A Spell for Refreshment of the Spirit

Death Defeated: The Nightingale

2012-02-01T21:25:00.000-08:00

"The Emperor and the Nightingale" is my nomination for the most-nearly-perfect short story everwritten.

Jenny Lind-- wikimedia commons

Hans Christian Andersen is one of my favorite authors, as I mention elsewhere. This tale is in part a tribute to the Swedish singer Jenny Lind and her unaffected performances in a musical world that valued a lot of frippery.

This story is spiritually refreshing in many ways—the cleverbut gentle satire, the sheer beauty of the imagery, but most of all because inthe end, Death is defeated.

A while ago I acquired the complete DVD set of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre. The Nightingale is one of the best episodes of this brilliant series, and but for some unnecessary but harmless embellishments is faithful to the original. Mick Jagger as the world-weary Emperor hits just the right note, if you’ll pardon that pun….

The Logismoi blog features a post about the Elder Porphyrios and his encounter with a nightingale. The elder relates:

After a while the silence was broken by a sweet, intoxicating voice singing and praising the Creator. I looked. I couldn’t discern anything. Eventually, on a branch opposite me I saw a tiny bird. It was a nightingale. I listened as the nightingale trilled unstintingly, its throat puffed out to bursting in sustained song. The microscopic little bird was stretching back its wings in order to find power to emit those sweetest of tones, and puffing out its throat to produce that exquisite voice. If only I had a cup of water to give it to drink and quench its thirst!

Tears came to my eyes—the same tears of grace that flowed so effortlessly and that I had acquired from Old Dimas [an old Russian Athonite hermit]. It was the second time I had experienced them.

. . . ‘Why did they [nightingales] puff out their throats to bursting?’ The purpose was worship, to sing to their Creator, to worship God. That’s how I explained it.[2]

Writes the poet John Keats: "Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird!"

Indeed not. Beauty and worship are deathless.

A Wrinkle in Time 50th Anniversary

2012-01-17T20:15:00.000-08:00

This is a 'me too' book-- one that my oldest and closest friend author Linda Finlayson and I both tagged as 'favorite' when we were in I think about grade seven. We've been sharing our favorite books, including our own, ever since.

Wrinkle clearly owes a little something to the Narnia books but it is a book for a newer generation with a twist all its own. The young heroes travel to a strange world, aided by powerful supernatural beings, where they must help overcome the rule of an evil being. In the end, it all comes down to love....

Let's not bother about the TV movie based on the book-- Madeleine L'Engle herself said "I expected it to be bad, and it is." I will however say that some years ago I saw a wonderful stage adaptation by Vancouver's own Pacific Theatre.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the book, which is the first in a series. There are live stage events in places I wish I could get to....but anyway, we can all access the net, where, for example, Tor.com blogger Mari Ness is celebrating with The Madeleine L'Engle Re-Read. Sounds like a good idea!

I am so excited to hear that there is a graphic novel version of the book due out later in 2012. Here's a page from it. It is being done by Hope Larson. I guess it is time to start my wish list for next Christmas already!

A Book to Refresh One's Spirit

2012-01-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

"The anti-hero is the prototype of despair. The hero flings aloft the banner of hope.....If we thought that there was nothing but misery, degradation and darkness and above all perpetual defeat, what would be the use of trying to feed or clothe ourselves, raise children, and put a penny by to purchase a book to refresh one's spirit* and fortify one's hopes?"-- Paul Gallico, "Aim for the Heart"

*Emphasis added by me.

Paul Gallico is one of those writers I am going to read more of someday...but meanwhile, his Thomasina (aka in movie form as The Three Lives of Thomasina) is a family favorite. He is also the author of such diverse tales as The Poseidon Adventure, The Snow Goose, and Flowers for Mrs. Harris, among others.

Some find Gallico overly
sentimental. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I am personally the opposite of that. Opposites attracting as they do, of course, I picked an arch-sentimentalist for a husband. He goes 'awww'! when the characters in our favorite TV shows finally get together romantically, and wishes they would take his advice ("Dad! They AREN'T real!" And if they were, well, too often people ask his advice and then don't take it after all. Ask any clergyman, it's a common phenomenon.)

Anyway, Gallico in the article quoted above talks about how he writes a story. In three short pages he does get to the heart of it, which is pretty simple-- think up human and likeable characters, and then "try them almost beyond endurance."

You can see that trial in this still from the movie Thomasina. Mary Ruadh and her friends are holding a funeral for her beloved cat Thomasina-- who has been 'put to sleep' by Mary Ruadh's own father, the vet, because he is too busy with another injured creature and thinks it is not worth trying to save her.

Gallico concludes his essay with the title, "Aim for the heart." This may be sentiment, but it is not sentimentalism for its own sake. As he says, it is all about hope. If your spirit needs refreshing, let me recommend a reading of Thomasina or its very faithful film adaptation (with the bonus that it stars the wonderful Patrick McGoohan as the frozen-hearted vet who only thaws when he nearly loses his daughter.)

Refreshing Life Lessons from Jane Austen

2011-12-10T12:30:00.000-08:00

Listening to people's stories is the nicest thing you can do for them.

(from "Mansfield Park")

This pic is from the most wonderful slide show at The Huffington Post. Author Bill Deresiewicz has created a list of "Twelve Life Lessons You Can Learn from Jane Austen". Naturally I picked the one about 'stories' to highlight here:

"A person's story is the most personal thing about them, and paying attention to it is just about the most important thing you can do. Our stories are what make us human, and listening to someone else's stories--entering into their feelings, validating their experiences--is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity."

Serendipitously, I just happened on a post that dovetails nicely with this, from the Children's Book Quotes Blog Check it out, one of my favorite blogs.

And now excuse me, I am off to my public library's website to request Mr. Deresiewicz's book, A Jane Austen Education :

Sometimes, you can't make these things up....

2011-12-02T13:25:00.001-08:00

It sounds like a sappy Christmas movie, but it's real and it's recent. This story is clipped from the website of the Orthodox Church in America's Diocese of New York and New Jersey:

t was a sad day for the faithful of Saints Peter and Paul Church in Buffalo NY when an intruder forcibly entered their holy house and escaped with a parish treasure: a silver encased Holy Gospel book dating back to 1933. The parish had recently experienced the revitalizing efforts of OPERATION BUFFALO (a diocesan-wide project to revive the 114 year-old parish), the assignment of Father Vlad Zablotskyy as rector, and -- in an expression of gratitude for blessings received -- offered a $250 contribution to support OPERATION ONEONTA. In the midst of such joy and thanksgiving, the theft was the cause of sadness and sorrow. That is, until something ... “a miracle on Ideal Street” ... changed everything.

During the week of Thanksgiving Day, faithful parishioner Steve Camp spotted an appealing sales coupon in the newspaper. It looked like a good deal, so he clipped the coupon. Although not in a particularly good mood, Steve decided to take a short walk to the corner store where the coupon could be “redeemed” (a word that would prove to have profound meaning). It was not a place he would have gone that day; in fact, it is located in the direction opposite of the way he would normally walk. Holding the coupon in his hand, Steve decided the “good deal” was worth a journey into that area “on the other side” of his world.

On his journey he was approached by a young man. "Do you belong to that church on Ideal?" Steve didn’t recognize the young man and was not expecting a conversation at that moment.“What?” The young man repeated, “Do you belong to that church on Ideal?" “Yes,” Steve replied,“I do.” The two men stood face-to-face for a few moments, gazing into one another’s eyes. The young man seemed very sad. It looked to Steve as if the young man’s eyes were about to cry. Tears began to fall from those sorrowful eyes as he began to speak. “I can’t live with what I did,” he said, “and I don’t want any reward.” The young man spoke with great emotion. He seemed desperate. “I only want to make things right and return the book I stole from the church.”

Then a miraculous thing happened. Both men broke down in tears. They hugged each other. It was, according to Steve, an emotional couple of minutes. The young man begged for forgiveness. “All can be forgiven,” said Steve as he consoled him, “you are doing the right thing ... thank-you and God bless you.”

Filled with joy and relief, Steve raced to the rectory to show the Holy Gospel

book to Father Vlad.

On the Sunday following Thanksgiving Day, the faithful of Saints Peter and Paul Church venerated their precious Holy Gospel book. In his moving sermon, Father Vlad spoke about giving thanks, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption. There were tears of joy upon the faces of the faithful; and a special kind of blessing through their encounter with an unknown young man.

Into Great Silence

2011-09-26T12:32:00.000-07:00

More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this 'something' that is born of silence. If you only practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence...after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence. - St. Isaac of Syria

Last Lent I posted a Facebook note beginning with this quote from St. Isaac of Syria. Just recently I got around to watching this wonderful film about the life of the monks of the Great Abbey of Chartreuse, Into Great Silence.

George MacDonald, in "The Hands of the Father" in Unspoken Sermons describes Heaven as "...the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence..."

When St. Isaac says "in the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent', he could have been talking about what it is like to view this film. More than ever in our constantly connect, cacophonous world, we seldom know anything like a real silence. And so it is no surprise that we ourselves have a hard time remaining silent.

The Dragon is smaller than you think.....

2011-04-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

Photo from

Wikimedia Commons

By Michail Jungierek

[GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0

or CC-BY-SA-2.5

As it's almost St. George's Day, I've been posting links to my medieval fantasy story, Light One Candle. In that story I have an intervention by this very popular martial Saint of the middle ages. His own story has collected many embellishments over the centuries, and the best known details are the romanticized ones about the rescue of the princess. His historical roots are briefly summarized here.

Whatever the factual origin of what later became the dragonslaying legend of St. George, in the Eastern Church we are often taught that the spiritual truth about dragon-slaying has to do with what we call 'the passions'-- by which we do not mean simply strong feelings, but rather the inflamed sinful impulses of us fallen folk that lead us astray and enslave us. George, who was in fact an early Christian martyr, is a great exemplar of heroic conquest of these impulses.

While writing my medieval fantasy, a particular aspect of the iconography of St. George really struck me: the dragon just wasn't that big. Look at the 15th C. bas-relief to the left, and the Russian icon below. These are just two examples of George-and-dragon art. Nearly all the images I could find had similar relative sizes of the figures. And I pondered on this as I had my fictional main character observe this fact about a stone statue of St. George in a mysterious woodland chapel. "Where's the great feat in slaying a dragon of that size?" he mocks.

The pious knight who has led him to the chapel says to him, "Do you think...that the dragon was so small at the beginning of the battle?"

That is what encourages and refreshes me about the legend and iconography of St. George. Sometimes whatever dragon we are facing looms impossibly large in our eyes. But if we fight the good fight, with the help of God and the saints, it gradually dwindles. A happy thought as we have now completed the battle of Lent and are approaching the darkest days of Holy Week.

PLANET NARNIA: A Jovial Book

2011-04-05T17:12:00.000-07:00

I didn't think anything could make me love Narnia more than I already do, and have done for probably (ULP!) almost fifty years....but this book did!

Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, does for the Chronicles of Narnia what John Granger's Hidden Key to Harry Potter did for the Harry Potter books, and more.

Can you imagine that there is a deeper dimension, a more intricately-woven structure than we ever supposed to the Chronicles of Narnia?

I don't blame you if you are skeptical. But author and Lewis scholar Michael Ward deals with the objections very thoroughly. The real trouble we have is, we just do not live in the same thought universe that medieval people did...but which Lewis moved and worked in like a native.

I have a couple of very small quibbles with the book, but honestly I don't want to bother putting them in this post-- it would be unfair to do that without going into properly proportionate detail about all the many things I think are wonderful about the book, and I haven't the time to do that just now. And the quibbles I have are not with the author's thesis.

Please note, this is serious work of scholarly criticism, meant for the academic audience. I found it very well and clearly written (clarity of expression is one of Lewis's own greatest virtues) but it is thick with footnotes, references to medieval and classical authors, quotes and asides in various languages dead and living. So if you find the prospect of such a bit daunting, fear not-- the author has also written a book called The Narnia Code which advances the same basic argument but without all the academic bells and whistles.

Not much of a reader? Then you may just want to check out the documentary presentation The Narnia Code, by director Norman Stone.

I've been wanting Planet Narnia since I first heard about it; finally got it this past Christmas and have just read it in the past few weeks. I'm eager to go back and read the Chronicles again with this new appreciation for their structure, and also to re-read the Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and more of Lewis's works. And I really want to finally get hold of The Discarded Image itself.

Oh, and if you don't get the title of the post--- read the book and all will be made clear!

Turning Dirt into Art

2011-03-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

I'm still pondering how to apply the message of this one! This guy recreates classic works of art in the dirt on cars.

There is a lot of dirt around the internet, as well as in offline life. People who somehow stand out because of their position, or because they dare to stand up against something wrong, are prime targets for mudslinging. How exactly do you make art out of that?

I've never been one to deliberately put any of the mud I've encountered in my life into my fiction. Some writers and artists like to work out their troubles in their art, finding it cathartic. I just find that the deep involvement needed for a creative endeavour fixes any pain and unpleasantness deeper in my soul. Besides, as a clergy wife, I need to err on the side of being circumspect. So, while I share any novelist's amusement with this slogan,

I wouldn't really go there...however tempted! :-)

It still remains to be seen how to turn dirt into art, or lead into gold......But meanwhile I do find this artist's approach refreshing!

PS: edit.....I was adding a "Popular Posts" gadget to my main blog, and the top one that came up is one from a couple of years ago that is sort of the flip side of this one....Snark and sarcasm can certainly be one artistic response to mudslinging, but I am pretty sure that a little of it goes a long way....

The King's Speech: Humility and Daring

2011-03-07T18:10:00.000-08:00

Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all. ~William Temple

There's a lot to like about this year's big Oscar-winner, The King's Speech. Lots of better-informed people than I have said many things about such aspects as the outstanding performances by Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth, so I won't just repeat those kinds of things. To me, one spiritually-refreshing thing about the story really stands out, and that is the great combination of humility and daring.

Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who helps "Bertie" (George VI) overcome his speech difficulties, is from the first encounter respectful but firm with his royal client. He insists on first names only-- not only for himself, but also for everyone he helps, whether they are children or the man who is forced by circumstances to ascend the throne. At first glance, this radically egalitarian custom might appear anything but humble, but Logue's self-effacing manner make it clear-- he has a willingness to serve, to help others that dates from his time helping shell-shocked Australian soldiers recover after the First World War. And his respect and compassion for those he can help is universal. He has a quiet self-confidence, and no need to tear down anyone else in order to elevate himself.

Still, in that still very class-conscious era, it is daring to insist that a royal meet a lowly Australian in a grimy-looking basement office, and communicate on a first-name basis with the therapist. But Logue holds his position without ever forcing it, and eventually Bertie comes around.

Bertie too has a certain humility-- indeed he has suffered humili-ation all his life, a lefthander forced to write with his right and developing a crippling stammer under his autocratic and unsympathetic father. But unlike his elder brother, heir apparent David (Edward VIII) Bertie too has a servant's heart, and a willingness to undertake the heavy burden of the kingship, even handicapped as he is by his speech difficulties. He too steps forth in daring, to comfort and inspire his people in the time of great testing.

But I think the scene that illustrates the combination of humility and daring most vividly is the one where Logue insists he and the king-elect be left alone in Westminster Abbey to rehearse the coronation speech. At one point Bertie turns around to find his speech therapist comfortably draped across the throne. Cheeky? A little. But Logue never makes it about himself. His daring to take such a liberty is all to get Bertie motivated. The act is, on the surface, disrespectful to tradition, but Logue's manner is never disrespectful. As the William Temple quote above has it, Humility is freedom from thinking about oneself at all.

some more enjoyable links about the story:

Logue bio

behind the movie

Comparing book and movie

Stammering Association

The Refreshment of Genuineness

2011-03-02T18:51:00.000-08:00

Here's an excerpt from just the sort of post I would have written about Keats, if I knew Keats the way my daughter knows Keats:

Keats was instrumental in my switch from Theatre to English Literature as a post-secondary focus. At first his tragic life story merely aroused a sort of longing and pity of the sort that can only be manifested in the hormonal tempest of a 16 year-old female, and encourages infatuation. But when that settled, and I was able to take a more sober and educated approach to his poetry, it was his relative innocence and optimism, and most importantly his genuineness which held lasting appeal. His "philosophy" was unpolished and his verse somewhat immature (and occasionally just plain cheesy). But I liked this better than the appalling self-importance and sophistication of the other Romantic poets. Here was a man laying himself open completely to you in all his imperfection and asking you to love him.

Read the rest at her blog

Refreshment of Spirit—send me your ideas!

2011-02-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you think you might be wanting some Lenten refreshment this year, let’s share some ideas!

I’m looking for suggestions for topics, books and films to review, links to refreshing websites.

Tell me what you think of when you hear the phrase “spiritual refreshment”.

If I use your suggestions, I’ll give credit, and link back to your blog or site if you provide the link.

Comment on this thread on Facebook, e-mail me at matdonna at shaw dot ca, or leave a comment on the guestbook tab here at my blog, A Spell for the Refreshment of Spirit. Check out some of the posts below and you’ll see what kind of things I’m looking for.

Refreshment of Bach

2011-02-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

This lovely quote and image are available on products at the Cafe Press Philosophy Shop

As I post this, I am just getting over a stomach bug which has hit my extended family. A number of other indicators suggest a rough Lent ahead.....so as an antidote I am going to do my best to make posts on this blog weekly or more frequently. Hope you will find that they refresh your Lent as well.

TILL WE GET IT RIGHT

2011-01-29T12:07:00.000-08:00

The story is told of a new priest who is assigned to a parish that has a history of bickering and discord. His first homily is on the topic “Love one another”(John 13:34). It sounds good to them. As they get his blessing on the way out of church they say, “Lovely homily, Father.”But next Tuesday the same people are at each other’s throats at the parish council meeting. Father says nothing.

The following Sunday, he gives the same sermon, word for word. Some of the people were asleep last week, so they don’t really notice. A few of them blink and wonder if this new priest is quite all right in the head. But they get his blessing and thank him for the homily anyway as before. During the week, Father is invited to the Sisterhood meeting. They conduct their business, ask Father to pronounce the blessing, and break up for tea. Father is such a quiet sort that some of them forget he’s there and start gossiping about their neighbours. Father says nothing but, you guessed it, he trots out that same sermon at Sunday liturgy, “Love one another.”

This goes on for several more weeks until at last the parish council calls an emergency meeting, with just one item on the agenda. They confront their pastor: “When are we going to get a new sermon, Father?”

Father smiles. “Just as soon as you’ve learned to put this one into practice!”

This same lesson seems to be echoed in the cycle of the Church year. We come to the Church’s New Year every September, and I for one have sometimes wondered—how can anything be “new” when we do it over and over again?

It reminds me of the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day. Murray plays the part of a cynical, egocentric weather reporter assigned to cover the emergence of Punxsutawney Phil, the weather-forecasting groundhog, from his winter den. The Murray character goes through the day in his usual temper, trampling other people’s feelings underfoot like the snow that covers the streets of the town. At day’s end he goes to bed, eager to get back to the big city the next day; but when his alarm rings, strange things begin to happen.

The radio is playing the same song as the day before. And the announcers are talking about Groundhog Day, today, February second! The hapless Murray proceeds through the day in nearly the same manner as the day before, meeting the same people, having virtually the same interactions. He knows beforehand whether the groundhog will see its shadow, knows which kinds of food people will choose to eat....he is living the same day once again.

When the alarm rings next morning and the same song plays on the radio yet again, he knows he is trapped. He begins to experiment, to see what he can change. He begins to be attracted to a co-worker and as a result starts to behave at least a little more politely toward her. Yet once again he awakens the next morning to another rerun of Groundhog Day.

There follows a long and arduous spiritual journey, as all Murray’s efforts lead to no substantive change in the events of the day. He is tempted to despair, and commits “suicide” several days in a row—and still wakes up to yet another Groundhog Day the next morning.

Then he embarks on a mission of self-improvement, and this is where the film reminds me most of the strong ascetic character of Orthodoxy. He becomes disciplined and open-minded, learning to play piano and studying poetry.

But most importantly, he turns his attention away from himself and begins to actively look for opportunities to help other people. In the end, it is the giving and receiving of love that break him free of the endless cycle of Groundhog Day after Groundhog Day.

Some commentators have likened this film to an eastern religious idea of reincarnation, while others have pointed out that the character’s experience resembles purgatory. But our Orthodox calendar gives us this experience of repeating certain events annually, right here in this life, over and over “till we get it right.”

The one imperative for us is the same one expressed by the new priest in the tale we heard, and in Groundhog Day: “Love one another.” It is the message of one of the most famous passages of scripture, the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. Like the man in the movie, I can learn to play the piano, I can do all kinds of good deeds, but whatever my accomplishments, “if I have not love, I am nothing.”

It is a lesson it takes us humans a lifetime to learn, and in God’s mercy the Church guides us through the steps year by year, as we learn the history of God’s love for us in His Incarnation, Death and Resurrection, and of the love of His saints, our examples, in response to His Divine love. Let us keep this lesson in mind, until at last we “get it right”.

-- excerpt from my book Seasons of Grace: Reflections on the Orthodox Church Year

(February 2nd, of course, is also the Feast of the Meeting of Our Lord in the Orthodox Church. A nice post about it is available at Fr. Stephen Freeman's blog

Civility: A Blast from the Past

2011-01-14T13:40:00.000-08:00

Everyone is talking about civility today. I'm not American, so before the tragic shooting recently I hadn't been closely following the ever-deepening political divide south of the border. However, for a long time I have noticed the same deterioration of civility in our society in general.

Today’s articles have reminded me of a refreshing story I have been meaning to post about for some time. It’s Blast from the Past, the 1999 film starring Brendan Fraser as a young man who is raised in isolation in a bomb shelter with 1950’s values and emerges into a rougher, ruder 1990s world at age 30.

Wacky fun ensues, and of course romance (since the young man’s name is Adam, and the woman he meets is named Eve….) But beneath the humour and levity are some fairly profound points. Adam may seem rather naïve to the other characters, but they end up admiring his honourable and respectful behaviour, and find their own attitudes changed by him. Here is an excerpt:

Eve: Now hold on, hold on just a minute! In the first place I do not fall in love with weirdos who ……have perfect table manners!

Troy: You know, I asked him about that. He said, good manners are just a way of showing other people we have respect for them. See, I didn't know that, I thought it was just a way of acting all superior. Oh and you know what else he told me? He thinks I'm a gentleman and you're a lady…I mean, I thought a "gentleman" was somebody that owned horses. But it turns out, his short and simple definition of a lady or a gentleman is, someone who always tries to make sure the people around him or her are as comfortable as possible.

Those lines alone make it one of my favorite films.

If you want more posts on topics related to civility, there are a few on my other blog here

MILLIONS: the Spiritual Refreshment of....Money?

2010-12-17T22:02:00.000-08:00

Don't forget, as often with this blog, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!!!!

Most underappreciated Christmas movie I know! I suppose because it's British and not Hollywood...the quirky tale of a little boy who talks to saints and who suddenly has a giant cache of cash literally dropped on him.......

I could talk about it, but maybe you should just read what the critics say as quoted by Wikipedia (emphasis added by me) :

The film received very positive reviews, earning an 88% "Certified Fresh" approval rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.^[3]

Roger Ebert awarded it a rating of four out of four stars and declared it "one of the best films of the year." He went on to write, ". . . althoughMillions uses special effects and materializing saints, it's a film about real ideas, real issues and real kids. It's not sanitized brainless eye candy. Like all great family movies, it plays equally well for adults—maybe better, since we know how unusual it is." It was on his Top 10 movies of 2005 placing at number 10.^[4]

Richard Roeper, Roger Ebert's co-host on the television show Ebert & Roeper, called it "One of the most stylish and eccentric films about childhood dreams and heartbreaks that I've ever seen."

Leonard Maltin praised the film upon its DVD release, saying "Millions is a winning and unpredictable fable from England that will charm viewers both young and old."^[5]

At the end of the film, Damien and his family give away much of the money to a charity that provides clean water to impoverished communities in Ethiopia. An inspiration to the audience, without making them feel that they've been preached at or manipulated.

The Secret of Kells

2010-10-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting a long time for this animated movie, The Secret of Kells. Wasn't able to see it in theatres, but our mail order DVD arrived the other day. I've only watched it once so far, with a few of the short extra features. I'm especially looking forward to the commentary.

The Book of Kells is a 8th-9th century illuminated Gospel book, now housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, whose website tells us

"The Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin MS 58) is celebrated for its lavish decoration. The manuscript contains the four Gospels in Latin based on a Vulgate text, written on vellum (prepared calfskin), in a bold and expert version of the script known as "insular majuscule".

The place of origin of the Book of Kells is generally attributed to the scriptorium of the monastery founded around 561 by St Colum Cille on Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland. In 806, following a Viking raid on the island which left 68 of the community dead, the Columban monks took refuge in a new monastery at Kells, County Meath. It must have been close to the year 800 that the Book of Kells was written, although there is no way of knowing if the book was produced wholly at Iona or at Kells, or partially at each location."

This is the inspiration for the story told by this Oscar-nominated film, its hero a young boy named Brendan who is fascinated by the art of illumination. His uncle, abbot of the monastery at Kells, a disillusioned former illuminator, is bending all the community's efforts on erecting a wall against the threat of Viking attack. When Brother Aidan, survivor of the massacre at Iona comes seeking refuge and bringing the partially complete gospel book, Brendan must decide whether to face his fears and defy his uncle to help Aidan complete the book. Brendan is aided by a forest spirit and the white cat Pangur Ban (made famous in an ancient Irish poem.)

You know how the word 'awesome' has lost is savour, muddied and worn thin in the mouths of people who wouldn't know awe if it swallowed them whole? It now means something like "very cool, exciting", whereas it used to mean "inspiring awe (reverential fear or wonder)."

'Awesome' is the only word for the Book of Kells. And the film The Secret of Kells holds to that definition of 'awesome'.

Real 'awesome' isn't threatened by a little humour and whimsy either, in both the illuminated manuscript and the film.

In the film, the master illuminator Aidan shows the partially completed book to the wide-eyed young Brendan-- but more than the brilliant and complex pages, it is an empty spot that drives the plot of the film: the page reserved for the CHI-RHO, which Aidan says his successor will have to complete.

I won't tell more of the story, which is an exciting adventure. It is necessary to mention that this is not Disney or Dream Works style animation, but something completely different that ushers us into the world of the illuminated manuscript.

Why the film was titled The Secret of Kells is not immediately apparent. But the Chi-Rho page does hold its own secret, which can be discovered if you do a little research. If you know your Greek at all, CHI-RHO are the first two Greek letters in CHRIST. They look like an X and a P, and when combined they form a monogram, famous as the sign which the Emperor Constantine saw in his vision. The page they are on is from the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, and about the birth of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh coming into the world.

I could write a great deal more about The Secret of Kells, but I think it is best you see it for yourself. You can start with the trailer here.

Because the World should eat like a Hobbit!

2010-09-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.-- Thorinn in The Hobbit

I was hunting for stuff about Bilbo's Birthday. Because of course it's coming up soon. I am partial to the feasting and the cozy feeling involved in such a celebration (and blogged on it once before here) ...though I think I will forgo the excuse to go barefoot.

Anyway, I came across this delightful site:

It's not just recipes for Shire-style fare-- it's also "A small, furry step to ending hunger in our own world. Because the world should eat like a hobbit."

Check out their blog. They have ways you can donate to help relieve hunger. Or just be inspired to help with a local initiative, or you church charitable organization.

