a respect of the Other, and a malleability of our spirits to respond to the other with God’s patience and kindness (Ladder 35). It requires presence with Christ (not just admiration) and a sensitivity to the griefs of the world—or “repentant mourning” (Ladder 42). Meekness as mentioned in the Beatitudes is essential to this Jesus Way, but not as being equivalent to weakness. Instead, meekness is “making choices and exercising power with a divine rather than a societal reference point” (Ladder 49), in addition to a hunger for righteousness, or rightness by God’s standard—versus a hunger for virtues of the world. A spirit of integrity—or integrated whole—is represented with a pure spirit; one that refuses the scapegoat mentality. This is a practice to participate in and not simply a decision to make.

Fundamentally, the Jesus way is characterized by kenosis—a self-emptying that proceeds a divine pouring out.

The Jesus Way in Societal Renewal

Jesus’ talk of the Kingdom of God was centered in a “here and now” understanding.

Forest points out the intentionality of the Beatitudes saying “...for theirs is the kingdom”. The kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit now; renewal is possible in this moment, not just in a future a heavenly kingdom.

Societal renewal begins with a poverty of spirit on the cultural level, acknowledging where our systems and structures are lacking, and grieving how they have hurt and destabilized the most vulnerable around us. Forest writes, hungering and thirsting for righteousness means responding to “the real world with all of its fear, pain, bloodstains, to be a rescuer, to protect the
defenseless, to participate here and now in God’s righteousness.” (Ladder 69). Societal renewal means to not gloss over the brokenness of the world with shallow platitudes, dismiss the injustices of the world as “just the way it is”, and simply imagine God’s kingdom as just a “slightly improved version of the world we already have.” (Ladder 112). Rather, a societal renewal is a deep engagement with the reality of brokenness and a transformative change to a new way of being. It is not trite nor necessarily tranquil, but an upending of structures used to uphold power structures that reward aggression, in exchange for more thoughtful engagement.

Jesus’ program for social renewal is dependent on the humanizing of the people in the categories our politics and culture have made caricatures or monolithic narratives out of. When He says, “Blessed are the merciful,” Jesus envisions the potential for real peace by extending kindness to those (groups and nations, not just individuals) who might wish us harm, imagining what might be if the lines of difference ceased to work as barriers and instead as invitations to lean in. It means extending aid to countries after natural disasters—even those we might see as adversaries (LOE 101, 103); it means refusing to reduce human deaths to the term of “collateral damage”; it means acknowledging the spiral effect of violence that often leads to more and more damage and increasing destruction for those on both sides; it means a “holy disobedience” to the laws or systems that declare only one (violent) way of being in the world (LOE 156). The Jesus Way of societal renewal asks that we no longer make decisions out of fear of other, but love for the Other, refusing to see difference as liability, but an opportunity to see the image of Christ where we least expect it.

But even then, no societal change is long-term, and the process is incomplete if there is no individual transformation too (LOA 126). As Forest quotes Sister Rosemary Lynch, “even if nuclear weapons were abolished, unless we diffuse the bombs in our own hearts, the human family is quite capable of finding other even worse means of destroying life.” (Ladder 121)

Enemy-Love and Taking Up Your Cross

Forest describes an enemy as “anyone I feel threatened by and seek to defend myself against” (LOE 18). In this light, to love my enemy is to pray for their flourishing, a change in my enemy’s heart. But to do that is to make oneself vulnerable—with no guarantee for change or of being loved back. It’s an exposure to potential death—literally or figuratively—doing so knowing the highest aim as followers of Jesus is not preservation of life, but demonstration of love at all costs. Enemy love in its very nature is a death as it is taking up the cross of death to self, ego, rights, and a need to be right. It is imitating Jesus in his willingness to die, so we might ensure love—not retribution or violence towards the other—gets the final word. 

Conclusion

Like so much of Jesus’ teaching, the ideas highlighted in the Beatitudes feel paradoxical and contradictory. And maybe if all we were trying to do was follow them as a checklist to be moved through, rather than a way of life, it would be impossible. But the Beatitudes represent a journey of inner transformation, growing self-awareness, and acknowledgment of our deeply held enmity towards the other, that can be transformed into prayer for and love towards the very people or groups who may seek to harm us. Jesus isn’t suggesting “niceness” or glib responses to real pain and challenging realities.

