Tag: Nonfiction

Joyful Heat

What the 14th-century mystic Richard Rolle has to say is not merely inspiring but challenging.  In it we find the same axis that is throughout the Bible, the unyielding fact that you cannot love both the world and God.  At least not very well.  Like me, you may find yourself busy with both but getting the best of neither relationship. 

Of late there has been a refreshing current in Christian thought, a return to the doctrine of creation and God’s judgment “it is good.” But the hard words remain: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever” (I John 2:15-17). “Don’t you realize that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God?” (James 4:4).  “You cannot serve both God and Mammon [money]” (Matthew 6:24). In our current, unprecedented material prosperity, it is well to remember these verses and the teachings of Richard Rolle.

For a 14th century man much is known about Richard Rolle. All I will say here is that he was a student at Oxford when a Master’s degree was a seven-year program, but he abandoned his studies. He stole two cloaks from his father and ran away from home to be a monk. Theft! An inauspicious start to a holy life, as many have noted. 

The Fire of Love

Further, perfect souls who have been caught up into this friendship–surpassing, abundant, and eternal!–discover that life is suffused with imperishable sweetness from the glittering chalice of sweet charity.* In holy happy wisdom they inhale joyful heat into their souls, and as a result are much cheered by the indescribable comfort of God’s healing medicine. Here at all events is refreshment for those who love their high and eternal heritage, even though in their earthly exile distress befell them. However, they think it not unfitting to endure a few year’s hardship in order to be raised to heavenly thrones, and never leave the. They have been selected out of all mankind to be the beloved of their Maker and to be crowned with glory, since, like the seraphim in highest heaven, they have been inflamed with the same love. Physically they may have sat in solitary state, but in mind they have companied with angels, and have yearned for their Beloved. Now they sing most sweetly a prayer of love everlasting as they rejoice in Jesus:

Oh honeyed flame, sweeter than all sweet, delightful beyond all creation!

My God, my Love, surge over me, pierce me by your love, wound me with your beauty. 

Surge over me, I say, who am longing for your comfort. 

Reveal your healing medicine to your poor lover. 

See, my one desire is for you; it is you my heart is seeking.

My soul pants for you; my whole being is athirst for you. 

–From chapter 2 in The Fire of Love by Richard Rolle. Translation and copyright 1972 by Clifton Wolters. Penguin Classics.

*Not today’s common usage of “charity” but from caritas (Greek agape), which means the type of love that is unconditional, giving, self-sacrificing, divine.

 

Through Mine Own Eyes, part 3

Concluding installment from Katharine Trevelyan’s remarkable experience in the garden at Coombe.  Previous installments tell more about Ms. Trevelyan. 

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Every prayer was fulfilled, every possible desire for the whole world consummated; for His Kingdom had come and I had beheld it with my very eyes. Never again the need to meditate for He was here, to be stood in, sat in, as a child might play on the edges of a great sunny river. And, indeed, I found myself only a child, playing in Him, laughing with Him at the way He was visiting His world. When I stood within Him, He gave and was everything. The years to come, which He showed me as easily as a father shows his child a curious shell beside the great river, held in them no surprise; only wonder and joy.

 

 

 

 

The Second Glimpse

Continuing with Lewis’s memoir. Note how this excerpt (and the next) show literature, books, as the vehicle for the mystical experience. These experiences had this one effect among others: They contributed to Lewis’s tremendous love of and life-long dedication to poetry and stories. 

Somewhat the same thing happened to me as a child. Books such as A Wrinkle in Time, The Outsiders (S . E. Hinton), The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis’s own Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Last Battle provided this kind of unspeakable joy and longing and a glimpse of something quite beyond the story and the walls of the world around me. Has it happened to you?

The second glimpse came through Squirrel Nutkin; through it only, though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books. But the rest of them were merely entertaining; it administered the shock, it was a trouble. It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened; and, as before, the experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire (that was impossible–how can one possess Autumn?) but to reawake it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, “in another dimension.”  –C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1955. @ C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.

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Photo by Sandis Helvigs on Unsplash

Joy

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We begin with C. S. Lewis for several reasons. His influence as a writer has been as great as anyone who wrote of a mystical experience in recent times. He bridges the ancient and modern worlds, and he bridges the wildest Romanticism with the most prosaic Church of England. Today he is still considered one of the greatest experts in medieval and Renaissance literature.  He could be a rigid logician and he always bested his opponents (with perhaps one exception) during public debates at Oxford, but his life’s course was set by a childhood experience beyond all reason.

This example of a mystical experience is not unique in its occurrence during childhood, but it is nearly unique in how articulate the author is able to describe it some 45 years after the fact.  But then, as he says later, “in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else.” 

…..The thing has been much better done by Traherne and Wordsworth, but every man must tell his own tale.

The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not fo years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought me his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss”of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to “enormous”) comes somewhere near it.  It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. [“Oh, I desire too much.”] –and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.

–C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, Brace & C0., 1955. @ C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.

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