Update on Juicy Campus

2010-07-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

Here's some spiritually refreshing news-- an update on an earlier post on this blog:

I am behind the times-- anti-cyberbullying campaigns apparently took their toll on Juicy Campus, the gossip website, a "virtual bathroom wall' for abusive, degrading, and hateful speech."

and when they could not turn a profit any more, the owners shut it down last year!

GOOD NEWS!

Validation

2010-06-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

This post originally appeared on my main writing blog, The Rafters Scriptorium. Now that Refreshment of Spirit is no longer on hiatus, I'm moving this post here, which is the right place for it.

The Refreshment of Spirit blog is about spiritually refreshing stories—the kind that Lucy read in the Magician’s Book in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, after she had been on some rather harrowing adventures, including reading another of the spells in the book that was not so refreshing.

I am not a Pollyanna by any means. But a while back I began to grow weary of the constant negativity and incivility and downright injustice I seemed to be seeing, not just on the evening news but everywhere I went. I don’t think we need to pretend such things don’t exist—quite the opposite. We need to point them out, refuse to let them be swept under the rug, and do what we can about them. Thus was born the Refreshment of Spirit blog, so I could write about the thing I love best in all the world—stories that bring us a little closer to the Author and Redeemer of all.

All good things come from Him, and the stories I love are not always explicitly theological. Indeed, I even sometimes find refreshment in the stories of avowed atheists, because anything good in them comes from the source of all good. All creativity flows from the Creator. The end product may be warped, muddied and distorted, but the jewels that shine through the grime still get their sparkle from Heaven.

Lately there has been talk of the need for civility in human interactions. As I noted in another post, politeness, civility, good etiquette --whatever you choose to call it—while it falls a long way short of the self-sacrificing agape Christians are called to, does enable us to make a start. Decent social behaviour does not make a saint of a sinner any more than tithing can make a generous man of Scrooge; but both can help ease the damage done to other people surrounding the miser or the misanthrope.

As Deacon Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers points out, only God can ultimately ‘validate’ us. But this delightful short film which I found posted on his terrific publishing blog shows one of those ways in which every day life can be transfigured with a small change. T.J. Thyne of Bones stars in this fable as a parking lot attendant who transforms the lives of people who come to him to get ‘validated’. The film is 16 minutes long—I encourage you to take your coffee break to watch it and be refreshed!

....And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown

2009-12-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

I've been working mostly on my Haliwerfolc blog about Saint Cuthbert for the last year, but now my books are handed in to the publisher and will be coming out in 2010.

So the Refreshment of Spirit blog is back with a Christmas post!

Last night we performed our annual ritual of watching A Charlie Brown Christmas. You know it's a classic, and you don't need me to tell you the story. You can find something of the story behind the story in this article.

Most famously, Linus recites for us "What Christmas is all about" from the Gospel of Luke, verses 8 through 14: [King James Version]

"'⁸And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. ⁹And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. ¹⁰And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. ¹¹For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. ¹²And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. ¹³And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, ¹⁴Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'"

Merry Christmas, everyone.

A Spell for Refreshment on Hiatus

2009-02-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

Think of this post as the Wood Between the Worlds. As it says in The Magician's Nephew, "it was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine....not the sort of place where things happen.........."

That is how it will be here for most of 2009, I think, though I hope things will happen here again before Christmas. I love the topics in his blog and hate to set it aside temporarily, but I have some pressing business to take care of in several different worlds. You can visit these worlds by diving into the various link-pools below:

Through the pool that leads to St. Herman's Church: it's almost Lent, which means singing in the choir at extra services every week. And in Holy Week things will get even more interesting, as I have a second grandkid due to arrive.

Through the pool that leads to 9th Century Northumbria: I have just signed my contract with Conciliar Press for Bearing the Saint, so I will be buckling down and aiming to have a presentable, close-to-final draft by end of summer.

Through the pool next door to that one: I hop still further back in time, to the 7th Century, as I consult with my editor about my Saint Cuthbert picture book, The Ravens of Farne.

And next to both of these....A new pool to the world called HALIWERFOLC, which will only open magically to

the world of Saint Cuthbert on his feast day A.D. 2009 March 20th

I hope you'll come explore these worlds with me while Storyspell sits here quietly for a little while.

Anonymity=Cowardice, Honesty=Refreshment of Spirit

2009-01-25T09:21:00.000-08:00

This poster visualizes the spread of anonymous gossip as the production of destructive monsters. Designed by Alex Godfrey for Ownwhatyouthink.com. Download Poster PDF.

The latest fads in our society almost never produce refreshing news. On the other hand, sometimes, like in the post from before Christmas about the guy who overcame disability to build a useable Viking Ship from popsicle sticks , you'll get somebody that says "You can't take me down!" to evil, tragedy, pain or disaster. Or to a current fad.

Remember the Magician's book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader?(Sure you do, without it I wouldn't have the premise for this very blog! :-)

It exists. Or at least, one of the spells from its pages does. That's the spell that Lucy tried out to see what her friends really thought of her. Lewis-as-narrator of Voyage of the Dawn Treader remarks of the words of this spell "nothing will induce me to tell you what they were."

But people today can find it --on the internet, of course. I guess we should have expected that, eh?

Blogs, e-mail lists, social networks, forums.....all of these have potential for damage. Writers may be indiscreet or even malicious as they slip into careless remarks about friends, or in a passive-aggressive way announce on their Facebook update or Twitter "Marjorie Preston (the girl who gossiped about Lucy) was getting pretty tired of some people by the end of last term."

But there is a site even more egregious than these, that exists for the very purpose of saying all sorts of things, without any social constraints at all. I'm not linking to it. It's called Juicy Campus, and it's a gossip cesspool like we've never seen before, where college students come to write the kind of stuff that used to only appear on washroom walls. Classmates may find themselves hounded, outed, harassed, labeled and slandered-- and unlike Lucy's friends in the Magician's book, the perpetrators get to remain anonymous.

But it's all in good fun. Well, fun like running with scissors, that is, until somebody gets an eye poked out.....

But hang on. This evil website has a noble twin.

Started by students at Princeton, Own What You Think.com "seeks to unite people and bring personal accountability back into the ways in which we communicate and interact with each other. It is about encouraging individuals to voice their opinions respectfully and constructively while refusing to participate in anonymous and malicious character assassination. It is also about taking a personal stand for something and encouraging others to do the same. "

Among the initiatives of their campaign for civil discourse, these students have created a "love wall" in which they write positive things about others; T-shirts that declare "anonymity=cowardice" and a petition/pledge that begins:

We, the undersigned, commit ourselves to taking a stand against anonymous character assassination, a culture of gossip, and all other acts of ethical and intellectual cowardice.

Bravo, Princeton and other colleges that have joined the campaign. Call it prissy and Pollyannaish if you like...when you see the stuff they are taking a stand against, ownwhatyouthink.com is what I call good magic.

Viking ship sails to give, not loot

2008-12-17T12:42:00.000-08:00

...and how spiritually refreshing is that?

A Viking ship made totally from ice cream and lolly sticks!

The ship called Thor was built by a man who was injured badly as a child but would not listen to the naysayers and was determined to do remarkable things with his life.

Now the ship is sailing up the Thames to deliver Christmas toys to sick kids. Saint Nicholas, the patron who gives gifts to children in need as well as the patron of sailors, must be thrilled-- a ship named for a pagan Scandinavian god coming to England to deliver gifts, not to loot them, as the Scandinavian invaders did once upon a time!

Links to more Christmas material below, in previous post.

Give the gift of Story

2008-12-08T17:05:00.000-08:00

It is that time of year.....and rather than create yet another Christmas post at the moment, I'm going to ask you to consider giving the gift of Story this Christmas. If you're reading this blog, of course, you probably already have books on your gift list for your nearest and dearest.

But I'd like you to also consider giving a book for older kids or teenagers to your local Christmas bureau. These older kids in need are often forgotten at this time of year. Chances are, these kids are not from bookish homes, so the challenge is to present something that will grab them.

Obviously, The Chronicles of Narnia are one of my own favorite suggestions. Packaged to tie in with the films, they are appealing to a whole new generation of kids. And of course the Harry Potter phenomenon has made reading a bit cooler than it was before-- film tie-ins are good here too.

CDs and films that tell or tie in with good stories are also good bets for this purpose. A recent underappreciated film that I hope to blog on at some point is Penelope. This one is wonderful for girls.

Please do chime in and offer your own suggestions, particularly of stuff that's currently widely available.

Meanwhile, if you came here looking for a seasonal read, click on one of these:

"Cold Hands, Warm Heart"-- what could make Jack Frost decide to rebel against the Winterfolk and join the side of Summer? Short fiction from my archive of previously-published stories.

"The Refreshment of Generosity: A Christmas Carol" -- a post about the Dickens classic

"Silent Night and War Game: The Refreshment of Christmas"-- post about the WWI Christmas Truce in No-man's Land.

Fairy Tale endings and Kingdom beginnings

2008-11-15T16:54:00.000-08:00

My husband said it was like a Hollywood fairy tale ending.

For several years now our church, the Orthodox Church in America, has been agonizing over a financial scandal of vast proportions. We have been leaderless, our membership wounded and divided as we approached our most recent “All-American” Council in Pittsburgh. This gathering of clergy and laity from all over North America had as its most important goal the choosing of a new Metropolitan.

Many people have been praying for many months or longer, both individually and corporately, for God’s mercy and guidance. True, a great deal of progress had already been made before the council in removing problem people from office, sorting out as much of the financial mess as possible, and setting up new Best Practices procedures to prevent such things in future. But the wounds were still raw, and the way ahead unclear. Many approached the council gathering with trepidation, the light of hope burning only dimly.

Tuesday night we began to see prayers answered. The newly-consecrated auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of the South, Bishop Jonah, spoke to the delegates in response to many of the pained and difficult questions about the scandal, and something happened. The next day, the majority of the delegates gave him their votes. The Holy Synod of Bishops then stepped out in humility and confirmed the people’s choice of this most junior bishop, consecrated to his office only 11 days earlier. It brought to mind St. Paul’s exhortation to the young bishop Timothy, “let no-one despise your youth, but be an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.”

Our membership could not see or agree upon a clear way out of our morass of denial and recriminations, but the Holy Spirit working in synergy with God’s people has now provided one. “It was like Pentecost” one of my husband’s priestly friends said.

Whistle-blowers and gadflies have risked, and some have suffered, great things to inform and motivate the people of God to seek an answer to our troubles. And the people rose to this challenge, both in prayer and in action. Now we have a completed investigation, a new Metropolitan with a new emphasis on genuine conciliarity, and public thanks and vindication given to many of those who dared to speak out.

This is a fairy-tale ending-- the happy turn at the end of a tale, which J.R.R. Tolkien calls a "eucatastrophe". But in God’s Kingdom, such an ending is only a beginning. Only in the next world is there a true and final happy-ever-after. Having begun the race, we must not look back, but press on to the prize. Our bishops have truly said that trust cannot be re-established—they must earn it. There are wounded little ones who still need healing.

But perhaps most encouraging of all is the way some of the strongest critics of the previous administration are speaking positively of this AAC and our new metropolitan. We have a new Metropolitan Council, and there is no reason to think they will not be vigilant and wise as the wheels of the OCA begin to move. They are beginning to move, and now that they are moving, it will be possible to steer.

Some remain a little skeptical. That is all right, and to be expected after our experience of the last few years. There is however a difference between skepticism and cynicism. The skeptic asks sincere questions and says ‘show me.’ The cynic however says ‘I don’t believe, no matter what you are showing me.’ Only the individuals can know in their hearts (if God grants them true self-knowledge) whether they are skeptics or cynics.

The rest of us can do little for the cynics but pray. They are the dwarfs in C.S. Lewis’s concluding volume of the Narnia books, The Last Battle. Narnia is liberated, and here is what happens:

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees...They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly…One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip…they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at!......”…they all said: “Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in..”

“You see,” said Aslan. “…Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

We need to heal. Our hierarchs need to earn our trust again. But we are not called to be dwarfs in a dark prison; we are called to be free men and women in the light of the Gospel. Let us continue to pray fervently for our new Metropolitan, our diocesan hierarchs and all our other church leaders, clergy and lay. We have seen God work a miracle in answer to our recent prayers. Now let us continue to ask Him for more such good gifts in the opening of missions, the healing of hearts, the ministry to the needy yet to come. For the best thanks we can give God for answered prayer is to ask Him for more, for He is a good Father who delights to give such good things to His children.

Stop to Hear the Music

2008-10-23T21:24:00.000-07:00

This post is in honour of Take Back Your Time Day Oct. 24, 2008

still from video posted on the Washington Post's website

It won’t be often that you see an article about a social/psychological experiment turning up as the main subject of a post on this blog. So please take it seriously when I give you the URL to a Washington Post article from 2007 at the bottom of this post. The article is called ‘Pearls before Breakfast’.

It is a long article, but believe me it is worth reading every single word. In fact the length of the article is bound up with what I at least see as the main point: that our rat race world is doing something terrible to us. It is causing us grownups to miss the beauty that children are instinctively drawn towards.

A world-class musician plays a sublime selection of music on a Stradivarius during the morning commute at a subway station. What reaction should we have expected, and what actually happened? The reporters involved could have simplistically disdained the barbarians who failed to appreciate the quality of the free concert, but there is more to it. This wasn’t just about people not recognizing a famous musician because they didn’t expect to see him there, or not caring about the quality of the music. The individual stories of the commuters of all walks of life are fascinating. And yes, it was the children who without exception were attracted to the music, heads turning as they tugged against their parents’ headlong progress to wherever they were going that seemed so important at the time. (you can listen to the full performance here)

I don’t listen to a lot of music, for what might seem like an odd reason to some. I am deeply affected by a lot of music. If I listened to more, one of two things would happen: either I would get inured to it, or I would end up a basket case. It isn’t uncommon for music to provoke me to tears. It’s less common for an article –about- music (or anything else for that matter) to have that effect on me.