He is requiring an internal awakening to our need for change, a hungering and thirsting for a rightness in the world that God envisioned in its creation, before taking on the task of trying to change the world around us. And yet, as impossible as it sounds, Jesus suggests this kingdom way of life is possible for here and now, accessible in every interaction with those we see as an enemy or an affront to us.

Louis Markos' "Myth Made Fact" - Review by Ron Dart

Louis Markos, Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes (Classical Academic Press, 2020).

There can be little doubt that the challenge, burden, and vocation of Louis Markos has been to make it abundantly clear that classical western mythology (and philosophy), like the Jewish heritage, is an apt and significant preparation for the coming of Christ and Christianity. There has been, sadly so, a tendency within some forms of Christianity, to demean and caricature Classical Greek and Roman thought and set it in opposition to Jewish thinking. Such a collision and clash between Athens and Jerusalem, the Academy and the Church, gratefully so, has not been the dominant approach to faith and learning within historic Christianity, but such an approach has done much to shape and define a tendency and leaning within substantive parts of protestant and evangelical Christianity. There has been a desperate and definite need to overcome such simplistic ways of understanding the Athens-Jerusalem tensions that post-apostolic and patristic Christianity engaged in, thought through, and lived forth. It was this more nuanced dialogue by classical Christians with their Classical heritage (always discerning the wheat and chaff, gold and dross) that, in most ways, created Western Civilization and the best of Christian Humanism.

It is to the credit, therefore, of Louis Markos that he has given himself, in an attentive manner, to ponder how the early church interacted with the Classical Tradition and the perennial relevance for those of us today who live, increasingly so, in a post-Christendom, post-Christian and post-structuralist context. The publication of From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (2007) and From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Though Shaped Christian Thought (2021) are but two of a variety of books birthed by Markos that insightfully and intricately weave together the nuanced relationship of Classical philosophy and literature as a form of common grace and general revelation. It is, though, with the publication of Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes (2020) that we are taken on a deeper dive into the richness and fullness of, mostly, Greek myth and the relationship of Greek myth to both Jewish thought and the emerging Christianity of the Bible and classical Christian thought and culture.

Myth Made Fact is front-loaded with endorsements and accolades (Foreword and Preface) that legitimate the larger rehabilitation and renovation project of Markos. The “Introduction” by Markos, “More than Balder”, sets the larger aims and goals in an apt and appropriate context and setting. In short, Markos is not only interested in Greek and Roman myth (he is also interested in comparative mythology) as a form of scholarly archival and museum research. He is much more committed to recovering and representing many of the perennial truths in Greek and Roman mythology that are applicable today for soul formation and a renewal of the classical virtues.

Myth Made Fact brings to frontstage 50 classical myths that reach across the ridges of time, the 50 myths divided, wisely and discerningly so, into six parts: 1) Journeys and Origins, 2) Platonic Myths, 3) The Four Great Heroes, 4) The Tragic House of Thebes, 5) The Tragic House of Atreus and 6) Love Lost and Found. Each of the myths retold is combined with a section that deals with “Reflections” and “Applications”. Markos, in these “Reflections” and “Applications” threads together passages from the Bible and larger historic events that bring to life the myths and compare-contrast them with Biblical stories.

There is, therefore, an ongoing and discerning approach, a careful weighing of Biblical, Classical myths and classical Christian reflections on the relationship between Classical myths, the Bible, and Classical Christianity—such a method evokes much in the longing heart, mind, soul, and imagination.

There has been a tendency within some forms of Christianity to be focused on the Bible and ignore how Christianity, post-Gospels, Paul and catholic epistles interpreted and applied their faith in a classical civilization (many of the early Christians who were not Jews from the 2^nd to the 7^th centuries were trained in classical literature). The dilemma of such an approach to Christianity (memoricide as a serious problem) means many modern forms of Christianity lack a minimal understanding of why most early Christians found classical myths, philosophy, literature, and theology attractive and valuable as a stepping stone to their commitment to Christianity. Myth Made Fact walks the extra mile to explain and articulate why immersion in classical myth, literature, and philosophy can enrich and deepen our understanding of Christianity. This has been the historic approach of Christianity and the recovery of such an approach is taken wisely and well in Myth Made Fact. This is also, as Markos rightly notes, why the modern mythmaking of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, and Star Wars (each and all drawing from classical myths) have such an abiding appeal.  

