Hospitality and Floods

 

This is another place marker post. 

I've been taking a class at the Davenant Institute studying The Chronicles of Narnia. I took it in part to push me along with the Hospitality and Lament project, but also because the professor, Dr. Jason Leporjavi, used Narnia Code by Michael Ward. Narnia Code is the popular version of Planet Narnia, and I have long wanted to discuss it with others. I'm writing this post as a marker for ideas that solidified or arose from the class that I will explore further in later posts.

1) While reading Ward's Planet Narnia around 2010, I expected to see a connection between Jupiter and his role as defender of the practice of hospitality. In Ward's work, I did not find a reference to Jupiter and hospitality. You see a similar role in Ancient Greek society based on Zeus as a defender/punisher/rewarder of hospitality or xenia. This was the cause of the whole Trojan War. Xenia was the practice of hospitality that includes responsibilities of both host and guest in the practice. More on that later. 

2) Sometime in the past, I made a connection between Ovid's poem Baucis and Philemon and the Dimbles in That Hideous Strength. Common to both was an older childless couple who practiced hospitality in its most life-giving form. Offering food, shelter, and fellowship in their poverty and childlessness. I had not connected until I recently re-read both was the common destruction by flood of those the leaders and their town for the leaders' corruption of, dismissal of, and lack of hospitality. Flood is an archetype of the destruction of wantonly corrupt societies going back to the oldest stories in antiquity, including the Jewish/Christian story. I also connected during my re-reading between the couple becoming oak trees at their death and Hermes, who, along with Jupiter, visited Baucis and Philemon. My other connection was to see that the Beavers in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe could be based on Baucis and Philemon. Both are childless, poor, and gracious in hospitality. I see here three couples who, in their poverty and childlessness, did not become bitter for childlessness and poverty are real sorrows. Instead, their woes became the ground where humility and hospitality flourished.  

3)When writing a paper for the Narnia class on the role of myth in Lewis's writing and thought, I began to see that Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader became a different boy because myth worked in him; not because as his mother thought from the influence of the Pevensie children. By participatory knowledge, he learned to look along the sunbeam when he traveled on the Dawn Treader instead of looking at the world. This will all make sense when I edit the paper for posting here.

The next post will be on the foundation of hospitality and lament, God as Good. 

Space and Abundance

 “Small events, observed with generous curiosity, yield epiphanies.” *

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

I am a summer gal. I love everything about it, including the heat and humidity. Not the hot 95 degrees hell heat. Just the normal hammock-napping, fresh tomato sandwich, cicada night-sounds summer heat. Late summer, there is peace unlike any other time of year sitting in the evenings at the pasture's edge, watching the slanted light of sunset gild dragonfly wings. September brought cool fall nights and warm summer days, turning the pasture golden where the early morning dew bends the grasses, dragonflies sit atop tall seed heads, and silver spider webs sway in the cool morning air. My husband had always mowed the acre and a half pasture every few weeks. In his absence, caring for his dad during Covidtide, the grasses grew tall, and we let it go. It gave him less to do when he would return home for short stays, and I had always wondered if birds and other animals would make good use of it if left fallow. In short, they did. 

The deer had plenty to graze and, for the most part, stayed away from my yard. The fawns and does lay near the edges of the pasture, napping during a steady misty rain without fear from coyotes or my curious presence. Flocks of goldfinches, during their spring and fall migrations, made quick work of dried seed heads and were drawn to my feeders. This year, two wild turkey hens set up residence with their eleven chicks. Their numbers are fewer now, probably due to raptors, Cooper’s Hawk, Mississippi Kite, and Red-Shouldered Hawk, who recognized the pasture's abundance as well. Watching all of this, I rarely felt alone or deprived during those solitary months.

When winter came, the pasture provided in a way I could not imagine. Winter’s cold added to the rest of the overwintering birds dark-eyed juncos, a species that only visits during that season. It’s a small sparrow-sized bird, with dark-slate uppers and a gray-white chest preferring to eat seed that falls on the ground below bird feeders. They are often harbingers of imminent snowfall that provides a backdrop that highlights their delicate beauty.