Why am I classing this article as a story of Spiritual Refreshment? Partly it’s the humility of the musician, Joshua Bell, which reminds me of that same ‘getting out of the way’ I wrote about in Benjamin Bagby. Partly it’s the wonder of beauty and art that can touch something in us humans and make us aware of transcendence. And partly it’s the always-wonderful spectacle of little children showing a wisdom that the big people have forgotten.

read it here . Oh, and take the time to enjoy. (hat tip to the Facebook group for Take Back Your Time)

Happy Birthday Bilbo!

2008-09-18T15:23:00.000-07:00

still from the movie posted at :

http://www.theonering.net/scrapbook/source/Imladris.net

"IF MORE OF US VALUED FOOD AND CHEER AND SONG ABOVE HOARDED GOLD, IT WOULD BE A MERRIER WORLD. "

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit or There and Back Again

As we contemplate the celebration of Bilbo's (and Frodo's) birthday on Sept 22nd, corresponding with the first day of fall this year, you could hardly improve upon this quote from The Hobbit for spiritual refreshment.

The ancient practice of hospitality and gift-giving runs like a bright thread through the history of a dark world. To provide for the stranger was a sacred duty in the ancient world. And I don’t think there has ever been a culture in which food and music and giving things away were not near the center of the celebration of birthdays and other special occasions. From Anglo-saxon ring-giving to native North American potlatch, human hosts have forged bonds with their guests by serving them food and drink, then strengthend the bonds by sending them home with gifts.

One thing I especially love about hobbit birthdays is the ‘mathom’ tradition. Like many of our world’s cultures, hobbits in the Shire do not receive gifts on their birthdays, they give them away. This is a particular contrast with the solitary figure of poor Smeagol/Gollum. He speaks of the One Ring as his birthday present when he is in the cave with Bilbo; only later, in The Lord of the Rings, do we learn that this ‘present’ is not something he was given, but a precious thing he looked upon covetously and then took for himself with murderous hands.

A mathom is something handed down, passed around and given away. It is an appealing idea in our materialistically cluttered world, where we give lip service to Re-use as one of our modern three R’s. Bilbo was a wealthy hobbit and so could afford to give away the custom-made imported toys of “real dwarf make” (and you can be very sure they were ‘fair trade’. ;-) Bilbo also made sure to see that practical gifts, like tools and sacks of potatoes, were given to the poorer families in the neighborhood. But the more usual custom, in the comfortably middle-class Shire, was to recycle those unused odd whatsits and stray thingamabobs as presents, making sure that no guest went home from a party without something.

And then, when you had collected far too many of these knick-knacks, your own birthday would come around and you could de-clutter your hobbit hole by inviting a large number of guests. Don’t forget to fetch the Old Winyards out from the deepest cellar…and if perchance you have some unexpected guests, and the cakes run out, do remember your painful duty as hobbit host to go without!

THE COMPANY OF FOOLS

2008-08-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

I discovered Great Big Sea late. I don’t listen to much music—I am easily distractable, and highly susceptible to earworm songs. I have a lasting love of The Chieftains, though, and some other Celtic groups. Great Big Sea is a Newfoundland group that is part of this tradition, fusing the Irish-descended Newfoundland style with rock and pop and probably lots more I know nothing about. I just know it’s good stuff, with moving tunes and lyrics that are thoughtful and relevant to contemporary life.

I can’t classify all of GBS’s work as Spiritually Refreshing. Group leader Alan Doyle, a religious studies grad, throws a lot of criticism, cynicism and borderline blasphemy our way at times; and yet many songs, like "Walk on the Moon" and "Ordinary Day" use positive religious imagery and are definitely classed as inspirational.

GBS’s latest album, Fortune’s Favour, showcases a literary theme that is dear to my heart in the number “Company of Fools”. “The Fool” is an archetype with many variants and incarnations, such as the court jester, the Joker in the card deck (and most recently in Batman: The Dark Knight); the trickster character like Brer Rabbit and other rabbit heroes like Watership Down’s El-Ahrairah; and the Holy Fool or Fool for Christ. The Fool is important because, strange and laughable as he is, he can get away with Telling the Truth.

Perhaps one of the most famous stories about the Fool is Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Emperor’s New Clothes". You know it, I’m sure—two tailors dupe a vain emperor by pretending only really clever people can see the invisible cloth they use to make his new clothes. But of course they have only been sewing air, and when the Emperor parades himself in the streets wearing these imaginary garments, it is a small boy (whom critics identify with Andersen himself) who laughs and points, crying “The Emperor has no clothes!” The boy plays the part of a jester, but the Emperor turns out to be the really foolish one...

This is what Great Big Sea is celebrating in this collaboration between Alan Doyle and Russell Crowe (yes, THAT Russell Crowe…):

Many a truest word
has been spoken by the Jester

Standing against the tide

Is the noblest of gestures

It’s the little pearls of wisdom

That tumble from the light

That makes us laugh until we cry

Because we know that they are right

Within the strangest people

Truth can find the strangest home
So meet me in the village

where all we idiots go.....

(complete lyrics here)

Truth. Sometimes it's dark and nasty, and sometimes the Fool puts it crudely for the shock value-- to shock the audience awake. But without Truth, there is no spiritual refreshment.

That's why -I- would 'rather spend a lifetime in the Company of Fools."

Pratchett and Puddleglum, or, Kiddie Lit Saves the World!

2008-07-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

Don’t forget—HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

It’s not so much that Commander Sam Vimes has had greatness thrust upon him; it’s more like greatness has grabbed hold of his ankle to drag him along, kicking and screaming, to save the world.

…..oh, all right, I’m just trying to write like Terry Pratchett, and failing miserably. I’m sure better writers than I have tried and failed…if they were foolish enough to try in the first place.

The inimitable and brilliant Terry Pratchett, O.B.E., who has “occasionally been accused of committing Literature”, is the creator of the fantasy universe of the Discworld. Having your world’s very foundations comprise a gigantic turtle swimming through space, surmounted by a quartet of elephants bearing the spinning turntable of the world on their backs, strikes the western mythological sensibilities as rather amusing; and the denizens of this fictional universe are constructed with a similar offbeatness. Yet Pratchett’s stories, for all the comedy that sparkles across their pages, have a consistent weave of dark and grim themes.

THUD! Is a murder mystery featuring the redoubtable Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Except the mystery turns out to be more than mere murder….

While no-one knows more about the strange and unsavory streets of Ankh-Morpork than Sam Vimes, the commander is at heart a suburbanite and solid family man. Thereby hangs a frantic and hilarious chase scene—possibly the best ever written for a pre-motorized setting—as Vimes’s men help clear the way for his commute home, lest he be late to his daily appointment with his infant firstborn, Young Sam. The appointment is for the bedtime reading of WHERE’S MY COW?

The heart of every parent in the world cries out in sympathy for Sam as he reads for the hundredth time the plot-challenged picture book with the senseless conclusion. When he dares to make his own editorial adjustments, we know that disaster will ensue….and it does, in the form of Young Sam repeating some rude language in the ears of his mother. Chastened, the elder Sam returns to the word-for-word authorized version of WHERE’S MY COW? for the remainder of the novel….even when, at the climax of THUD!, he finds himself fighting an epic underground battle.

You see, trolls and war and supernatural catastrophe and the like notwithstanding, the appointed hour for WHERE’s MY COW? arrives, and Hell Hath No Fury like Sam prevented from reading to his boy. WHERE’s MY COW?, shouted by memory as the commander hacks his way through an underground battle with the trolls, becomes an integral and mystical element in literally saving the Discworld from catastrophe.

It’s silly, of course. But “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise”, and there is a profundity to the silliness, because of Sam Vimes’s simple human fatherly devotion.

Vis a vis the importance of foolish things, it is quite interesting to see Pratchett, who guesses he is an atheist arrive, via THUD! and WHERE’S MY COW? , if not at the same place as C.S. Lewis, at least in a nearby neighborhood.

I think of Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, defying the witch’s taunts that his and the children’s talk of Narnia is all a pretty fairy tale made up by babies. Pratchett’s outlook on the universe is indeed akin to Puddleglum’s in that in the Discworld pretty much anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Pratchett reinforces this view with the anthropomorphic language I tried to reproduce at the start of this post. And yet his characters like Vimes do not scruple to set store by such foolish things as a children’s story, and by such seemingly small commitments as reading to one’s children every day. Kiddie Lit saves the World!

P.S. I am not one of those Christian readers who is more interested in what a given writer believes about God than anything else. I find the most interesting thing about Pratchett’s recent experience of what he seems willing to believe may be supernatural is not the mere fact that he had such an experience, but his willingness to discuss it publicly. He seems not to care what other people, atheist, Christian, or other, may think of him as a result of this quite personal disclosure. That bespeaks a certain honesty and humility, reflected in his very amusing stories which in my opinion are indeed Literature of the best, spiritually refreshing sort.

Getting Out of the Way

2008-07-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

This article, sans hypertext, first appeared in an issue of Christian Vision in the early 1990s. It was one of a series I did for that publication, a Christian writers’ newsletter from Skysong Press, who still publish the Christian fiction zine Dreams and Visions.

The storyteller mounts the platform and takes up his six-stringed lyre, and with his bold shout the audience falls silent, not daring to move a muscle. "Hwaet!" he cries, "We Gar-dena in geardagum theodcyninga thrym gefrunon...."

The year is 1991, the site of performance Vancouver, British Columbia. But almost from the first words, the audience is no longer there. Benjamin Bagby has magic, and he uses it to open the door into the misty world of sixth century Denmark. For the next hour and a quarter his listeners join the Scyldings and Geats in the famous mead-hall, Heorot, while the hero Beowulf makes good his vow to destroy Grendel, the monstrous descendent of Cain whose jealousy of human happiness has goaded him to a bloodthirsty spree.

I was there. Yes, the entire performance was in Old English; the audience was given a translation of the poem, and in the brief lulls during which the storyteller re-tuned his lyre, you could hear the turning of pages. But even this did not break the spell.

No costumes, no special effects. Just a man with a voice and an instrument. Yes, he had to re-invent storytelling techniques that no longer exist-- techniques that must date back at least to the time when David soothed the demonized King Saul with his harp.

But techniques--the gentle strumming of the lyre to evoke the ocean voyage, or the heightened speech that paints for us Beowulf's heroic character-- these are only the magic runes that unlock the door to the story. Bagby's Beowulf transcends mere performance, for having unlocked the door, he does not stand on the threshold, blocking our view, but strides in confidently, drawing his listeners irresistibly after him.

I am not a performing artist, and don't know exactly how Bagby did this-- how he got himself so much out of the way that we all knew we had come there not to see Benjamin Bagby perform, but to experience Beowulf. I suspect we see few performing artists who are so successful at what they do, because most of them do not want to be actors or singers, they only want to be stars. In short, to enter the magic door needs humility.

The same applies to literary and visual artists. And here I do know a little about how to do it, or at least how not to do it. Don't let a bad sentence stand, for instance, or you'll be blocking the doorway into your story with your own laziness. Don't waste time showing off your flowing prose, if what the story requires is action; then it will be your ego that bars the entry.

It amounts to loving the story you are trying to tell, more than you love being a writer. Like Saint Francis, the artist must want only to be a channel. By all means, develop your technique; no less a genius than Hans Christian Andersen had to return to grammar school at the age of seventeen, to get the basic education without which he would never have had the tools to write the tales that are now more widely translated than any other book in the world except the Bible itself.
But having learned the runes that will unlock the magic door-- having learned how to write description, how to reveal character, how to keep the narrative moving-- don't stand in the doorway admiring your accomplishments. Get out of the way, and let your readers come in.

EDIT addendum, 2008: I've watched the DVD, including the extras, and it's worth every sceatta.

UPDATE: Benjamin Bagby will once more be performing in Vancouver this November 2008

Ships and Shipmates part two: Friends in Harmony

2008-05-25T19:05:00.000-07:00

Part one is here

Patrick O’Brian’s nautical Aubrey-Maturin books are not so much a series of novels as they are one long serial novel. In the world of these books the reader experiences a deep immersion in 19th C shipboard life and feels the strength of camaraderie and unity of purpose that marks life aboard the Surprise, Captain Jack Aubrey’s favorite ship. Surprise is a ‘happy ship’ (though some other vessels in the books are not), led by a captain who is firm, fair, highly competent and dedicated. Aubrey and his close friend, ship’s doctor Stephen Maturin, complement each other in their strengths and weaknesses.

Every buddy movie ever made is built on the principle that two diverse characters are better off working together than going their separate ways. The initial encounter of a buddy duo often makes for a humorous scene, as one or both of the pair is surprised and discomfited. In the case of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, the catalyst that brings them together is music, which both of them adore…but their behaviour at the concert where they meet is quite different. As the musicians at the Governor’s House play their final crescendo

“… on the little gilt chairs at least some of the audience were following the rise with an equal intensity: …two in the third row…happened to be sitting next to one another…The listener farther to the left was a man …whose big form overflowed his seat, leaving only a streak of gilt wood to be seen here and there. He was wearing his best uniform…the deep white cuff of his gold-buttoned sleeve beat the time….The high note came, the pause, the resolution; and with the resolution the sailor’s fist swept firmly down upon his knee. He leant back in his chair, extinguishing it entirely, sighed happily, and turned towards his neighbour with a smile. The words ‘Very finely played, sir, I believe’ were formed in his gullet if not quite in his mouth when he caught the cold and indeed inimical look and heard the whisper, “If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.”

But the inauspicious beginning is soon put behind them, for Jack is convivial by nature and Stephen too honest with himself not to admit the music was so fine that Jack’s rather unrefined enthusiasm was in fact justified.

The excellent film adaptation Master and Commander (drawing on events from several books in the series and not just the initial volume of the same title) captures, in particular by means of music, the essence of the multi-volume progress of the friendship between the open, bluff English ship’s captain and the intense, secretive, philosophical physician. The books of course show us in much more detail how at times their national outlooks—Stephen is Irish—and their personal agendas clash. We see them through thick and thin, battling the elements and the enemy; Stephen unable quite ever to get his sea legs, Jack at a loss on land. We see them each at their fallible worst—Stephen succumbing to laudanum addiction, Jack to marital infidelity.

