I came across this quotation on pg 210 of Paul Miller’s A Praying Life. It captures so well what I love about both C.S. Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. It comes from Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian.

Lewis’s mind was above all characterized by a willingness to be enchanted, and it was this openness to enchantment that held together the various strands of his life - his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and (in some ways above all) his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story.

It is this element that characterizes the most godly men I have known and most admire. Smashing cynicism out of the way, they passionately and joyfully embrace the story in which they have been placed, and they are enthusiastic about telling that story to others. This is the fear of the Lord. This is the kind of man that I want to be.

The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is not to be had in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle. To journey for the sake of our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world’s sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.

- Frederick Buechner, upon hearing bad news from a friend

Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two equals four.

- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you , opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

- Henry David Thoreau

You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you.

- Rwandan Proverb

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.

- Carl Schurz

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.

- Jean Arp

Perhaps, after the Fall, Truth - the immense and beautiful tapestry that is Truth - was cut up into pieces, puzzle pieces, and now we spend our lives trying to put all of the pieces back together in their correct order.

Every piece of information that we receive, via the senses and otherwise, is a piece of this puzzle. We start our attempts to put the pieces together probably before we are born.

But a map is needed, something that gives us clues as to where the pieces go, like the picture on the top of a puzzle box.

But we don’t have the puzzle box or any other complete photograph or map of the tapestry.

Have you ever tried putting a giant puzzle together with no idea what picture you are trying to create? What would you do? You would start by trying to find at least two pieces that seemed to fit together, and then you would build from there.

But even with just two pieces you cannot help but try and create some kind of map for yourself by projecting the pattern further beyond what you have already constructed.

Others offer maps that attempt to explain your reality and fit more of your unexplained/poorly-fitted puzzle pieces together. But these maps are often wrong, usually as a result of sin.

Sin is our attempt to avoid God and get to the Truth without Him. But He is the Truth.

The Bible is the only good map that we have. It is not a clear photograph (like the puzzle box top), but it is not overly simplistic either, and it leads us always ever deeper into the mysterious complexities of the Truth.

If we were to see the tapestry of Truth now in full we wouldn’t understand or be able to comprehend it.

We are always in the process of creating and modifying our own internal map of the Truth. Some refer to this map as their “philosophy of life”. It consists of 1) all of the pieces that we have encountered and fit together up until now, and 2) our map that we have constructed that “makes sense” of those pieces and projects a bigger pattern.

This isn’t quite it… We don’t hang onto the puzzle pieces themselves (the little and big bits of data that we process in our lifetimes), we just use them to construct the internal map. Most of the pieces are tossed aside and forgotten once they have been used to trace out their place in the map.

Some of the pieces are similar (if not identical), and sometimes it is hard (if not impossible) to figure out where they go. Sometimes a piece can seem to fit just as well in several different pieces.

So it is with the map fragments that we are given or create. They come in many different sizes, and if you look close enough they lead in many different directions. One fragment may make perfect sense of a given set of pieces, yet does not fit with other large maps that have been constructed.

Some important components so far:

• the tapestry = Truth
• the puzzle pieces = the bits of input out of which we construct reality.
• maps = sketches, photographs, attempts (some better, some worse) at recreating some part (greater or smaller) of the original tapestry. The Bible is the only reliable map.
• Sin = our rejection of God (and therefore Truth), which led to the initial fragmentation of the tapestry and our separation from Him.

Beauty

The tapestry is beautiful beyond all words. Therefore, one good way to know if a map fragment (whether great or small, and whether understandable or not) is correct is that it is beautiful.

Now we cannot always see beauty when it is before us, so we cannot then say that all correct maps will always be beautiful to us. Sometimes we are blind.

But also there are times when we encounter beautiful things that we don’t understand. We cannot see how these beautiful map fragments fit in with the rest of our map or even why the are beautiful, yet we must keep them! For true beauty is always at least a little bit mysterious and beyond words. This is because Truth is so much more than we can comprehend, even in its unfragmented form.

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.

- Charles Dudley Warner

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

- Paul Valery

Those who wish to sing always find a song.