Myth Made Fact is brought to a fit and fine end with the “Epilogue: Beyond Greece and Rome” and “Appendix A-B-C” that are portals of sorts that point the way to yet further trails to take on the Classical myth-Christian journey pathway. In short, the waymarks are ample, the challenge being one of going on the journey. I might also add that in this hefty tome there are some fine paintings that illuminate and richly illustrate the myths in a visual manner.

There has been, in the last few decades, a decided movement to explore the often forgotten classical heritage of Christianity in our age that tends to be rootless, fragmented and divided (both in the church and world). It is this recovery and renovation project that is part of a larger attempt to halt the deterioration of faith and culture in a context that has no anchor or moorings. Louis Markos is, rightly so, playing a significant role in this larger project and his work in classical myth and literature (often ignored in such a rehabilitation process) should be welcomed and applauded, Myth Made Fact but one pillar in the cathedral of this rebuilding effort.

Ron Dart            

Paul Zizka's "Aloft: Canadian Rockies Aerial Photographs" - review by Ron Dart

Ron Dart

Paul Zizka, Aloft: Canadian Rockies Aerial Photographs (RMB, 2021).

There are photographic books on the Canadian Rockies worthy of a few scans and there are superb books on the Canadian Rockies—such is Aloft. The title and subtitle offer the curious the visual nature of this bounty of a book. The photographs are, indeed, taken from above the Rockies and the photographer is very much aloft, the “Introduction” by Zizka worthy of a reflective read (as are his visual gifts).

The photographs taken reflect all the seasons in the Canadian Rockies and track the varied faces and forms of the Rockies in a sort of ordered journey, Rundle Range and Three Sisters near Canmore taking the lead and initial bow, Mount Assiniboine area stepping on stage to strut its sheer beauty. Then, it’s to Banff, Lake Minnewanka, Sulphur Mountain, Mount Louis and Mount Norquay ski hill bounties not to miss.  The photographic journey turns northward to Castle Mountain, Sunshine Meadows (summer and winter on display), Bourgeau Lake, Shadow Lake, Storm Mountain and Shadow Lake Lodge next on the Rocky Mountain and Taylor Lake aloft tour. It was inevitable, of course, on the photographic overview of the Rockies that Lake Louise and Moraine Lake would be next to visit, their expansive and epic-like grandeur worthy of multiple meditative moments. Those who have lingered and trekked in the area are amply rewarded by photographs of Eiffel Lake, Sentinel Pass, Lake Agnes (tea hut ever-present), Temple, Victoria-Lefroy and Louise Ski Hill, of course. Lake Louise freezes in the winter and the shoveled Lake near Chateau is cleared and turned into rinks to skate on (many pleasant memories of skating on Louise in winter). Zizka has eloquently captured the golden beauty of the alpine larches in the early autumn, Abbot Hut above the higher tea hut suitable for many a night stay (such tales to be told from Abbot Hut). The photographic pilgrimage continues to the ever-charming Lake O’Hara region with its rich and layered history, Yoho, many trails done there and Takakkaw Falls a place not to miss (many a night spent sleeping at the base of it). The turn is then made, ever aloft, to Kootenay National Park, the Icefields Parkway the journey ever northward from an aerial perspective, Bow Lake highlighted (treks taken from there worth the doing as is kayaking on the lake), Peyto Lake frontstaged (the starting point for the Wapta Traverse).

The aerial overview maintains a northwards flight, Saskatchewan and Athabasca Glaciers illuminated, crevasses noted and Mount Athabasca (climb worth the effort) duly noted, tourist trips part of the photographic package. Jasper National Park, rightly so, comes into attractive and compelling hue, Fortress Lake, Hooker Icefield and Chisel Peak but tasters and teasers. But, to Jasper and Edith Cavell, Fairmont, Chevron and Ramparts, Tonquin Valley and Amethyst Lakes photographs not to miss (nor, in the Rockies, treks not to miss). Humber Provincial Park is given its prominent places as is Mount Alberta and the ever attractive Maligne Lake, Mt. Robson and Berg Lake next on the agenda as Jasper is left behind.