But through it all, the evenings spent playing string duets and sharing meals reaffirm the surprising harmony between a pair who are very unlike. Friends and shipmates become much more than the sum of their parts, and their story is a joy to read.

Truly Valiant

2008-05-03T12:40:00.000-07:00

image courtesy of Irish artist Kim Shaw, originally posted at The Lion's Call.

As we are less than a fortnight away from the movie premiere of Prince Caspian, I’ve decided to set aside part two of Ships and Shipmates till next month and talk about the second book in the Chronicles of Narnia instead.

Who is so heartless as not to be won over by the most valiant character in children’s literature, perhaps in all literature?

I hope the film of Prince Caspian will do him justice, for Reepicheep the Mouse, knight of Narnia, has a thing or two to teach us all.

I’ve written about murine heroes in this blog before. They are certainly a popular staple of kidlit—besides Graham Oakley’s Church Mice, there’s E. B. White’s Stuart Little and numerous mice in the stories of Beatrix Potter, to name only a few. Perhaps writers figure children should be able to identify with small and powerless creatures.

Lewis, however, does the rest one better. His Reepicheep is not there simply for his child readers to identify with as a little character threatened by all the larger characters around him, who can be escaped thanks to the very smallness of a mouse. Reepicheep, on the contrary, is fearless, feisty and above all truly valiant. He is a role model not only for children but for the adults those children become, and for the adults who read the Chronicles of Narnia over their children’s shoulders.

Today perhaps more than ever before, Reepicheep speaks to those who love Refreshment of Spirit, and indeed to the world. When Prince Caspian was first published, the reaction other characters (and doubtless readers too) would have toward a swashbuckling mouse was predictable: isn’t he cute?, or some variation thereof. But Reepicheep quickly proves that he is not playing at being a hero; he is a hero, first in his own heart, second in his actions, and third in the undying loyalty of his followers.

These days, Reepicheep is not just a figure of amusement to our jaded society because he appears to be a small creature trying to act big, but also because the very heroic code he lives by seems amusing to those who don’t know their own deep need for Refreshment of Spirit.

Perhaps this cynicism isn’t so new, however. Let’s remember that Queen Susan went home from the adventure of Prince Caspian to a life of bedazzlement with vanity and shallow social butterflying, and so ceased to be a Friend of Narnia. Somehow she lost touch with the depth of devotion shown by Reepicheep’s mouse troops, who promptly prepared to cut off their own tails rather than let him endure the humiliation of that maiming alone. That is the loyalty that comes to the Truly Valiant.

we interrupt this blog....

2008-04-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

...very briefly to note that I now have a Facebook group dedicated to the themes of this blog. So if you are on Facebook, come check it out. I hope the URL above will work if you are already a member there; if not, you can sign up and just search for A Spell for Refreshment of the Spirit on the "Groups" page.

Meanwhile, it's Holy Week and we are preparing to celebrate Pascha, the greatest feast of the Orthodox Church. I'll be back here in a week or two with the second part of Ships and Shipmates.

Ships and Shipmates

2008-04-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

Seagoing stories are among my favorites. Perhaps the Royal Navy ship HMS Surprise, with her strict wartime discipline and rigid chain of command, is a little more like a monastic community than your average parish. Still, it is not for nothing that the architectural term for the main space in a church, where the congregation gathers, is nave, from the Latin term for 'ship'. In an essay on church architecture, Aidan Hart writes

".....the basilica was the only building of the pagan Roman empire which was suitable for large Christian assemblies, since the interiors of pagan temples were designed only for the priests and the sacrifices, not for the worshipping public. Another early symbolic reading of the basilica relates it to a ship. According to the “Apostolic Constitutions” (c. 400 A.D.) “the house of the believers is long in shape like a ship [hence nave from the Latin navis] and directed towards the east.” Here the emphasis is on the transitory nature of our present life, of our movement towards the heavenly city to come. The basilica is primarily, therefore, a church plan which emphasises action, motion."

What other image but that of a ship could convey so vividly that we are all in this together, a company of shipmates on a journey, huddled together against the hostile elements in the great wild world around us?

Yet those who go down to the sea in ships (Ps. 107:23) are by no means cowards and isolationists. On the contrary, they are adventurers, like Saint Brendan the Navigator-- or, to mention a fictional example, Caspian the Tenth of Narnia, who leads the Dawn Treader expedition in search of his father's lost friends. With him sails Reepicheep, the valiant talking mouse who seeks nothing less than Aslan's own country.

More about Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels and about ships and shipmates in the next post!

Death, Faith, Hope and Love

2008-03-22T16:52:00.000-07:00

Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold

Passage by Connie Willis

Spiritual refreshment isn’t always found in the sunnier pastures of literature. Sometimes the most revivifying draughts well up from stories about the dark night of soul.

We interrupt this post for a public service announcement: If you didn’t pay attention to the masthead of this blog, now’s the time to remind you: Here There Be Spoilers. If you haven’t yet read Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold or Passage by Connie Willis, you may perhaps want to hie thee off to some other blog for the nonce.

I love speculative fiction—sf, fantasy, horror, supernatural, any of those literary categories that hint that Things Are Not As They Seem. Where but in SF or fantasy could the author kill off the main character halfway through the story, and then go on writing about him or her—without resorting to flashbacks?

In the midst of life we are in death, reads one of the prayers in the Anglican funeral office. Willis and Bujold in these two books have each tackled the subject of death in the midst of life—the life of the story, that is. These are two very different writers, and you can catch how very different these two particular stories are just by looking at the style of the cover art. And yes, as I hinted up top—in each of these books, the main viewpoint character dies partway through the book.

Passage, the story of near-death researcher Joanna Lander, who gets a lot nearer the big D than she planned, has a lot of the screwball comedy in it, like most Connie Willis stories—even her rather grim novels Doomsday Book and Lincoln’s Dreams. There is a lot of chasing around after an elusive MacGuffin or three, a lot of interweaving of stories and themes that don’t at first appear to be related.

Mirror Dance is a volume in Bujold’s continuing space opera saga of the Vorkosigan family, focusing mostly on the character of Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, Imperial undercover agent, hyperactive mercenary fleet admiral and self-appointed knight errant. The main wonder is that in this line of work, Miles never managed to get himself killed any sooner in the multi-volume series…

As I said, these are two very different writers. Willis writes what I call “Science Fiction for people who hate Science Fiction,” where the technical details are mostly kept to a minimum. Bujold writes traditional space opera adventures of a very high calibre, strongly founded on characters facing acute moral conflict. But both of these literary cooks season their dishes with faith, hope and love—even, or perhaps especially, when their subject is Death.

UPDATE WARNING: I didn't mean to confuse anybody-- I just found out that Lois McMaster Bujold's newest volume in her Sharing Knife series is also, coincidentally, entitled Passage. Don't go confusing it with Connie Willis's Passage. Whatever-- most anything by either of these authors will be a good read!

Weavers of the Web of Story

2008-03-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

Edit March 26/08: This book has just been nominated for the Hugo Award!

In her study of the Inklings, The Company they Keep, Diana Pavlac Glyer cites J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" and discusses how he "conceives of all stories everywhere existing as parts of a tapestry or web, an image that implies the work of many hands, many colors, many times, all contributing to one enormous, seamless, single work."

There are loads of wonderful things about Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings in this book. Reading about the heady creative sessions in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College or over pints at the Eagle and Child, I find myself wishing my own writing crit partners lived nearer so we could enjoy similar occasions, rather than just swapping electronic copies of works in progress by e-mail. But the essential element of reading and commenting on each other's work is nevertheless part of our creative process.

Equally essential is our collaboration with "the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors", as Cory Doctorow puts it in his acceptance speech for the Sunburst Award, quoted by Glyer in her book. Some of the best advice I have ever had about writing-- and I can't remember from whom!-- was to read widely, and read deeply. I'm reading deeply about Saint Cuthbert and Northumbria in the seventh to 10th centuries right now; but reading beyond the specialized field of one or two projects keeps me weaving in threads of new colours. Hard to say, even, just what will turn up in the finished story....and that's all part of the fun.

The Web of Story has many weavers. It's a privilege to be one of them, drawing on threads from the depth of warp and the breadth of weft to weave in my own small but unique threads to the Great Tapestry.

SILENT NIGHT and WAR GAME: the power of Christmas

2007-12-20T10:38:00.000-08:00

Usually the stories I write about here are fiction...but this one is for real, a bit of history from the First World War. Weintraub's book does an admirable job of telling the story of the Christmas Truce, using letters and newspaper reports of the time, with plates featuring cartoons and photographs of the phenomenon.

When it comes to the complex causes of WWI aka The Great War, I'm about as clueless as Baldrick ("No, there was definitely something about an ostrich..."). Well, probably a lot of the chaps in the trenches were no more informed of the big picture themselves. It seems to have been the front-line Germans and their Christmas trees who initiated the truce. Here is an excerpt from a Great War website:

""It is thought possible that the enemy may be contemplating an attack during Xmas or New Year. Special vigilance will be maintained during these periods." --From General Headquarters at St. Omer - to all units24th December, 1914.

This message came from the Headquarters of Sir John French and was sent to all British Units in France and Flanders on Christmas Eve, 1914. It may be that Sir John ought to be taken at his word, and that there really was a considered possibility of some kind of German attack coming over the Christmas period. But there may have been a hidden message - that Sir John had considered the possibility of some show of friendliness at Christmas and had taken steps to give advance notice of HQ's disapproval of any such thing.

Far from wishing to attack, some Germans seemed inclined to make Christmas a quiet period, in which they could enjoy memories of home. The Germans had originated the tradition of bringing Christmas trees into their houses and decorating them, a practice which was introduced into England by Queen Victoria's Consort, Prince Albert. In 1914 the practice was still not as widespread in the UK as it was in Germany. The Germans had brought Christmas trees into their trenches and dugouts in various places, and had decorated some parts of their parapet. Leutnant Johannes Niemann, 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment refers to having a Christmas tree in his dugout, and mentions also that the soldiers had hung little Christmas trees above their trenches, complete with candles. The Scottish troops opposite him, seeing the lights and being mindful of the general order issued the day before, suspected an imminent attack and began firing. No attack came, of course, and things settled down soon afterwards." __________________________________________________

Next thing you knew, in many locations along the trenches that stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss border, soldiers were singing carols, calling greetings across No-Man's Land, even stepping out to shake hands and exchange small gifts like food and tobacco.

A major concern of both sides was the burial of the dead who lay in the No-Man's Land between the lines. But perhaps the most charming
of the complex of stories about the truce is that of the Christmas Day football game, told in the picture book War Game by Michael Foreman (who also illustrated a fine edition of Dickens' A Christmas Carol)

From war to play, even just for a single day.....the surprising power of Christmas.

Happy Birthday Jacksie!

2007-11-29T13:55:00.000-08:00

A hundred and nine today.....notice Father Christmas in this photo with the young author-to-be of the Chronicles of Narnia. I thought you all might enjoy Lewis's advice to a young writer:

The Kilns
Headington Quarry, Oxford
14 Dec. 1959

Dear Thomasine, It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt. (1) Turn off the Radio. (2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines. (3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd. hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again. (4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about . . .) (5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn't, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know - the whole picture is so clear in your mind that you forget that it isn't the same in his. (6) When you give up a bit of work don't (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier. (7) Don't use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training. (8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.
C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters volume 3

And here are a few Lewis links you may also appreciate:

Into the Wardrobe lively Lewis-focused community

NarniaWeb for news of the Narnia movies

Trailer for the docudrama C.S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia

I never get tired of mentioning that my daughter had a bit part in that last one.....;-)

And here are my own photos of our visit to the Kilns, Lewis's home in Oxford.

If it weren't for Lewis, I don't suppose I ever would have created this blog, as the title Refreshment of Spirit is straight from his work.

Triumph of the Small

2007-10-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

In The Lord of the Rings, the small hero, Frodo the hobbit, screws up his courage to undertake the terrible task of destroying the deadly One Ring:

"I will take the Ring," he said,"though I do not know the way."

Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him........."This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields, to shake the towers and counsels of the Great.Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?"

Small heroes are classic....and that is one of the things that is so appealing about Graham Oakley's marvellous Church Mice series.

Recently in an idle moment when I could and should have been doing any number of other things, I Googled the books, wondering if our collection was complete. To my astonishment, it turns out the whole series is out of print, and the volumes we are missing ourselves go for the kind of price that would make you want to put the book in a glass case and never touch it!

I'm not interested in collectibles as such, I'm afraid. My 1980s X-Men comic books are in a disgraceful condition from re-reading and more re-reading. So the Church Mice Take a Break and Humphrey will have to wait until the publisher sees sense and brings the series back into print...or at least until I can get the library to order them.

These cleverly illustrated tales of the diminutive murine (yes I had to look it up) heroes ooze charm but never quite topple over into excessive sentimentality, thanks to the author-illustrator's brilliant poking-fun at the foibles of the mice and other inhabitants of Wortlethorpe, quintessential sleepy English village.

It's the tolerance of foibles, without allowing the tyranny of foibles, that makes the community of church mice so appealing. And the way these small, small heroes-- with a little help from Sampson the Church Cat-- overcome the villains of their various adventures. If they can do it, why not us?

try them out, if you can get hold of them.....the Christmas book is one of my favorites.

Tales of Grimm Beauty

2007-07-04T21:47:00.000-07:00

I like studying fairy tales almost as much as I like reading fairy tales (and writing fairy tales. )

If The Lord of the Rings was the novel that made me say "where has this book been all my life?", Ronald Murphy's The Owl, the Raven and the Dove: the Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales is the non-fiction book that also made me say "where has the book been all my life?"

