TEA: Jesus In Disguise
Today I gave a talk on a retreat entitled “Jesus In Disguise”, where I look at the different ways in which we can encounter God behind the veil of the ordinary. The audio is available below:
Jesus in Disguise (Download)
"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Today I gave a talk on a retreat entitled “Jesus In Disguise”, where I look at the different ways in which we can encounter God behind the veil of the ordinary. The audio is available below:
Jesus in Disguise (Download)
Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.
– Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistola CVI, sect. 2
Continuing my notes on The Four Loves, this is the first of two posts which continue my summary of Chapter 2 (“Likings and Loves for the subhuman”). In this post we will be looking at the section which Lewis devotes to the love of nature.
1. Some people have a special love of nature
For some people, perhaps especially for Englishmen and Russians, what we call “the love of nature” is a permanent and serious sentiment. I mean here that love of nature which cannot be adequately classified simply as an instance of our love for beauty.
(a) This is more than simply an appreciation of beauty
Of course many natural objects – trees, flowers and animals – are beautiful.
(i) Either of individual objects…
But the nature-lovers whom I have in mind are not very much concerned with individual beautiful objects of that sort. The man who is distracts them. An enthusiastic botanist is for them a dreadful companion on a ramble. He is always stopping to draw their attention to particulars. N
(ii) …or of vistas
or are they looking for “views” or landscapes. Wordsworth, their spokesman, strongly deprecates this. It leads to “a comparison of scene with scene”, makes you “pamper” yourself with “meagre novelties of colour and proportion”.
(b) For these lovers of nature, it is about the “Spirit” of the place
While you are busying yourself with this critical and discriminating activity you lose what really matters – the “moods of time and season”, the “spirit” of the place. And of course Wordsworth is right. That is why, if you love nature in his fashion, a landscape painter is (out of doors) an even worse companion than a botanist. It is the “moods” or the “spirit” that matter.
(c) Which is why beauty itself per se is the focus
Nature-lovers want to receive as fully as possible whatever nature, at each particular time and place, is, so to speak, saying. The obvious richness, grace and harmony of some scenes are no more precious to them than the grimness, bleakness, terror, monotony, or “visionary dreariness” of others. The featureless itself gets from them a willing response. It is one more word uttered by nature. They lay themselves bare to the sheer quality of every countryside every hour of the day. They want to absorb it into themselves, to be coloured through and through by it.
After a weekend camping, surrounded by gorgeous landscape, this seemed like the only appropriate way to return to blogging…
I see You in the sunrise
I see You in the rain
I see You in the laughter
I feel You through the pain
Everything that You have made is beautiful
Oh, my God, I can’t believe my eyes
But in all of this to think that You would think of me
Makes my heart come alive
Your love is like a mighty fire deep inside my bones
I feel like I could climb a thousand mountains all at once
And I never have to wonder if somebody cares for me
I love the Maker
And the Maker loves me
I see You, You are creation
I see the grandness of Your majesty
The universe is singing all Your glory
I can’t believe You live inside of me
More than just some words upon a page
You’ve shown me in a million ways
But there is one that stands above them all
Hands of creation on a cross