There is much more that could be said about this photographic and aerial overview of the Canadian Rockies, but for those who have done many of the trips in the area, skated, skied, trekked, hiked and climbed many of the peaks, Aloft is a memory massager and reminder of the vast, compelling, immense and perennial appeal of the Canadian Rockies. Aloft is certainly worth the purchase and the photographs, descriptions and vividness of the tour a journey not to miss.

montani semper liberi

Ron Dart                       

Stephen Hui's "Destination Hikes" - Review by Ron Dart

Review of Stephen Hui, Destination Hikes In and Around Southwestern British Columbia (Greystone Books: Vancouver, 2021). Foreword by Cecilia Point

I have before me a few first edition books (collector’s items I assume) that were pioneering guide books in their day: Mt. Garibaldi: Vancouver’s Alpine Playground (1922) by Don Munday, a signed edition of Dick Culbert’s 1960s A Climber’s Guide to the Coastal Ranges of British Columbia, a splendid 1967 copy of Glenn Woodsworth’s A Climber’s Guide to the Squamish Chief and Surrounding Areas (signed by the superb climber and search and rescue legend Tim Auger—we spent some lovely time in Lake O’Hara many a year ago) and the many editions of 103 Hikes in Southwestern British Columbia by, initially, David/Mary Macaree, then Jack Bryceland. The more recent stepping on the stage by Stephen Hui has enriched and enlarged, updated, and revealed yet a greater variety of more and less demanding treks to take.

The publication of Destination Hikes In and Around Southwestern British Columbia is a fit and fine companion to Stephen’s earlier book, 105 Hikes In and Around Southwestern British Columbia. The style of both books is much the same, but this new book adds to the possibilities of trails yet to take and destinations yet to see. The book is divided into four regions: 1) Hikes North of Vancouver, 2) Hikes East of Vancouver, 3) Hikes West of Vancouver and 4) Hikes South of Vancouver (in the United States). Each hike is replete with superb photographs and headings that include distance, time, elevation gain, high point, difficulty, maps and trailhead. Photographs also include a variety of animals, waterfalls, scenic sights, thick forests, carpeted forest floors, signs, alpine flowers, wooden cabins, richly coloured clouds, and various types of glaciers. There are also many “Stop of Interest” sections that make a trip to the mountains yet more attractive and worth the effort in doing. Stephen, rightly so, makes it clear that for those keen to take to the mountains (shorter or longer trips) preparation and precautions are needful and necessary—he has a fine few pages that cover the basics of outdoor rambling so that one and all return safely and in good form.

The 55 hikes included in Destination Hikes do, as the subtitle suggests,

point to “Swimming Holes, Mountain Peaks, Waterfalls and More”. The “More” opens up more enchanted trails worth the trekking. 19 of the hikes are north of Vancouver, 20 of the hikes east of Vancouver, a mere 7 of the hikes west of Vancouver and another 9 hikes south of Vancouver (in the state of Washington). So, the bulk of the hikes in this timely beauty and bounty of a well-crafted book are north and east of Vancouver.

The Foreword by Cecilia Point is a keeper not to miss. Cecilia has an evocative way of inviting those keen to take to such sacred and time tried 1^st Nations landscapes to realize many have gone before them and their footprints still remain for those with eyes to see and hearts to feel. The Foreword is, indeed, worth a few meditative reads and much inward digesting.

The “Overview Maps” (pages 30-37) are well worth the pondering as plans are made for trips into the backcountry and means of evaluating the expectations and demands of such trips, mountain weather, and group dynamics, always, of course, the variable and unpredictable elements in any mountain and rambling trip.

I have done most of the trips that Stephen so well describes and there can be no doubt that Destination Hikes is a must-have book for those eager to take to the mountains, alpine lakes, peaks, ridges, and much else in southwestern British Columbia and further southward into Washington. The book also provides most of the information needed for safe trips there and back again and continues the unfolding journey

of solid and reliable guidebooks for those interested and committed

to mature trips into the bounty of beautiful British Columbia.

Montani Semper Liberi

Ron dart                     

Erasmus in Review: Two Works - Ron Dart

Robert D. Sider (edited), Erasmus on the New Testament, (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2020).

Mark Vessey (edited), Erasmus on Literature: His Ratio or “System” of 1518/1519, (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2021).

Erasmus was too good a humanist to live only in the past.

—P.S. Allen

The name of Erasmus will never perish.

—John Colet

Erasmus has published volumes more full of wisdom
than any which Europe has seen for ages.