One particularly bitterly cold morning in February, when temperatures were below zero and snow covered everything, I bundled up to walk the puppy down the long gravel drive that borders the pasture. The prolonged bitter temperatures only added to the isolation I felt on this silent, gray morning. Birds, my faithful visitors, had disappeared from their feeders. As we quietly walked, I heard faint rustlings and saw the grasses stir and then watched as flocks of sparrows and dark-eyed juncos rose quickly above the pasture where they had gathered underneath in caves of snow-laden grasses. So, that’s where they were. Our "neglect" of the pasture gave shelter to them and granted me an unexpected and welcome sight. 

I planned none of it. How could I? I didn’t know then birds could burrow and shelter in grasses. Even if I had known, I’m far from being able to predict during the summer, when we let the pasture grow, birds and others would need it in a mid-winter polar vortex, much less herd the birds to safety. It happened on its own, due to a little intentional neglect and plenty of curiosity on my part. I only gave space.

You Shall Know

You shall know suffering and grief, and suffering and grief shall make you odd.

With apologizes to Saint Flannery.

Working Together

When I began making the connection between the practices of hospitality and lament and discussing it with others, I quickly realized that I needed to explain those words. Often the word “hospitality” conjured images of a table set with pristine linens, fine china, silver, and candles. Beautiful as that can be, it was a limited image and far from the images I hoped to encourage. Similarly, "lament" recalled images of an unbridled display of grief. I didn’t want either set of images to hinder others who wished to learn more about these practices. I found that some definitions and illustrations were either too terse, lengthy, or vague to be helpful. As providence would have it, Alan Jacobs came to my aid.  Some of his most recent blog posts were extremely helpful not only in providing apt descriptions for these practices but in spurring a meaningful connection between hospitality and lament. 

Jacobs is working on a series titled Invitation and Repair. In one of his recent posts in this series he discusses the use of similes saying, "Maybe that’s what humanistic thought is essentially: a search for new similes, new ways of perceiving the familiar — better to appreciate it when it deserves appreciation and better to change it when it requires changing.“ This was what I was looking for, similes for hospitality and lament. Words flexible enough to give me new ways to explain the practices and allow others new ways to envision and embody those practices. In his next post, I found those similes and meaningful connections between hospitality and lament. 

In his post titled, not giving up, Jacobs explained, "One way to describe the Invitation and Repair project is to say that it’s for people who haven’t given up." He goes on to give examples of various institutions and how they have given up their good purpose. Those good purposes, he says, require the hard, patient work of those who do not give up. This idea is easily connected to both hospitality and lament. Those who practice hospitality and lament commit to hard, patient work, knowing there will be temptations to give up.  Both practices require physical, emotional, and spiritual stamina which are often tested due to the frequency and intensity of the work. 

Jacobs goes on to say in doing the work of inviting and repairing, "we manifest hope: we look towards a future of cooperative endeavor — cooperative discovery, cooperative healing."* There was the connection I had been looking for between hospitality and lament, hope. The two practices work in a cooperative endeavor to manifest hope. When hope is initiated and supported within hospitality, then the practice of lament can work within and toward hope and healing. If the hard, patient works of lament and hospitality don’t collaborate, and if hospitality and lament surrender to the temptation to give up, hope and healing are forfeited. Hospitality and lament must work in collaboration for the discovery of hope and healing.

And what of those similes?  Well, I saw that hospitality offers an invitation of hope to those who seek, in their lament, to repair hope grown tired or lost along the way. So, invitation and repair seem at this point to be apt similes for hospitality and lament. 

*This echoes Andy Crouch's suggestion that lament is the seedbed of creativity, but that is an upcoming post. 

Why?

Why? Why put these ideas out here? For one it is a way of me thinking through how hospitality, fully practiced, tills the ground to allow the gospel of Christ to be heard and lived in, especially those places of lament.  

