That's actually ripping off the title of a GK Chesterton collection of essays, but if "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" then perhaps I've gone beyond it with outright theft. Love you, old boy.
So I'm back blogging again after a year. What's up. Things are good. In Stratford-upon-Avon on a queen sized bed now as we speak. How merciful the Lord hath been--not a quote you can really whiz past very well, one that wants to dilate whatever moment you're in to make it more full, more inclusive of your past and future. Truly, he hath.
So in summary I went to the hiking in the UK program in spring of 2009, Jerusalem in the winter semester (Jan-Apr) of 2010, and now back to the same UK program spring 2011, this time as a TA, but of course to continue writing and growing in my understanding. To examine my life further, to detect the divine fingerprints that have been left everywhere. Life is the scene of the greatest crime called love. It's a cloak and dagger affair, the ultimate Anonymous One being rather tough to catch: blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see him, or rather, those who look, because once they see they'll live.
That reminds me of a quote I read at John Ruskin's mansion, Brantwood, nestled in a flowery forest in the Lake District near Beatrice Potter's (not even sure what her name is, sorry) home and across from Coniston Water. There's only one lake in the Lake District, incidentally, the rest being named "Mere" (a Norse word) or "Tarn" (no idea). That adds to the Middle Earth impression you can feel here. Ruskin's quote, anyway, was this:
"The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see."
Clearly, there is a difference between "getting it" and simply knowing things. Remember, in 1 Cor 13 Paul draws a distinction between "knowing all mysteries" and "knowing God," for to have all knowledge is not enough without charity, but to have the sort of knowledge that comes from having God as your acquaintance, who's simpler name is Love (1 John 4), that is "life eternal" (John 17:3).
I want to say something that isn't about England. It's more about this--this business of eternal life. I am seeing something that I haven't seen for a long time. I don't have a pure enough heart to speak in a plain enough way, but this is the most important thing I know.
And I wish I had a better segue, but I don't. No transition, but this is something worth the jolt.
For years I have tried to save myself. I have worked as hard as I can--falling often (as everyone writing such a thing will claim, their inevitable disclaimer that they're "merely mortal"), but trying just enough more. I rarely had peace or hope. In Jerusalem, however, in the Garden of Gethsemane, of all places (how merciful the Lord hath been...), a professor said something that bothered me about the Atonement. He seemed to say that we couldn't know exactly how to get it into us, or something like that. I thought of D&C 45:5 (3-5), my favorite Atonement scriptures. "Wherefore, Father, spare these my brethren that believe on my name, that they may come unto me and have everlasting life."
"Why does it only say 'those who believe'?" I wondered. Isn't that the imbalance some evangelist churches have between faith and works, the ones who run to the front of football stadiums and just say they believe, as Elder Holland once referred to in a talk? But there it is in our scriptures. "What's wrong with just saying I believe?"
Ah. That time I caught the difference.
There is a difference between just saying we believe and just believing. Is just believing really enough?
I'm sorry this is turning sermonic, but it's the most important stuff I know--I'll give you random novelty stuff later, like how Captain Picard played Shylock the Jew in "The Merchant of Venice" two nights ago (amazing) (how merciful...)--but this is what gives me a hope that alters my whole mood.
Walking along the canals of Stratford yesterday, towards Mary Arden (Billy Shakes' mother-in-law)'s farm, a few friends and I discussed this. 2 Ne. 31:20, I think it is--the great scripture about "Pressing forward with a perfect brightness of hope" and stuff like that. Well how are you supposed to hope like that when your hopes rest on an imperfect mortal (which is what we are when we are honest--and not)? The last line: "Relying wholly on the merits of him who is mighty to save." Wholly. Love that word.
Lets talk for a moment about love. I used to think it was the mightiest power, the thing that conquers all--God's strength. Think about Ammon saying that power is granted unto him according to his desires which are in God (Alma 18:35 I think). "My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure," said Sir Galahad (in Tennyson's poetry). I thought love was strength, but I was wrong--or at least simplistic.
Lately I've noticed how the best people aren't known for their ability to do much but for their inability to do less. Think of the best missionaries in the Book of Mormon. Enos: "Wherefore I saw that I must go down to meet my maker, having been wrought upon by his Spirit that preach his word unto his people" (Enos 1:26). Alma, when he was old and his sons were going on missions: "And Alma himself could not rest, wherefore he also went with them." Could not (Alma 43:1). Ether preached from morning until night because of the Spirit which was in him (Ether 12:2-4 or something). Ammon and the sons of Mosiah "Could not bear the thought that any human soul should suffer endless torment" (Mos 28:3-4). That's what love really is. It is a weakness--a holy helplessness--an inability to do less than your full power. Works are inevitable when you love. That's why faith without works is dead--if you really have faith, you will have been saved, or rather, been made into his image, which is love, been reborn.
But you will never love if you try to perfect yourself. That I know. Loving is too hard to force OR fake, in the long run. Charity must last to be true--it never faileth. We can't forge that.
When you don't have to work, because Christ has done it for you, when you don't have to worry about your salvation, because you believe it's yours already, you will have hope and peace and assurance, you will have been changed. When you have been changed by hope--the promise you have found through faith--you will love. THEN you will work, precisely because you don't have to.
The price of getting to Heaven is not climbing as far as we can, but to stop resisting the truth. It is degrading to be carried, but there is no other way to reach the Kingdom. We must swallow our pride and be borne.