—Thomas More

I am halfway through the Ratio Verae Theologiae of Erasmus, loving the clarity and balance of his Latin, his taste, his good sense, his evangelical teaching. If there had been no Luther, Erasmus would now be regarded by everyone as one of the great Doctors of the Catholic Church. I like his directness, his simplicity, and his courage. All the qualities of Erasmus, and other qualities besides, were canonized in Thomas More.                                                        

Thomas Merton

Erasmus has often not been treated the best in both 16th-century Reformation-Renaissance history, thought, and religion, or the centuries that followed. The Roman Catholic Church put his writings on the Index at Trent and many Protestants have uncritically bowed the knee to Luther’s rather volcanic and reactionary rebuttal to Erasmus’ Freedom of the Will (1524), in the rather feisty The Bondage of the Will (1525). Both Roman Catholics and Protestants, therefore, in the religious and culture wars of the 16^th century did not know how to cage this wild bird. Erasmus tended to transcend the tribalism of both the Roman Catholic and variations of Protestant clans and Sanhedrins. And yet it was Erasmus, more than anyone else, in his various translations and annotations of the New Testament, who raised substantive questions about serious mistranslations (and the theological-pastoral implications of them) of Jerome’s Vulgate. The main translations by Erasmus of the New Testament in 1516, 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535 did, as the saying goes, lay the egg that Luther hatched. It was in these, increasingly so, translations, commentaries, and annotations that Erasmus distinguished himself as one of the most significant scholars of the first half of the 16^th century. The recent publications of Erasmus and the New Testament (2020) and Erasmus on Literature (2021) do need to be read together as companion tomes on Erasmus’ layered and nuanced approach in how to read, interpret and apply the text of the New Testament. In fact, both books walk the extra mile to highlight the all too obvious reality that Erasmus should not have been marginalized in his age and ethos or our context. But, it is to these two books worth the reviewing we now turn.

Love on a human scale: The Gospel according to Ivan Illich - Review by Marcus Rempel

Every now and then a book comes into my life that puts me in a happy dilemma: I want to lend it to all my friends, but I don’t want it to leave my house. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey is a labour of love by Illich’s long-time friend and co-conspirator, David Cayley. At 552 pages, its heft reminds me of the boxes of “a good, but inexpensive wine” that Illich managed to write off as a teaching expense. This opus represents many, many evenings of intelligent, friendly, and finally life-changing dialogue that culminate in a  near-symphonic quality.  Cayley’s deep understanding and clear prose pull a complex, balanced harmony out of themes that to the casual reader of Illich could seem eclectic. What does medical overreach have to do with the 12th-century innovation of silent reading or the New Testament concept of the Anti-Christ or the dissolution of gender as a capitalist phenomenon, for heaven’s sake? 

In a confusing and troubling time, this book gave me the permission to weigh the harm done by coronavirus against the harms done in the fight against it, a model to help me accept and be grateful for some of what medicine provides, and still have the confidence to resist to the hysteric shunning of my unvaccinated friends. In the wake of the discovery of more than 1,308 unmarked graves for Indigenous children who were coerced into residential schools and never came home again, the book helps me name the totalitarian hubris of a church that thought it could “do what God cannot, namely manipulate others into their own salvation” through brute force, child abductions and mind control, and repent of such hubris through a closer walk with Christ, rather than by running away from my spiritual inheritance.

One of Illich’s mottos was “I fear the Lord is passing me by.” Illich receives in Jesus’ parable of the Samaritan a radical freedom to encounter the other Other in the human other—an opening to friendship that can not be guaranteed, a surprise that cannot be institutionalized. His other motto was Corruptio Optimi Pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst. Glorious innovations tend to have dark shadows. A faith in which there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free is uniquely prone to an imperialism that flattens Indigenous cultures and drives men and women out of the complementarity of gender into the competitive, unidimensional arena of sex.

This last idea risks generating much more heat than light, and a book review by a white man about a biography by a white man about another white man seems unlikely to help the cause. I may just be securing my copy from being borrowed! At the risk of mansplaining, I will spill a little more ink on what may be a stumbling block for many in accessing Illich. Many of Illich’s friends advised him against publishing his thoughts on this matter, and when Gender came out in 1982 it did mark a fall from grace for Illich among the New Left.