A friend of mine and I were texting back and forth a few months ago about an idea I had for post-Covidtide. It involves clearing a path and setting up space beside a stream, a place where small groups or individuals could come for a day to slow down, sit, pray, think, reflect, and lament. Perhaps some of these posts will be provided to use as a guide if needed. While it will be years, if ever, before we understand the impacts this time has had on all of us, the time is ripe for some to walk down that path and sit quietly. Some have lost loved ones, jobs, money, time with family and friends. We have all experienced an overwhelming sense of instability at times. But loss and uncertainty, as with good fortune, is best lived with others. True no one can experience or live loss for you, but we can share it with each other. 

 

Between The Lion's Paws - Laying Down a Marker

PNG Pic Lion

I'm following in the footsteps of Alan Jacob in the way that a child does her father on a sandy beach. She attempts and misses but continues in belief that he knows where he is headed or least, he has an idea. Why I am choosing to share this project on my blog can best be expressed in this post  where Alan explain the difference between the blogosphere and blogging.  Specifically, he contends that blogging can be dialogical:

... I post a thought; later, I return to it with an update; someone responds, and I incorporate their thoughts into a new post that links to them and to the original – basically, what I am doing right now. Note also that blogging, when done in this fashion and in this spirit, is also seriously dialogical, and I think there is a close connection between a dialogue-friendly medium and a forgiving medium. More on that another time, perhaps.

In this blog post he writes of a new project, saying that he is  "Just laying down a marker here, by way of a beginning."

And so, I do the same. Laying down a marker, by beginning. More accurately continuing and combining several themes I've read about, mulled over, and noticed connections between for over ten years now. It's time to put the pieces on the table, see if they fit and if they do how.  If they don't at least I will know.

The themes I've worked with are lament, suffering, hesed, the goodness of the Lord, hospitality, and The Chronicles of Narnia. Subsequent posts will list resources and initial thoughts of these themes and others. While at times lament will take a prominent seat, it is only because we have lost this God-given practice, and I am convinced, as you will see from others as well, one we need to recover quickly.

First, I am indebted to Michael Ward for sparking this line of thinking via passages in his brilliant book Planet Narnia. Ward makes a convincing argument for his theory that each of the Narnia books corresponds with a planetary influence properly understood within medieval cosmology. You can watch here for a summary of that argument. While living through a season where many if not most of my beliefs about grief and suffering, and the goodness of God were challenged and dismantled, this passage from the chapter "Saturn" helped to begin a rebuilding. (Saturn being a vehicle to express the sorrows of this life.)

Despair or outrage at crookedness only makes sense of one has a notion of the straight, and that notions could not have arisen if everything were bent or even if everything were dualistically good and bad, for dualism is a truncated metaphysic which cannot account for the natural human preference for happiness over sorrow. Saturn with his plagues and pestilences therefore cannot be sovereign, Indeed, it is only by virtue of his deferral to Jove that Saturn can exert his true influence, making his patients into contemplatives who see beyond sorrow. 

It was in re-reading the Narnia stories with his theory in mind that I noticed that each book begins with a lamentable state.  A state with hints of Saturnine influence that could and did lead to expressions of lament. But the more surprising element began to appear on subsequent readings. Without the presence of Jovian hospitality (Jupiter being the god who presides over hospitality, read the story here),  true lament could not occur and accomplish the work it is given. 

Said another way, from a  psalm that I came to learn is a psalm of hospitality,

Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

    He makes me lie down in green pastures,

he leads me beside quiet waters,

    he refreshes my soul.

He guides me along the right paths

    for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk

    through the darkest valley,

I will fear no evil,

    for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

    they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me

    in the presence of my enemies.

You anoint my head with oil;

    my cup overflows.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me

    all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord.

Psalms 23 George Herbert

The 23 Psalme.