The birds of the title refer to three story traditions-- the classical myths, Germanic folk tale and legend, and the Christian sacred story. Fr. Murphy broke new ground with this study, investigating first hand Wilhelm Grimm's personal copy of the Greek New Testament.
The idea that the Grimm brothers merely collected traditional tales and published them has long ago been debunked. Fr. Murphy demonstrates just what sort of spin they put on them...braiding together three different strands to create something new, creating magical stories with a religious underpinning similar to the works of C.S. Lewis and George MacDonaold. Fr. Murphy's book pays particular attention to some of the best-known of the tales such as Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White.
I sent Fr. Murphy a copy of my poetry chapbook, which contains this poem about Snow White. He was kind enough to write back to me and remark "I was so happy to see from your poem that I was not the only one who caught the nature of the Prince."
be sure to read the actual Grimm's version of the tale, not some bowdlerized version. One important detail appears when the dwarfs have placed Snow White in her glass casket on the mountaintop:
"And birds came too, and wept for Snow-white; first an owl, then a raven, and last a dove."
Fr. Murphy writes:
"As Snow White opens her eyes, lifts the lid of the casket and sits upright, she says, "Oh God, where am I?" The answer which Wilhelm worot is Christ's, the answer hoped for for millennia, "the king's son says, 'You are with me,'" and he tells her that he loves her more than anything in the world and immediately invites her to follow him into the eternal world of the Father . "Come with me to my father's castle, you will be my wife." The story comes to a mystical Trinitarian ending as the good soul, led by the Spirit in the owl, the raven and the dove, is brought to a meeting with the Son, who conducts the person in love beyond death to his Father's house."

Watership Down: Story and Community

2007-06-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

If you follow the TV show LOST, you’ve glimpsed this book in the hands of the con artist Sawyer, who scavenged it from the wreckage. What a great book to have on a desert island—not because it is escapist fantasy, but because it speaks in a spiritually refreshing way about the topic that will become the number one concern of the castaways in LOST—community.

Theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has it right when he speaks of the rabbit heroes of Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down as “a story-formed community.” Stories of the rabbit hero El-ahrairah are embedded in the main narrative, each one recounted at a time when the rabbits need to be buoyed up by the particular lesson of a particular story. These tales are by turns inspiring, thrilling, humorous, or frightening; and they model such virtues as cleverness, courage, and teamwork. (There is more about Watership Down and heroism in this post.)

In contrast to the love of Story shown by the band of rabbits led by Hazel, another group of rabbits in the story have forgotten, downplayed and despised the traditional stories, instead steeping themselves in depressing modernist poetry. This rabbit warren, know as Cowslip’s warren, is living in self-deceit. They train themselves to accept death—because death is the price they pay for comfort. Their warren is surrounded by snares set by the farmer who feeds them and keeps off the foxes. Whenever one of their number goes missing, they pretend to forget that rabbit’s existence.

It is a chilling portrait. But the rabbits of Hazel’s group are by contrast the kind of characters the reader finds himself wanting to emulate. Inspired by the daring and cunning of El-ahrairah and his faithful helper Rabscuttle, Hazel’s rabbits dare to make a journey to find a new home. They learn new skills, make friends of other rabbits and even non-rabbits, and hold together against the attack of the martial warren of Efrafa. When the story of Watership Down is over and the warren at peace, Hazel and his friends have become part of the story tradition that is being learned by new generations of rabbits. What a thing to aspire to—to be part of the great Story of life in such a way that we, even we ourselves, can become the heroes of our children and grandchildren!

Edit p.s. Dec 2007: My essay "Parables for Mission Planters: Principles of Leadership and Community Drawn from Richard Adams' Watership Down, is available as a free PDF download in the Canadian Journal of Orthodox Christianity.

the Refreshment of Laughter: Connie Willis

2007-06-07T19:12:00.000-07:00

Some books are refreshing just because they are funny. Only certain kinds and degrees of funny, though. Satire is a useful tool in the public arena, and it can be refreshing if only it is done with a light touch. One of my favorites is Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes".

And of course, for brilliant satire these days you need look no farther than the Harry Potter books. viz. this quote from an interview with "Hogwarts Professor" John Granger: "If Lewis and Tolkien are modernists writing in reaction to the same questions and issues that provoked all writers of the modern era, albeit as moderns in opposition to the unexamined convictions of modern people, I think the same might be said about Rowling as a post-modern writer. She is exploring the same problems as her contemporaries and she has the same seeming superficiality and lightness that makes her satire comic and winsome."

Satire can be tricky, though, as it can easily cross the line from fair if clever criticism to the savagely unbalanced. A favorite writer of mine who has no trouble with that line is Connie Willis.

I like to call Ms. Willis's work "Science Fiction for People who hate Science Fiction". I like to recommend Bellwether to start, as it is short and very lighthearted-- a screwball comedy that nevertheless ponders big questions about causality in the universe. A plot summary won't do it-- but if you have daughters you will SCREAM with laughter at the "Barbie birthday party" and the discussion of child-raising fads....plus, workplace morale-building fads, restaurant fads, fashion colour fads ("pomo pink", anybody?) and more. The amazing thing is that all these ingredients are not just thrown into a kind of a stew-- Willis weaves them into a narrative web that will catch you fast. But you'll like it. Really.

The Nightmare Tree by Richard Rene

2007-05-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

This book is the kind of book this blog is all about. It's nice to see a NEW one, much as I love the great classics.

Full disclosure, the author is a friend. And I have just finished doing a review of the book for the "Books to Treasure" column of The Handmaiden. That will be out in mid-August, and will have much more detail than I have posted here.

But apart from that.... if you want something "like" Narnia, but "different" from Narnia, this is the book you're looking for.

This book has a sense of the transcendent, like Narnia. Unlike Narnia, it is not an allegory.

It is however a tale of a magical unseen world, and a battle between good and evil. Young Jonah Comfait journeys to Mysterion, where he faces the Cyclops, the Reef of Fire and the Bay of Storms to rescue his father from the Djinn, who hold him captive in the Nightmare Tree, feasting on his terrible dreams.

Unlike most of the stories I write about in this blog, this one is just newly published, so I don't want to give any spoilers here. It's probably for a slightly older audience than Narnia-- pre-teens up to adult. It has a fresh setting, the Seychelles, yet it uses the classic hero journey archetypes-- mentor, helper, crossing the threshold, enemies/shadows/shapechangers etc.; and it draws on classic legendary motifs like the Djinn, the Cyclops, pirates, mermaids and more.

What is "refreshing" about this book? It is a book of hope. "There's always hope of freedom in Mysterion," says one character.

You can order the book online now from amazon.ca, but it will also soon be available on amazon.com

What is a Hero, anyway?

2007-04-30T17:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about this, thanks to a recent conjunction of story experiences.

1. Spider-Man 2—while channel flipping, I came upon one of my favorite scenes in the world, the one where Spidey stops a runaway commuter train with such effort that he collapses and is pulled into the train by the grateful rescued people who pass him overhead and lay him gently on the floor, mask missing.

300—finally got out to see this big screen movie of Frank Miller’s graphic novel interpretation of the battle of Thermopylae, in which a few Spartans, insanely outnumbered, save Western civilization as we know it by holding off the Persian hordes.

3. Watership Down—dipped into this old favorite while revising an essay I’ve been working on. A rabbit named Hazel leads his little band to a new home and concocts a plan to get some doe rabbits so the community won’t die out.

In every one of these cases, one or a few make a sacrifice of themselves on behalf of the many, a sacrifice that brings them to the very jaws of death. As Christopher Vogler notes in The Writer’s Journey:Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters, a Hero is “someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others, like a shepherd who will sacrifice to protect and serve his flock.” Vogler doesn’t spell it out, but of course this remark is an allusion to John 10:10-11...describing, in my mind, the Source of all genuine heroism.

“One who sacrifices himself for others” is a fairly broad and simple description, and the stories to be told are near-infinite. “Hero” is one of what Jung calls “Archetypes” in his theory of the collective unconscious; those ideas are further developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Christopher Vogler in turn has applied these ideas to modern storytelling.

Interestingly, if you look at the three examples above, you’ll notice that the heroes are each quite different. They are marked as heroes by their actions, but they are all of different character types. Spider-Man is what is sometimes called an anti-hero—indeed he was one of the first in modern comics—a neurotic loner, an outsider, a wimpy teenager suddenly given amazing powers. King Leonidas and his 300, on the other hand were born and bred to be heroes; the weak and deformed of Sparta have been weeded out by ruthless infanticide, and these 300 are the pick of the surviving crop, trained harshly from childhood.

Hazel is perhaps the least likely hero of all—he lacks any very distinguishing characteristics, and it is other rabbits in his band who supply size and strength, supernatural knowledge, and outstanding cleverness. But Hazel is the one who holds them together with farsightedness, good sense, and above all with his courage in going ahead of them to run their risks for them “like El-ahrairah”, the rabbit folk hero whose stories they admire.

There are so many heroes in the stories of the world—because we all need heroes, and really, American Idol and Superbowl winners just don’t cut it. And there are also many kinds of heroes....because, likely or not, we all need to know that we can be heroes too.

We interrupt this blog....

2007-04-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

....to announce that Vi Nesdoly has honoured the Spell for Refreshment with the Thinking Blogger Award! Thank you Vi!

It's now my turn to pass on the award to five more bloggers. Here they are:

Peter Chattaway's Film Chat (since, to my surprise, I don't see the award anywhere on his blog yet! If it's there and I've missed it, what the heck, go visit anyway for great film news, reviews, ponderings.... )

Ed Willett's Hassenpfeffer already has the award, but-- his interesting posts, mostly about science news, do make me think!

Bev. M. Cooke's Bevnal Abbey Scriptorium thoughts about this and that-- societal trends, current events.

Graham Yates' Thoughts from the Vineyard quirky stuff well written

Thomas Wildeman's Kick Against the Goads (don't let his current Canuck fever fool you, there are plenty of thinkingblogposts there!)

From the original Thinking Blogger Award site

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog).

Every Story needs a Hero

2007-04-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'm long overdue to find the sequels to this book I read years ago, Ranvan the Defender.

But where to start? Heroism is a big topic, and I won't get all my thoughts about it together in just one post. I'm waiting with web-shooters at the ready for the new Spider-Man movie, for instance.....ah, maybe I should just change my handle to "geekymatushka" ;-)

I was already primed for conversion long before I got the Gideon New Testament distributed free to my grade 5 class in the less politically correct era of the 1960s. And along with the Chronicles of Narnia, it was comic books that did it.

RanVan the Defender brought back a lot of memories.

I wrote this review when I read the book, but it was never published anywhere-- just traded around by e-mail to friends.

RANVAN THE DEFENDER, by Diana Wieler.

This 1993 teen novel is outstanding. Great characters, original handling of material. Not exactly SF or fantasy-- or is it?

Is it really just adrenalin that gives Rhan, near the end of the book, the ability to do a couple of amazing things? And when a video game knight salutes him-- something the animated figure has never done in the hundreds of hours Rhan has spent playing the cornerstore video game—is the somewhat troubled and stressed out Rhan just a little delusional?

These questions are left up in the air, but you gotta love Rhan, 15 and
smart-mouthed but devoted to the heroic code he learns from comic books
and video games. I immediately thought of the SIG line Mark (Angloman)
Shainblum uses in his e-mail, a quotation from a Seinfeld routine to the effect that when you are growing up reading Batman and Superman, these are not just comic book characters, they're career options. "A little bit noble, a little bit stupid" is how Rhan describes the video knight-- and himself.

Flawless prose conveys the feel of Rhan's world—an overcrowded high school in a Vancouver neighborhood being taken over by (wait for it!) _Monster_ houses, haves and have-nots thrown together, cornerstores where the owner illegally sells kids cigarettes because he's losing money from having been robbed so often. Rhan is lovable, noble, flawed and utterly believable. Best of all, the story follows the heroic paradigm and yet avoids a predictable ending. One of the best books I've read in a long time, one of those I-wish-I-had-written-this books.

Servants of the Secret Fire

2007-04-10T18:06:00.000-07:00

These are the days we call Bright Week , but the brightness isn't in my brain or my step, as the past week has caught up with me. Hence the slowness to update this blog. But just today I found a refreshing post on a central aspect of The Story I would like to point you toward at Kick Against the Goads. The post focuses on Gandalf's struggle with the Balrog in the mines of Moria.

In Stratford Caldecott's Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, this passage is quoted:

The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white.....

'You cannot pass,' he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. 'I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udun. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.'
Three times Gandalf pronounces the declaration You cannot pass! And because Gandalf is a servant of the Secret Fire, he can keep the darkness of the Balrog at bay.

We too are servants of that Secret Fire, and how we wield it is the subject of an entry in my book Seasons of Grace from Conciliar Press (available on Amazon as well as direct from Conciliar). Here is a partial excerpt:

Lighting One Another's Candles

paschal procession

light passing from hand to hand

flames against the wind

Was it only a few weeks ago we celebrated Pascha?

Few things exemplify the Christian community like the Paschal procession, three times round the church at midnight. On a busy road, we drew stares from weekend partygoers passing in their cars. The wind puffed out some of our candles; but no-one was lost, for we had gathered together in the darkness, and shared our illumination, re-lighting each other's candles amid joyous laughter....

...even throughout the year, we need to keep our light shining, and share it with our fellows. Throughout the year, the darkness and wind take many forms.

A business collapses. A man betrays his wife. An infant dies. How to re-light the candles of the brothers and sisters assaulted by these violent gusts of wind?

We do well to remember, first, that the light we bear is not our own. We are only sharers of something we have received....

....somehow the storms of daily life in ordinary time seem to sweep some of us off the path. It happens most when we feel ourselves alone, without fellow-marchers to re-light our candles.

This is one reason why it is not merely a duty, but essential to our Christian life not only to attend services, but to actively participate in the ongoing life of our local parish—to keep circling the church, so to speak. A coal on the hearth keeps on burning, but if it gets dislodged and rolls away from the other coals on the fire, it soon fizzles. And the loss of even one coal makes the hearth-fire burn less brightly.....