Cayley’s chapter on “Gender” takes care to first understand what Illich had to say before critiquing some of his nostalgia and gender essentialism, a courtesy that was not granted him by early reviewers. Cayley summarizes Illich’s argument as follows:

Illich speaks loudly against equality as sameness. But he also speaks loudly for equality in its sense of equity, arguing that most women suffer irremediable disadvantages in a realm of universal circulation and competition. The two points are connected. Illich claims that idealizing equality may allow some women to rise to new heights of wealth and influence but that it will hurt many more—by lowering the status of every form of sustenance that occurs outside the cash nexus in which equality finds its measure, by fostering an illusory sense of opportunity, and by inviting those who fail to seize these opportunities to blame themselves. His analysis of feminism, in this respect, took the same form as his analysis of every other modern institution that he explored—it incites envy and delivers frustration. Only by reversing economic growth, unbuilding the global megalith, and restoring human scale will the majority of women regain their dignity, he says, because only then will the contribution of those who have been shunted aside in the rat race begin to matter. This is the sole sense in which he speaks against equality: equality-as-justice, he says, cannot be achieved without a firm rejection of equality-as-sameness.

Illich is on the lookout everywhere in his work for one-size-fits-all solutions that ignore the bonds and bounds of our bodies, whether the social bodies of community and culture or the physical bodies of women and men. Visions of justice that require everyone to have the same kinds of jobs, visions of health that require everyone to take the same kind of medicine, visions of education that require everyone to have the same kind of standardized credentials are for Illich a liberal power fantasy with an ugly underbelly, a perversion directly inherited from a church that could envision the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven as the mass conversion of global humanity into a single catechism and a single rite under a single worldly authority with divinely underwritten supremacy. Such a universalism inherently corrodes human freedom and erodes “the soil of friendship” which is always limited and local. “As long as you think of the world as a whole,” Illich said, “the time for human beings is over.” 

Illich is trying to protect islands of the homegrown, the homemade, and the homespoken. I think of feminist friends who make homegrown pickles with their homeschooled children when they could easily get jobs that would pay for cheaper pickles, cheaper child care, and then some. Perhaps at the kitchen tables of these mothers, Illich’s analysis of gender has “reached the hour of its legibility,” as is hoped by Giorgio Agamben, another male commentator. Besides the voice of Illich’s colleague Barbara Duden, and a comment from Cayley’s wife, we hear little sympathetic commentary from women in this chapter. That is too bad. 

 Illich calls this domain of the homemade “the vernacular,” reviving an old Latin adjective that could be applied to one’s mother tongue as well as to a cow raised at home instead of acquired at the market. He hopes such islands can align in an “archipelago of conviviality”—a chain of islands where life is still livable on a human scale, where we can love one another as neighbours and renounce the kind of “care” that implicitly takes the point of view of a systems administrator. It is not that Illich is against institutions and systems organized to achieve social goods, but as a loyal dissident of the Roman Catholic Church, he is acutely sensitive to the harms done in the name of good, and of the importance of limits and humility for those of us who get caught up trying to save the world, whether with sacred rites or secular ones. “Risk awareness,” Illich said to Cayley late in life, is “the most important religiously celebrated ideology of today.” That was before the Coronavirus lockdown.

Illich blesses the missionary impulse at the same time as he chastens it. He understands that whether inspired by Jesus or by a medical breakthrough, people will want to share their good news. But he sees with near-clairvoyant power how the good news is accompanied by a terrible danger. Humans inspired by visions of God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven all too easily construct an artificial, man-made world from which there is no escape. 

As a reader of Illich via Cayley, I find myself more deeply drawn into the good news of Jesus, and more able to discern and rebuke the spirits that dress up like Jesus while perverting his good news. I find myself both grateful for a vaccine that reduces the symptoms and spread of a nasty virus, and alert to the shadows of a campaign of global vaccine compliance. When a frightened neighbour who does not attend my church recently reached out to me to ask if I could write a religious exemption for her son so that this unvaccinated young man could attend college this fall, I said yes. As I did so, I silently thanked Illich and Cayley for helping me get my head around what the hell is going on in this strange time and how in heaven’s name such a yes to my neighbour could possibly be a yes to Christ.

A.M. Allchin's "Participation in God" - Review by Ron Dart

A.M. Allchin, Participation in God: Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition (Morehouse-Barlow, 1988).

Arthur Macdonald “Donald” Allchin (1930-2010) was one of the most significant Anglican theologians of the 20^th century, and his ever deeper probes into the classical vision of contemplative theology and the Anglican way are pointers not to miss. Significantly so, there has been a troubling tendency within the historic Anglican way to ignore the theology of theosis or, in sum, “God became man so humanity would be divinized (or deified)”. Participation in God reclaims such a vision as embodied in the historic Anglican way.