THe God of love my shepherd is, And he that doth me feed: While he is mine, and I am his, What can I want or need? He leads me to the tender grasse, Where I both feed and rest; Then to the streams that gently passe: In both I have the best. Or if I stray, he doth convert And bring my minde in frame: And all this not for my desert, But for his holy name. Yea, in deaths shadie black abode Well may I walk, not fear: For thou art with me; and thy rod To guide, thy staff to bear. Nay, thou dost make me sit and dine, Ev’n in my enemies sight: My head with oyl, my cup with wine Runnes over day and night. Surely thy sweet and wondrous love Shall measure all my dayes; And as it never shall remove, So neither shall my praise.

Lament as praise

Walter Brueggemann wrote here that lament is a form of praise.

The loss of lament in our worship and the need to regain the practice

Lament. This has been something I have been reading about, mulling over, and beginning to think through as a practice.  At the very least we need some of the older hymns that acknowledge our struggles and need of Him.

I have watched a friend in pain struggle painfully evident on her face when only praise music is offered in the worship service. I have had severe relationship breaks that seemly have gone unanswered and no amount of "praise music" can replace the wrestling and healing my soul needed and still needs.  My sister recently became a widow at 58 and I sat with her in services that only emphasize the good God gives us, with no mention of the struggles/heartaches/knock-you-on-your-face hardships this life includes, and how it did not comfort, but added to the grief she carried. I felt like it taunted her. I watched a young mother deal with a lifelong diagnosis for her child and her feeling the silence of God.

It is just, right and good when we declare His goodness, but unless we see that goodness juxtaposed with life's hardships, that declaration rings shallow and strips His goodness of the depth it deserves and the slow transformative healing His goodness will bring. Because it is slow transformation, weekly lament around our sins and sorrows with our local church community, brought to Jesus as we partake of the Eucharist, will be the place that forgiveness (for sins), healing (for the brokenness we experience), and fellowship (to show us we are not alone in our sins and sorrows) are experienced and can do that transformative work. As His word is declared, we hear and experience His goodness.

The older I get, the more I see the need for regular, corporate lament and quite frankly the more frustrated I am at my generation (I'm almost 60) for ignoring, dismissing, or making peripheral the weekly practice of lament and necessary taking of the Eucharist.

My plan is to use this space to record what I read, hear, see and think. No answers, just writing to know what I think and to learn.

Psalm 77

To the choirmaster: according to Jeduthun. A Psalm of Asaph.

I cry aloud to God,
    aloud to God, and he will hear me.
In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;
    in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
    my soul refuses to be comforted.
When I remember God, I moan;
    when I meditate, my spirit faints. Selah

You hold my eyelids open;
    I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old,
    the years long ago.
I said, “Let me remember my song in the night;
    let me meditate in my heart.”
    Then my spirit made a diligent search:
“Will the Lord spurn forever,
    and never again be favorable?
Has his steadfast love forever ceased?
    Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
    Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” Selah

Then I said, “I will appeal to this,
    to the years of the right hand of the Most High.”

I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
    yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
I will ponder all your work,
    and meditate on your mighty deeds.
Your way, O God, is holy.
    What god is great like our God?
You are the God who works wonders;
    you have made known your might among the peoples.
You with your arm redeemed your people,
    the children of Jacob and Joseph. Selah

When the waters saw you, O God,
    when the waters saw you, they were afraid;
    indeed, the deep trembled.
The clouds poured out water;
    the skies gave forth thunder;
    your arrows flashed on every side.
The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind;
    your lightnings lighted up the world;
    the earth trembled and shook.
Your way was through the sea,
    your path through the great waters;
    yet your footprints were unseen.
You led your people like a flock
    by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

English Standard Version (ESV) The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

The End of This Story and the Beginning of All the Others

   "'Understand, then, that it would have healed her; but not to your joy or hers. The day would have come when both you and she would have looked back and said it would have been better to die in that illness.'
   And Digory could say nothing, for tears choked him and he gave up all hopes of saving his Mother's life; but at the same time he knew that the Lion knew what would have happened, and that there might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death."

The Magician's Nephew

C. S. Lewis