- Swedish proverb

When formulating a philosophy of life, I contend that the least accessible fact, and thus the most baffling to isolate and classify, is the complex moral and spiritual environment of the philosopher himself. Most efforts at abstraction fail to impress the common man because sages seldom take time to interpret life from within the center of their own perspective as individuals… A worldview remains truncated to the degree that a thinker fails to deal with data gained by a humble participation in the moral and spiritual environment… What it means to be held in a moral and spiritual environment can only be learned as one acquaints himself with the realities that already hold himself from existence itself. This pilgrimage into inwardness is a painful personal responsibility, for only the individual himself has access to the secrets of his moral and spiritual life.

- Edward John Carnell, The Case for Biblical Christianity

You are never too old to be what you might have been.

- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

If I only may grow: firmer, simpler, - quieter, warmer.

- Dag Hammarskjold

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

- James Thurber

copied from entry on 2/20/2000, 3:30 AM:

1. Preface - explaining purpose, organization and reasoning behind organization.
2. Personal Definitions of Key Terms and Concepts
3. Intuited Concepts and Extra-logical Conclusions
4. Logical Conclusions within the paradigm of #3
5. Logical Conclusions within other paradigms (including Science and other philosophical approaches)
6. Logical Conclusions resulting from comparison and contrast of #3 and #5.
7. List of Issues to be covered in 3-6.
8. Collection of resources and references to resources pertaining to issues in #7.

2/23/00

All complex words and concepts must be defined in the simplest and clearest terms possible when writing my comprehensive philosophy. This must be done in order to tear down (as much as possible) the barrier that denies us direct access to and sharing of Reason, viz. Language.

(Am I reconstructing the Tower of Babel?)

copied from journal entry dated 1/31/00:

The key ingredient in all areas of applied organized thought - from theology to biology - is consistency.

It is impossible for the mind to accept two concepts that it recognizes as being mutually exclusive or contradictory. There may indeed be times when I act on or allow contradictory beliefs into my operative philosophy, but once I consciously recognize contradiction, I am not able to convince myself that both can be true. 

Moreover, I hold any actions taken according to contradictory beliefs to be cowardly and reprehensible. 

This idea of consistency is a major cornerstone of my personal philosophy of life, and many of my other beliefs are strongly influenced by it. 

One major problem is that it is impossible for us to hold up each concept presented to our minds and to check it against all those that we have formerly accepted. Therefore it often happens that we unwittingly operate by conflicting philosophies.

But, as if this were not a big enough problem, we also do this consciously, when we simply choose not to recognize these contradictions as such. If it is possible for us to sin against ourselves, then it seems to me that this may be the worst of such transgressions. 

I also think that it is important to note that, since our minds are not capable (as far as I know) of judging absolute truth, there are often concepts that are only in apparent contradiction with each other and, upon further examination, it may be proven that they are not. by this, I do not mean that our minds are capable of uncovering all such errors of judgment. Some of these we may never understand.

I think that one area of philosophy involving many such apparent contradictions is where religion and modern science meet. I, personally, accept most of the findings of modern science, and I also believe the message that is put forward in the Bible. Although many people now consider the two to be mutually exclusive, I believe that the concepts of science can make sense within the context of Scripture. Those scientific theories that do run in direct contradiction to  my theological beliefs I question thoroughly for error. But if I were to find one such concept of science to be completely consistent with the rest of my beliefs about science, and if I was unable to conceive of any alternative approaches, and if this idea were to be found completely inconsistent with my theological beliefs, then I would be forced to re-examine the latter for internal contradictions. I accept the teachings of both science and Christianity only to the extent that they contain neither internal contradictions, nor contradictions with each other. 

 

I post this entry here with a certain degree of trepidation because of how it might be taken by others, particularly in light of a lot of theological debate that has been going on in my current circles. I must note that my personal views on the nature of Scripture and its relationship to science have developed significantly since writing this entry. I post it here only to help myself and others to locate my present thinking within a trajectory and that I might be able to pinpoint when certain ideas first began to develop and why.
Feel free to critique what you read here and leave your comments. It will help me to continue to think about these things more carefully. But please do so knowing that this does not accurately reflect my present perspectives on the matter.

11/25/99:

The most important thing for a parent to teach a child, above all do’s and don’ts, is the habit of analyzing one’s own thoughts and actions. Without this, laws and morality become meaningless and futile. Such an existence is virtually animal.