"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
This week I watched a video of a Protestant visiting an Eastern Orthodox parish which I remember passing when I visited Denver.
I don’t entirely like a few of the answers given by the Orthodox priest, but you do get some really lovely images of their parish:
I recently re-read Aesop’s Fables. I had always loved them as a child, and a couple of years ago I had an hour or so to kill and the house I was in had a copy of the book. I very much enjoyed reading them again, so this past week I set aside some time and read them from copy to cover. They didn’t disappoint.
One’s homesickness for Heaven finds at least an inn there; and it’s an inn on the right road.
– Ruth Pitter
I can’t believe I hadn’t come across this until now… This is Brooke Fraser’s “C.S. Lewis Song”:
If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy,
I can only conclude that I was not made for here
If the flesh that I fight is at best only light and momentary,
Then of course I’ll feel nude when to where I’m destined I’m compared
Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the morning
I will sigh and with all creation groan as I wait for hope to come for me
Am I lost or just found? on the straight or on the roundabout of the wrong way?
Is this a soul that stirs in me, is it breaking free, wanting to come alive?
Cos my comfort would prefer for me to be numb
An avoid the impending birth of who I was born to become
For we, we are not long here
Our time is but a breath, so we better breathe it
And I, I was made to live, I was made to love, I was made to know you
Hope is coming for me
Hope, he’s coming
Since in the podcast we are currently working our way through The Great Divorce, I thought it would be advisable to become more familiar with the character of George MacDonald. MacDonald was a minister and writer who greatly influenced C.S. Lewis. Lewis said that reading MacDonald’s Phantastes “baptized” his imagination.
I therefore read George MacDonald: An Anthology, which was assembled by C.S. Lewis. It contains 365 extracts from MacDonald’s work, such as the following:
#262 A Lonely Religion
There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.
It was fascinating to see the themes and threads of thought I have seen in Lewis’ work in that of his master. It has certainly whet my appetite to read more of MacDonald’s work.