There are many candles in our life, just as there are many in the church temple, in the altar and before the various icons. We can share our light in many ways—visiting the sick, driving others to church, teaching in church school, offering a listening ear to the troubled.

But all these things can only be done if we first simply keep on processing around the church—just continually being with the people God has appointed our fellow-marchers at our local parish. Don’t hurry off to lunch before the after-church coffee is over; make an effort to invite fellow parishioners to your home, or to attend the women’s group. You will then find there is somebody there to re-light your candle when it blows out; and, perhaps even more blessed, you may be there to re-light theirs.

Cuthbert of Lindisfarne

2007-03-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

Find this and other wonderful icons at the website of British iconographer Aidan Hart.

I am not planning on turning this into a blog of saint's tales, but March just happens to be particularly crowded with some of my personal favorites. March 20th belongs to Saint Cuthbert, who is sometimes called the English Francis of Assisi-- or, for the Orthodox, the English Seraphim of Sarov. This because of the plethora of animal tales about the 7th C. Anglo-Saxon hermit, bishop and abbot.

Here is an excerpt from Bede's life of the Saint, illustrated in this icon:

.....he would go forth, when others were asleep, and having spent the night in watchfulness return home at the
hour of morning-prayer. Now one night, a brother of the monastery,seeing him go out alone followed him privately to see what he should do.

He went down to the sea, which flows beneath, and going into it, until the water reachedhis neck and arms, spent the night in praising God. When the dawn of day approached, he came out of the water, and, falling on his knees, began to pray again. Whilst he was doing this, two quadrupeds,called otters, came up from the sea, and, lying down before him on the sand, breathed upon his feet, and wiped them with theirhair after which, having received his blessing, they returned to their native element. Cuthbert himself returned home in time to join in the accustomed hymns with the other brethren. The brother,who waited for him on the heights, was so terrified that he could hardly reach home; and early in the morning he came and fell at his feet, asking his pardon, for he did not doubt that Cuthbert was fully acquainted with all that had taken place. To whom Cuthbert replied, What is the matter, my brother ? What have you done? Did you follow me to see what I was about to do? I forgive you for it on one condition,-that you tell it to nobody before my death. In this he followed the example of our Lord, who, when He showed his glory to his disciples on the mountain, said, See that you tell no man, until the Son of man be risen from the dead. When the brother had assented to this condition, he give him his blessing, and released him from all his trouble.The man concealed this miracle during St. Cuthbert's life; but, after his death, took care to tell it to as many persons as he was able.

Cuthbert figures as an off-stage but highly influential character in one of my current WIPs (that's writerspeak for Work In Progress), a historical fantasy novel set in England during the Viking invasions. I'm also planning an article about St. Cuthbert for an upcoming issue of AGAIN magazine.

And I have yet another Cuthbert-project germinating. Since my novel's plot veers away from one of the most fascinating aspects of the St. Cuthbert vita before it can play out, I'm thinking of incorporating it into a book for younger readers. This is the story of Cuthbert's folk, the combined company of monks and layfolk of all ages who fled his monastery lands on and around Lindisfarne (aka Holy Island) more than a hundred years after his death. But they did not go without their Cuthbert-- they took his body with them, and carried him in procession all over the North of England before settling down many years after.

Talk about a pilgrimage!

Joyful Play in the Face of Death

2007-03-09T14:26:00.001-08:00

It's been an age since I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the article from which this post is excerpted made me decide I must do so again soon:

"Something happened between the Iliad and “Sir Gawain,” something that left a profound mark on the Western soul, something that no amount of political or social change can account for. Somehow, sometime, a shadow lifted, and in the light of day, men and women began to play, and play joyfully, in the face of death. Somehow, somewhere, men (especially men) learned to smile and even, like Hamlet’s gravediggers, sing at the edge of their graves." Peter Leitheart, on First Things reposted at Kick Against the Goads.

A search took me to some interesting Gawain sites. Here's another quote I quite liked:

"Gawain is, naturally, more fully drawn than any other character. Not only do we observe him ourselves, we are told how he impressed other people in the story and how he himself thought and felt. We see him behaving, as all expect him to do, with exquisite courtesy; but we also see what is not apparent to the other characters, that such behavior does not always come easily to him. All the time that he is parrying the lady's advances, we are aware that he feels himself to be on a knife-edge between discourtesy and compliance." (Dorothy Everett)

Want some more fun and games? Try these Gawain and the Green Knight paper dolls!

Saint Patrick-the Steadfast Man

2007-03-06T16:29:00.000-08:00

My own copy is sans this great dustjacket from the UK first edition, but inside Paul Gallico's life of St. Patrick are many echoes of that Story about the cup, the sword, the tree and the green hill.

Included are the only extant primary sources (in translation of course): the Confessio, in which he defends himself against slanderous charges, recounting the story of his conversion and missionary labours; and Patrick's Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, demanding repentance of a Welsh chieftain who had slaughtered a band of the newly-baptized.

A small sample from Gallico's comments on these writings of the saint: "Patrick at no time trod an easy way. And the true modesty of the man is gleaned not from his professions of unworthiness and denigrations of himself, but from the manner in which he skips over the trials and hardships that beset him from his sixteenth year until the end of his days, and which he dismisses with a few words, not wishing to bore his readers."

Maps to Treasure

2007-02-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

hmmm.....the moment I typed that title, I realized it could have a double meaning!

I do treasure my maps. One of the entries in my book, Seasons of Grace, begins "I am in love with maps. I belong to the National Geographic Society; my bedroom is decorated with several years' worth of calendars featuring antique map prints; and I even have a lampshade in a map motif. Cartographic renderings of places from Jamaica to Jerusalem tease my imagination as I gaze on them while riding my stationary exercise bike, going nowhere fast...."

But maps can also lead us to treasure... figurative if not literal. For me this is true whether they are maps of real places, like the BCAA maps we pick up when we take a road trip, or maps of the fictional worlds where we may read stories of Refreshment.

The colour cover image above, not as clear as I would like, is the slipcover of Brian Sibley & John Howe's wonderful renditions of Tolkien's Maps of Middle Earth, which my daughter presented to me as a birthday gift when we visited her at The Kilns in Oxford a couple of years ago. On that same trip we also visited the Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral (and saw a genuine medieval chained library while we were at it.)

Another time, one Christmas I believe, my husband gave my Barbara Strachey's lovely Journeys of Frodo: an Atlas of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Sadly, I can find no images of it available online. But if you are really serious about both maps and Tolkien, check out the Middle Earth DEM Project. It is truly awe-inspiring.....!

Maps of course often figure prominently in stories-- a most notable example is Thorin's map in The Hobbit; and we can't forget the quintessential fictional map, the treasure map in RL Stevenson's Treasure Island.

Tarzan's Valentine

2007-02-14T22:03:00.000-08:00

Okay, so Valentine's Day will be over by the time I get this post up-- but I couldn't pass up the chance to plug my nominee for the ultimate date movie!

Chick flicks and romantic comedies can run the gamut from the veddy civilized, my dear (think Pride & Prejudice) to the rather crude, as in Someone Like You (aka Animal Husbandry, as the source novel was titled.) The common thread between such diverse films is the romantic attraction between the hero and heroine.

But for my money, Weissmuller and O'Sullivan's 1934 performance tops them all.

Perhaps you're wondering why the film portrayed in this lurid poster belongs on a blog about "Spiritual Refreshment". I place it here because of several important elements. Firstly, the good guys win. Also, Tarzan is an Adamic figure who shows us how to live in harmony with animals and the natural world. But mostly (and the reason it's a good date movie, too), the hero and heroine's love is remarkably unblemished by any kind of selfishness or betrayal on the part of either-- and if that isn't refreshing, I don't know what is.

The story picks up where the first Tarzan movie leaves off. As this second film opens, Tarzan has already got the girl, and they are living a paradisal existence, far from "civilization". On the surface it's a bwana pulp adventure, but the heart of the story, if you'll excuse that expression today, is the relationship between Tarzan and Jane. While there is savagery in the jungle about them, nature red in tooth and claw and all that, there is something touchingly innocent and pure about the way the ape-man and his mate interact. Asleep in the nest he has built her in the treetops, Jane wakes to Tarzan's gentle blowing on her face; they swim together, in a lyrical nude scene that was censored at first release and in recent years restored; and he tosses her through the air and catches her in circus antics amongst the vines and giant trees.

If this story were being interpreted today, I don't doubt Jane would undergo considerable angst over the temptation to return to the glitter and glam of civilization, and would be worried about her career path to boot. But this Jane knows what she wants, and it's Tarzan. There are no rivals in the jungle for his affection, he's always there when she needs him, and his playfulness makes her light up in a way that other suitors could never hope to do.

The snake that enters this jungle Eden comes in the form of ivory-hunters. Tarzan takes them to the fabled elephant graveyard, naively unquestioning, but when he realizes they mean to carry away the ivory, he insists this is an offence against this sacred ground. The treacherous hunters pretend to agree to turn around, but one of them shoots Tarzan and leaves him for dead.

But it isn't so easy to kill the lord of the jungle. For Tarzan is a master of the animals, harking back to the garden, as do many tales of animal companions. He is in harmony with the apes and elephants, and they come to his aid. Like a typical mythic hero he returns as if from the dead to rescue Jane from the hunters, an army of hostile natives, and a mob of lions.

Missed it this Valentine's Day? Who says you have to wait for next year?

Light in Darkness

2007-02-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

In my first entry in this blog, I noted that stories that refresh the spirit are not always all sweetness and light. Some people think that darkness makes the light brighter-- but really, it is only that our perception is altered. Daylight we generally take for granted; just as we take food for granted until we fast to the point when we can actually feel our hunger again. As for darkness, however-- we can take it for eight hours or so in our own beds; but let an unexpected blackout fall and we become anxious until we can find the flashlight and turn its comforting beam on.

In pre-Edison times, the moon had a significance for people, especially travellers, that we postmoderns simply cannot fathom. When my elder daughter was about a year old, her father and I showed her a bright rising moon out the kitchen widow one night. She gasped and cried out "DA MOON!", instantly smitten, and we suddenly understood how the ancients fell into worshipping the lamp of the night. A light that shines in the darkness arrests our attention with its beauty and scatters the evil things of night.

Galadriel's phial plays this vital role in The Lord of the Rings. This book, perhaps the most influential fiction of the 20th Century, is a rich, deep lode of refreshment for the spirit, and this will surely not be the last time I blog about it. But it is, in many places, a very dark book indeed, and the darkness is at its deepest in Shelob's lair. And this is just where the light of Eärendil's star, caught in Galadriel's phial, shines out to wound the nightmare spider.

There is much more to the story of Eärendil, and I haven't room for more than a little here. The tale is to be found in the Silmarillion, Tolkien's pre-history/mythology of Middle Earth. A partial summary, from Stratford Caldecott's Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien:

"....Eärendil is permitted to plead before the Valar on behalf of all the free peoples of Middle-earth. His plea is answered, and the Valar descend upon Middle-earth in a war of wrath that destroys the power of [the personification of evil in Middle-earth ] Morgoth. The Silmaril is set upon the brow of the immortal Eärendil as he sails the darkness of space in a silver ship fasioned for him by the Valar. "

Further exploration of Caldecott's excellent study reveals the seed of Eärendil in the work of Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf's "Crist":

Eala Earendel engla beorhtast
ofer middangeard monnum sended!
Hail Earendel, brightest of angels,
above the middle-earth sent unto men!

In the Book of Lost Tales, we find Tolkien's own song to the Morning Star:

"Earendel arose where the shadow flows
at Ocean's silent brim;
through mouth of night as a ray of light
where the shores are sheer and dim
he launched his bark like a silver spark from the last and lonely sand...."

"It is in this form," Caldecott concludes, "as a beam of light from the Morning and Evening Star, captured in a crystal phial, that the same light much later comes to Fodo as a gift from...Galadriel." This is the light that shines for our hobbit heroes as "A light when all other lights go out."

Light runs like a bright thread through the often-dark history of Middle-earth, as it does in so many of the great stories of our darkened universe.

Being Bilbo

2007-01-28T20:58:00.000-08:00

Comfort and Adventure

I was hooked as soon as I read at the end of the first paragraph on the first page, "it was a hobbit-hole, and that meant comfort."

I was not a kid any more when I read The Hobbit for the first time-- in fact I no longer recall if I read it before or after reading The Lord of the Rings, which I first experienced in my twenties as the book I had been looking for all my life. I don't know how I managed to miss Bilbo earlier on-- his tale of "There and Back Again" was certainly right up the alley of a kid who would make bi-weekly journeys to the library and cart back a dozen volumes of treasure at a time-- titles like those in Andrew Lang's coloured Fairy Book series, collections of Norse myths, the Mary Poppins books, Edward Eager's imaginative modern fantasies, juvenile science fiction by Andre Norton or Robert Heinlein, historical fiction by Rosemary Sutcliff, and of course the Narnia books from Hobbit author Tolkien's close friend, C.S. Lewis.

Now each time I read "An Unexpected Party" (ch. 1 of The Hobbit), I see myself more and more in Bilbo. Come to think of it, I'm now around the age he was when Gandalf scratched the rune for "Burglar" on his lovely green door. For hobbits and still more for humans, the fifties are a decade for maturity and settling into routine and respectability, not for running off with a bunch of dwarves you never met before on a wild-dragon chase (without even a pocket handkerchief). A well-appointed hobbit-hole with full larders and occasional properly-determined entries on the Engagement Tablet--- comfort is a high priority for those of us born in the baby boom.

We are, as Bilbo says, "plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!"

Bilbo is what is known in the writer's trade as a reluctant hero. The call to adventure arrives, as per Christopher Vogler's pattern in The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters, and Bilbo does not jump up immediately to answer the Call-- in fact, he shrieks, faints, and cries out hysterically "Struck by lightning!" Vogler says of this kind of response, the Refusal of the Call, that "There is charm in seeing a hero's reluctance overcome, and the stiffer the Refusal, the more an audience enjoys seeing it worn down."