Allchin highlighted, in his “Introduction”, how two important Anglican writers on spirituality missed this core notion of deification: Thornton’s English Spirituality (1963) and Moorman’sThe Anglican Spiritual Tradition (1983). Allchin’s three lectures, delivered in 1983-1984 in the USA, probes the aberrant read by Thornton and Moorman and turns to significant post-reformation Anglican Divines in their read of deification. The initial lecture discussed Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes, the second lecture lingered with Charles Wesley and Williams Pantycelyn, and the third and final lecture E.B. Pusey and the Oxford Movement are covered. The final and summary chapter articulates “The Co-inherence of Human and Divine”. Needless to say, the Patristic Tradition ethos ever informs such insightful lectures turned book.

The elevated ideal of deification is often seen as the bailiwick of the Orthodox way but given the historic Anglican-Orthodox dialogue and the fact both traditions draw deeply from the best of the Patristic way, it is quite predictable that the notion of theosis would be held in common by both---such is the deeper meaning of sobornost that Allchin understood so well, his engagement as a catholic Anglican with the Orthodox central to his vocation. As the deeper and more perennial meaning of theology, soteriology, and anthropology is more maturely embraced by the Christian Tradition, the integrative and high vision of true Christian Humanism will be realized, theosis the portal into such an expansive reality.

There are few good and readable overviews of the doctrine of deification but Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition is definitely one of them. Such a compact missive corrects a certain read of the Anglican way that has tended to shrink Anglican contemplative theology to the smallest circle turns. We should be grateful to Allchin for his life and prolific writings. Participation in God a superb entrée to Allchin’s life and thought.

Fiat Lux

Ron Dart

"The Inklings and Culture" - Review by Ron Dart

Monika B. Hilder, Sara L. Pearson & Laura N. Van Dyke (eds.), The Inklings and Culture: A Harvest of Scholarship from the Inklings Institute of Canada (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020).

There has been, within Canada, a committed history of interest in the Inklings. My mother was faithfully involved with the Toronto group that published Pilgrimage: The Toronto C.S. Lewis Society (a magazine on Lewis and the Inklings in the 1980s-1990s, final edition 2009). The Canadian C.S. Lewis Journal: The Inklings, Their Friends & Predecessors that closed shop Autumn 2001 (lasted almost 30 years, 100 publications) was, in its last decade, published on the West Coast. But, it was with the founding of The Inklings Institute of Canada at Trinity Western University that a more mature and integrated vision of the Inklings came into being. The publication of The Inklings and Culture is the well-birthed child of such fine parenting.

The fact I took in Lewis and the Inklings with my mother’s milk, and, in some small way, contributed to The Inklings and Culture, means my decades-long journey (from the earliest years) was amply rewarded by heeding and reading the many and polyphonic voices in this well-tuned Inklings symphony.

The Inklings and Culture: A Harvest of Scholarship from the Inklings Institute of Canada is, indeed, a harvest and feast of a read. The tome is divided into 4 parts and 27 chapters. Each part is packed with insights and probes that make for creative reads and varied interpretations of the pure gold of Inklings life and thought: Part I: Literary Influences, Part II: The Christian Imagination, Part III: Artistic Responses, and Part IV: Contemporary and Theological Issues are not to be missed.

Most of the Inkling worthies step on front stage (MacDonald, Lewis, Sayers, Chesterton, Williams, Tolkien, and Barfield – some more obviously Inkling than others) and other lesser-known writers and artists who historically anticipated or had affinities with the Inklings in direct and indirect ways (Charlotte Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Sewell, Bede Griffiths, and Reinhold Niebuhr are also mentioned and discussed).

Lewis decidedly leads the pack of articles with 15 of the 27 reflections dedicated directly to him, whereas Tolkien is featured in 5 articles and Sayers in 3 of the essays. MacDonald, Chesterton, Williams, and Barfield are momentarily on stage. But, there can be no doubt that Lewis is the main actor that speaks his speech well – not trippingly on the tongue as some do. The quality of essays and themes covered are of a high level and not to be missed. There can be no doubt that Hilder, Pearson and Van Dyke have done Canada well in their harvest of scholarship. The Canadian Inklings children have now matured as well-rounded, comprehensive, and creative adults, the table spread a bounty not to miss, much nourishment in the feast. I might also add that Hilder’s “Introduction” and Van Dyke’s “Chronology” makes the tome a greater, grander and fuller bounty not to miss.   

