Re-united with Old Friends

Sunday afternoon the movers dropped off all the things from my house and office in Georgia that I thought would be useful or fun to have in the 1000 square foot apartment here in Orlando that I will be sharing for the foreseeable future with my husband and youngest son. About two thirds of the boxes that left Jasper actually went into storage here in a weather-controlled storage unit a couple of miles from the apartment.

Two walls of our bedroom (apart from doors and windows) are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. For the first time in many years, I have nearly all of my "literature" books close at hand. Those who saw my FaceBook post yesterday know that I was struggling to focus on getting all those books on the shelves in some orderly fashion, when what I really wanted to do was to read, to re-acquaint myself with old friends, to make another attempt at making friends with some of the books about which I've had "good intentions" (sometimes for decades!), to make new friends, even to have a good argument with some of the writers with whom I have a bone to pick.

My present unemployed status has given me an amazing opportunity to read widely without having to produce any "work product." No sermons, no adult education class outlines, no formal continuing education, college, or seminary papers. This gives me a degree of freedom which is making my head spin. This is more freedom than I know what to do with! My Hebrew Bible and several grammars and lexica (lexicons??) are on the shelf, as is my side-by-side Greek and Latin New Testament. I could re-establish my former habit of reading the Daily Office lectionary in Hebrew and Greek. Volume 2 of my Oxford edition of War and Peace, which I read on the Schwinn Airdyne one winter when the little ones were napping and the big ones were at school is right there, beckoning. I remember spending EXTRA time on the stationary bike because I got so caught up in Tolstoy. But I lent my father the first volume. I think Volume 1 is in the boxes of books from my parents' home that I put into storage. If we're talking Big Projects, Anthony Powell's series, Dance to the Music of Time is on the shelves, too, as is Proust.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are some small books that I loved and that are worthy of further attention. Marguerite Yourcenar's novellas are surely worth a second read. And all that poetry! Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, R.S. Thomas, Billy Collins, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman (whose work I've barely spent any time with!). And a bunch of Shakespeare plays I'd love to read again.

I'd like to spend some more time with Augustine's City of God and On the Trinity. I remember once discovering in Trinity a passage in which Augustine is listing the amazing things in the world, including a friend of his who can fart tunes. I've never been able to find it again. (Did I dream it??)

I'm ready to re-consider the works of some of the feminist theologians I discovered over the years and put aside to read "when I had time." In particular, in light of my growing interest in Mary, the Mother of Jesus, I'm looking forward to sitting with these sisters, arguing with them, being instructed by them, being disturbed by them, growing and stretching as I consider their work.

Something a couple of days ago sent me to C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce. It is short, brilliant, stylized, with all the virtues and flaws of Lewis. I found my heart rejoicing as Lewis writes of the possibility of the most ordinary human beings, basking in God's love and goodness, yielding to God's grace. Of non-Orthodox writers I've read, he perhaps comes closest to being an exponent of the Orthodox notion of "divinization." Lewis is also at his best in his trenchant capturing of the banality of evil in domestic dialogues between "well-meaning" spouses and old friends who cling to old hurts, who elevate "mother love" or romantic love to idolatrous heights. He's spot on, and though his dialogues are dated and very regional, one can easily recognize the types in 21st century America. His image of heaven as infinitely more "real" than Hell is marvelous, as is his way of summarizing the limitations both of the doctrines of free will, choice, and predestination in light of the perspectival problems of time and eternity. Lewis puts into the mouth of his Guide for his tour of Heaven, George MacDonald, these magnificent words:

"Ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "N future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. and that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven," and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.
...There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened."

I, like George MacDonald himself, hope that salvation is universal, and that nobody ultimately chooses Hell. But I see Lewis's point. The choice must be there, truly offered.

Anyhow, reading this short work by Lewis makes me think I need to add Dante's Divine Comedy to my "read soon" list. I have Robert Pinsky's translation of Inferno.