"An Unexpected Party" is nothing but this wearing down of Bilbo's entrenchment in his comfortable hobbit-hole. First Gandalf and then the dwarves disrupt his quiet life. While he is running about serving this crowd of peculiar unexpected guests, he listens to their songs about dwarvish love of treasure and then suddenly "Something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking stick....."

But then it all fades, and as the dwarves talk of the very real dangers of the adventure ahead, Bilbo panics and faints. While recovering, he overhears their discussion, and their poor impression of him. His pride is goaded, and "He suddenly felt he would go without bed and breakfast to be thought fierce." And he takes that fatal first step, across the threshold to adventure.

Often throughout the story Bilbo has cause to regret his choice to answer the Call to Adventure. But there are no good stories that do not leave comfort behind. From the beginning, Gandalf has seen something more in Mr. Baggins than appears on the surface, and is proved right in his choice of a burglar, as again and again the hobbit from the Shire saves the band of dwarves from such foes as trolls, orcs and giant spiders.

It's good to be Bilbo, and it's good to know comfort. Often on his journey, it is the memory of his hobbit hole and comfortable things that sustains Bilbo through the darkest moments. And when at last he wends his way There and Back Again, he settles down on the proceeds of his adventure and is "quite content; and the sound of the kettle on his hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party."

Adventure does come calling when we least expect. We cling to our comfort, and perhaps like Bilbo never lose our love of it-- and yet it is good to know that no matter how small, plain and quiet we are to begin with, we too can answer the Call to Adventure-- if we dare.

Allies for the Fight

2007-01-19T09:58:00.000-08:00

Not a story (I promise stories in various forms will always be the main focus here, though!) but very much in line with the ideals of Refreshment of Spirit is this poem by Violet Nesdoly.

It's so easy to fall prey to negativity. There's so much of it around us. And the truth is the life in Christ is a war against the world, the flesh, and the devil. We need to continue to fight the good fight, to stand firm against the unconscionable both around and within oursleves.

When Violet writes

"I have decided to stop visiting with Anxiety,
answering Irritation’s persistent knock
and opening those emails from Anger"

all she is saying is that she has decided to stop consorting with the enemy. And she goes on to list the allies to whom she will instead stick close, learning and drawing strength from them.

The stories I choose to focus on in this blog are ones that help us get to know some of those Allies better-- faith, patience, wisdom, hope and many others. Oh, it's inevitable that in these stories we will catch sight of such enemies as greed, fear, malice, revenge and more-- their name is legion, and they prowl about us as lions seeking their prey. We may even engage in hotly contested battles with them. But in a story that refreshes the spirit, the reader will not in the end be uncertain whose side he should be on, and he will come away from the story better equipped than before to accomplish great feats in the battle.

A few posts ago we visited with Generosity in Dickens' A Christmas Carol. In future posts perhaps we'll go calling on Love in A Wrinkle in Time, or Hope in Lord of the Rings. A vast crowd of friends, mentors and allies awaits us in these wonderful stories, and I am looking forward to spending much time with them.

Dreams of Flight

2007-01-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

Have you ever dreamed you were flying? More than a third of dreamers report having dreamed of flying at least once.

Actually, I'm surprised it's only that many. I thought everyone had flying dreams. Researchers are unable to conclusively determine the causes or meanings of such dreams, but those who have them often say they are their favorite dreams, in which they experience a tremendous feeling of elation. We do know that lucid dreamers--dreamers who report being aware that they are dreaming even while they are in the dream-- have flying dreams twice as often as other dreamers.

Flying dreams are reported all over the world, and as far back in history as the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians.

The first really successful plane flight, the one you always hear about made by the Wright Brothers, took place less than a century ago, but the history of technology-assisted flight goes back to Da Vinci through the Crusades and to the depths of Greek myth. But even today, when we can make transcontinental flights in a matter of hours, our sense of wonder at the idea of flying by magical or supernatural means remains unabated. Magical flight, with its accompanying elation, appears again and again in stories of spiritual refreshment.

The elation and the flying seem to be a chicken and egg combination-- do we fly from "happy thoughts" as in Peter Pan (compare how laughing similarly elevates Mary Poppins and her charges to a tea party on the ceiling); or does flying send our spirits soaring (think Harry Potter whooping aloft on his broom at the end of the Prisoner of Azkaban film)? Sometimes flight in stories is under a person's own power, like Superman. Sometimes flight is accomplished in or on a magical object, like a flying carpet in the Arabian Nights or the Norse mythical ship Skidbladnir; sometimes it is on the back of a flying magical animal companion like the hippogriff in Prisoner of Azkaban, or a flying horse like Fledge in The Magician's Nephew. (more about animal companions in a future post!)

One of my favorite tales of flight is not a book, but a segment in the film Fantasia 2000.
Seen on the IMAX screen, a pod of whales perfom a breathtaking aerial ballet to Ottorino Respighi's "The Pines of Rome". Well, I am not sure it is a mere ballet so much as a pilgrimage from sea to sky, which morphs into a liturgical dance at the climax, when the whales joyously breach the upper clouds in circle around a radiant pulsing star (very like the glow of Christmas in Whoville at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.)

Why does the dream of flying mean so much to us? Perhaps the answer is in these words from the Prophet Isaiah.

Water and Spirit

2007-01-05T09:14:00.000-08:00

You are tired and thirsty, dirty, sweaty, hot-- what do you want most? Water, the ultimate refreshment for the body both inside and out. No wonder it is such a frequent and prominent motif in the literature of refreshment for the spirit as well.

Water is on my mind this week because we have just celebrated Theophany, which in the Eastern church is the feast of Christ's baptism. We could return to Voyage of the Dawn Treader to examine the motif of water at length. The chief instance of the outer use of water that comes to mind is Eustace-the-dragon's "disenchanting" bath; for the inner use, the adventurers' reaching of the place where "the waves grow sweet" in the utter East and where they drink this "liquid light".

But I would like to move on to another of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Silver Chair. This is because the main viewpoint character, Jill Pole-- friend of the one-time dragon Eustace-- is in this story a character constantly in search of refreshment.

The story begins with a different kind of water-- Jill's hot, humiliating tears, as she sits "blubbing" behind the gym where she has sought refuge from Them, the school bullies. And the tears repeat themselves, in a much more dreadful way, after she and Eustace reach Aslan's country. Showing off at a cliff's edge, Jill struggles with Eustace, who ends up falling off, and her tears are tears of repentance and regret.

"Crying is all right in its way while it lasts," writes Lewis. "But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do. When Jill stopped, she found she was dreadfully thirsty." Jill finds a stream-- but there is a lion nearby, and he will not go away, nor promise not to eat her. But she comes to drink at last in her great need, and finds the lion to be the good but not tame lion Eustace told her about-- Aslan.

Jill is set the task of remembering four signs and sent on a journey with Eustace and a helper, the Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum. Throughout this journey, Lewis writes again and again of Jill's concerns with water. When she and Eustace first arrive in Narnia, blown on Aslan's breath, the Regent Dwarf Trumpkin commands that the pair be "properly washed", and Jill is taken to a delightful chamber high in a turret with a little sunken bath in it. But next day at Puddleglum's, she has to make do with "some sort of a wash-- not a very nice one-- in one of the nearby channels" of the marsh. Though "not very nice" the wash still makes her and Eustace feel "fresher", and gives them an appetite.

The adventurers begin their journey by leaving the marsh for the wild lands of the north, crossing a shallow, noisy stream in which even Jill only gets wet up to her knees. Journeying for days in the cold, desolate lands, Jill dreams of hot baths in the Giant city of Harfang....and forgets to recite the signs.

Now we come to one of my favorite scenes. In the night, as rain washes the snow away, Jill dreams. A giant toy horse rolls across the carpet and stands at her head, then turns into a toy lion. "And then it was not a toy lion, but a real lion, The Real Lion, just as she had seen him on the mountain beyond the world's end. And a smell of all sweet-smelling things there are filled the room. But there was some trouble in Jill's mind, though she could not think what it was, and the tears streamed down her face and wet the pillow. The Lion told her to repeat the signs, and she found that she had forgotten them all. And Asland took her up in his jaws...and carried her to the window and made her look out. The moon shone bright; and written in great letters across the world or the sky....were the words UNDER ME...."

There is much more about water and its power to refresh the mind and spirit in this book and the other Chroncles of Narnia, as in many other stories. But I think I will stop here for now. Jill seeks refreshment, and finds it in living water, in the power of tears to wash away the things that keep us from seeing clearly. Only then can The Healing of Harms (title of the final chapter) begin to happen.

The Refreshment of Generosity: A Christmas Carol

2006-12-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

In case you were wondering-- this post is NOT late. The Twelve Days of Christmas begin with the Day itself and continue to the eve of Theophany (Jan. 6th, in the Western Church celebrating the arrival of the magi, and in the Eastern Church marking the baptism of Christ).

I have a lovely tpb edition of this classic illustrated by Michael Foreman (Gollancz, 1989). Unfortunately I cannot find a cover image of that one online, so here is the frontispiece of the 1843 first edition from the Wikipedia article.
(EDIT 2007: I have now found the Foreman cover online!)

But it doesn't much matter which if any illustrations you get to go along with the text; next to the original Christmas Story itself, Dickens's beloved tale stands as the quintessential Christmas story. For over a hundred years it has influenced the concept of Christmas in the Western world: the now quaint-sounding carols, shoppers in Victorian costume bustling about the snowy streets while shop windows trimmed with holly glow warmly.

A romantic picture, but beneath the cloak of snowy holiday scenes lies the cruel landscape dominated by Ignorance and Want. Dickens grew up in a world of poverty deeper than any experienced in the West today by any but the poorest of the homeless. In A Christmas Carol he goes to the heart and root cause of poverty: not lack of resources, but lack of generosity. Ignorance and Want can be combatted by the concerted action of people of goodwill.

Robert Heinlein classifies character-driven stories in three main ways : 1) boy-meets-girl, 2) The Little Tailor (an everyman character accomplishes great things) and 3) The man who learned better. A Christmas Carol is the third of these types, and a radical exemplar; Scrooge at the end of the story, converted by the Three Spirits' forcing him to see himself and his terrible end, "became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them...His own heart laughed, and that was enough for him."

Is it believable that a lifelong miser should turn his values upside down (in the film adaptation with Alistair Sim, indeed, the transformed Scrooge stands on his head!) as a result of a traumatic supernatural experience? Is it not just as likely that, after the fact, he might put the visitation of the Spirits down to "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato"?

I leave such concerns to the individual reader. But what makes this book for me one of "refreshment of spirit" is not just Scrooge's conversion from miserliness to generosity, but the generosity of spirit of many other characters.

Scrooge's clerk Bob Cratchitt, for instance, browbeaten and dramatically underpaid, can nonetheless offer a toast to his employer at Christmas dinner. And Scrooge's nephew, who has been disowned by his parsimonious old uncle, is not deterred by cries of "humbug!" from wishing the old sinner a Merry Christmas; and further, in the sequence where Tiny Tim dies, goes out of his way to offer help and comfort to Cratchit. And then there are the Fezziwigs, whose delightful Christmas party so cheers their employees.

A Refreshing Story is one that is based on hope-- the hope that the entrenched miserliness in all of us can change, and that the actions of each can in some small way change the entrenched misery around us. Do we really need a harrowing ghostly visitation to begin that change, or can we follow in the footsteps of the simple Bob Cratchitts and Fezziwigs of our own acquaintance?

Scrooge's nephew says:

"I have always thought of Christmas time...--apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that-- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

O very well-- I know this is a cliche-- but how can I not end this entry:

"God bless us, Every One!"

Story Spells for Refreshment of the Spirit

2006-12-19T13:51:00.000-08:00

"On the next page she came to a spell 'for the refreshment of the spirit'....It went on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real....When she had....come to the end, she said, "That is the loveliest story I've ever read or shall read in my whole life...But here part of the magic of the Book came into play. You couldn't turn back. The right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned; the left-hand pages could not..."oh dear, it's all fading away...It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill....."
And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story that reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book..."

--C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

When I need refreshment of spirit, there are certain stories I return to again and again. When Lucy found she could not go back to the story-spell in the Magician's Book, she begged Aslan to tell it to her instead; and he replied, "Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years." And this is how the Great Lion tells that Story: by letting us catch glimpses of it, through a glass darkly, in other stories that we experience or encounter in our lives. Let Peter Pan and Wendy chant "I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!" But as for me, my chorus is "I do believe in stories! I do! I do!"

What Lewis calls "refreshment of spirit", his fellow-Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien calls "escape and consolation" (in the essay "On Fairy Stories", available in The Tolkien Reader). For a story to refresh the spirit, it is not enough that it merely inform or entertain. Indeed there are stories that will not refresh but poison the spirit-- like the spell Lucy found "to make beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals," and the one which allowed her to spy on her friends. Lewis-as-narrator remarks of the words of this last spell "nothing will induce me to tell you what they were."

Likewise I will not write on this blog about stories that flatter our human vanity or appeal to our selfishness and meanness. True, no humanly-made story is as perfect and unsullied as the one Lucy read about the cup, the sword, the tree and the green hill; but there are many stories which for a moment will let us catch a sudden scent of some divinely beautiful garden, or hear a single heart-wrenching measure of a transcendently glorious symphony.

These refreshing stories-- they may be told in various forms, such as novel, short story, epic poem, film, stage play, music, dance-- are by no means free from pain, darkness or fear. Yet they do bring us escape, refreshment, consolation. This blog will look at such stories, and the means by which they work their healthful magic. Hence the spoiler warning at the top of the blog; this is not a review blog as such, but a learning exercise for myself and anyone who cares to join me. As my main blog explains, I too am a writer of stories; I strive to make them the same refreshing kind of stories as I like to read, and also encourage my creative writing students to do the same.

Please feel free to comment on the ideas put forth in this blog, or nominate your own favorite stories of refreshment for examination in a future post here.