There can be no doubt those who anticipated the Inklings (MacDonald, Chesterton) and the Inklings did, in their unique way, unconceal, and by doing so, reveal a mother lode of mythic, imaginative and literary gold within the Western and Christian Tradition that had been somewhat concealed by a hyper form of right of centre Enlightenment rationalism and scientism. It was this healthy and full-bodied Christian romanticism and humanism that was the genius of the Inklings and why their presence ever persists to inform, instruct and point the way to finer and fitter trails worth the taking. There can be no doubt that The Inklings and Culture is Canadian scholarship at its evocative best and the impact of such a hefty tome will linger for many a decade and be a library from which future Inkling scholars will turn to slake a deeper thirst, the wine full-bodied and palette tasty.

Ron Dart           

"The Inklings and Culture: A Harvest of Scholarship" - review by Ron Dart

Monika B. Hilder, Sara L. Pearson & Laura N. Van Dyke (eds.), The Inklings and Culture: A Harvest of Scholarship from the Inklings Institute of Canada (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020).

There has been, within Canada, a committed history of interest in the Inklings. My mother was faithfully involved with the Toronto group that published Pilgrimage: The Toronto C.S. Lewis Society (a magazine on Lewis and the Inklings in the 1980s-1990s, final edition 2009). The Canadian C.S. Lewis Journal: The Inklings, Their Friends & Predecessors that closed shop Autumn 2001 (lasted almost 30 years, 100 publications) was, in its last decade, published on the West Coast. But, it was with the founding of The Inklings Institute of Canada at Trinity Western University that a more mature and integrated vision of the Inklings came into being. The publication of The Inklings and Culture is the well-birthed child of such fine parenting.

The fact I took in Lewis and the Inklings with my mother’s milk, and, in some small way, contributed to The Inklings and Culture, means my decades-long journey (from the earliest years) was amply rewarded by heeding and reading the many and polyphonic voices in this well-tuned Inklings symphony.

The Inklings and Culture: A Harvest of Scholarship from the Inklings Institute of Canada is, indeed, a harvest and feast of a read. The tome is divided into 4 parts and 27 chapters. Each part is packed with insights and probes that make for creative reads and varied interpretations of the pure gold of Inklings life and thought: Part I: Literary Influences, Part II: The Christian Imagination, Part III: Artistic Responses, and Part IV: Contemporary and Theological Issues are not to be missed.

Most of the Inkling worthies step on front stage (MacDonald, Lewis, Sayers, Chesterton, Williams, Tolkien, and Barfield – some more obviously Inkling than others) and other lesser-known writers and artists who historically anticipated or had affinities with the Inklings in direct and indirect ways (Charlotte Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Sewell, Bede Griffiths, and Reinhold Niebuhr are also mentioned and discussed).

Lewis decidedly leads the pack of articles with 15 of the 27 reflections dedicated directly to him, whereas Tolkien is featured in 5 articles and Sayers in 3 of the essays. MacDonald, Chesterton, Williams, and Barfield are momentarily on stage. But, there can be no doubt that Lewis is the main actor that speaks his speech well – not trippingly on the tongue as some do. The quality of essays and themes covered are of a high level and not to be missed. There can be no doubt that Hilder, Pearson, and Van Dyke have done Canada well in their harvest of scholarship. The Canadian Inklings children have now matured as well-rounded, comprehensive, and creative adults, the table spread a bounty not to miss, much nourishment in the feast. I might also add that Hilder’s “Introduction” and Van Dyke’s “Chronology” make the tome a greater, grander, and fuller bounty not to miss.   

There can be no doubt those who anticipated the Inklings (MacDonald, Chesterton) and the Inklings did, in their unique way, unconceal, and by doing so, reveal a mother lode of mythic, imaginative, and literary gold within the Western and Christian Tradition that had been somewhat concealed by a hyper form of right of centre Enlightenment rationalism and scientism. It was this healthy and full-bodied Christian romanticism and humanism that was the genius of the Inklings and why their presence ever persists to inform, instruct and point the way to finer and fitter trails worth the taking. There can be no doubt that The Inklings and Culture is Canadian scholarship at its evocative best and the impact of such a hefty tome will linger for many a decade and be a library from which future Inkling scholars will turn to slake a deeper thirst, the wine full-bodied and palette tasty.

Ron Dart