I've probably said enough. It's incoherent way too much. I'm sorry. But I hope you get the gist of it. We will work when we don't have to, because that is what makes us want to. We don't have to when we have let him carry us, which requires two things: we must surrender the world, for he will take us beyond it, and we must surrender our pride, for we will not deserve the place to where we go. "Now I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed" (Moses 1:10). To rely "wholly" on Christ is absolutely crucial. It is the Crux of Christianity, the very Cross. That is the whole of it. Believe--truly. (1 John 5 talks about how that is to overcome the world.)
I just like seeing how when I'll let go I won't have to work--I will have to simply let myself go. Why struggle when we could let our natures be changed so the right thing will spring out of us by default? I know there are a lot of answers--I still have a few--but I know it feels better every time I let go of one more.
*
So on to the trip here in the UK.
First of all, as I mentioned, it was unbelievable to have Patrick Stewart play Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" two nights ago, here in Stratford, home of Billy Shakes (as Dan King calls him) himself. The most magical part by far was the classic speech everyone who knows the play clings to--the big food-for-thought thing about anti-semitism: "Hath not a Jew eyes, hath not a Jew ears? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you poison us do we not die?" (scrambled paraphrase--look it up) The moment really sharpened into focus the way we dehumanize others by artificial categories like sects and politics and religion and whatnot, when the most fundamental things--the things that make us what we too are--we share.
In the morning I had haddock and poached eggs (haddock is the same fish used in "Fish n Chips:) for breakfast, bought three sweet books after lunch ("The Witches" by Roald Dahl for old times' sake, and "Boy" + "Going Solo" by him too which I've never read, then "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" which I'm pumped to read), then I saw the play. What a DAY.
Yesterday I enjoyed eating some Irish mussels at "The Lame Duck" alongside "good friends," as Pat Madden called us, Lauren Ashley and Kaley and the Maddencitos (Pato and Adi) and Rachel and crap who else? 2 meals for 10 pounds--fantastic pub fare and prices before the play, "The City Madame," a good performance of a play I disliked for the way it tried to enforce a morality I didn't believe in (women give all due deference to your lords and masters, some men can never change--may all narrowmindedness be hanged; it was the spirit of it I truly choked on). Great moments though: the best one was probably a very inappropriate joke one of my favorite people on the program laughed uproariously at, all by himself. It was so funny. Noisy American.
ZANE!!! Gotta tell you this.
So I was assigned to drive from Rowardennan--a youth hostel at the foot of Ben Lommond (which we hiked the next day) and the shore of Loch Lommond--back to Balmaha for groceries during class one day. It was terrifying. Narrow rustic roads sealed in by mossy stones in flaring green forests--distractingly beautiful, plus oncoming traffic made me have to squeeze in spots you wouldn't believe to get our van past the other cars. I suddenly realized I was singing "God Save the Queen" to myself.
Why was that?
AHA!
Long ago in the days when we walked the halls of Cedar High, I remembered, Zane also launched a habit of us driving on the wrong side of the road every now and then, and singing "God Save the Queen" during it. And here I was! On the wrong side of the road! And my subconscious had clued my mind in with that song until the memory came out. Then I began belting out the song exceedingly Britishly, boldy, and proper, bellowing "God save our gracious queen / Long live our Noble queen / God save the queen!" It was glorious. Probably my favorite part of the day--better than Ben Lomond even.
So that's the tremendous trifles idea--how random little things can truly be the wonders of our lives--an idea that presupposes that Wonder is the true substance of our lives. We never really find live through anything else.
"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown."
--Emerson, Nature
How hard is it to see the truth within things we always see because of "that tragedy with lies within the fact of frequency," as George Eliot says in Middlemarch. The thing--seeing--beyond that fact of frequency "has not yet been wrought into us, and perhaps we could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life it would be like seeing the grace grow or hearing the squirrel's heartbeat, and perhaps we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
True genius can appreciate the ordinary. CS Lewis said "Power...does not come from novelty but from significance." Do you think God did not know that his prodigals would return? And yet does he not run when he sees them coming from "far off"? God has no more surprises, but he mas more joy than we can imagine. The shortsightedness of evil is that it looks to novelty. Novelty, however, will someday fail. Thus the world will lose its charm. But charity never faileth. It will always be beautiful. Perpetual wonder lies within it. Remember when we were kids and could watch our favorite movies again and again and again? Become thou as a little child. Rediscover that wonder. See eternal beauties so they need not be replaced with fresh novelties in the way of all the world's frantic spirit of obsession: fashion, media, even--I'm afraid to say--travel. If we are always looking for something new, we will always find something that will eventually be old. We need to look for something that predates new and outlasts old, something timeless, something true. We need to, as Ruskin says, see.
A moment to remember. I was inhaling Wysteria at Wordsworth's last home, Rydal Mount. Wysteria is my favorite flower in England. It is light purple and gentle and the smell is delicate yet fierce. The scent seems to match the color, to outdo it, actually, rather. It is a pity there are no words to convey smell--smell is like experience, like music or spirit. You simply have to hear or feel them. I was wondering about that while I stood on a small wall of flat slate (wondering also if I should do that) and while I pulled the flowering vine towards me. A sear of pure light, no bigger than a star, appeared through the dangling leaves and flowers. It was very piercing--some raindrop perfectly refracting the sunlight which had just come out. I didn't know what to make of it--wasn't sure I should try to make anything of it unless it came naturally--but it was a beautiful little moment, and I've been wondering about the random moments we remember, the moments where we are shocked into our senses, startled into awareness. I think it was George Eliot who also said that "Poetry can make us more aware of the substratum of our being, for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves." Perhaps all beauty is a shock. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," said Keats. And truth can rock us every time.
One awesome little moment was sitting outside Robert the Bruce # something's hunting lodge on the other side of Loch Lommond (we'd been kicked out of our other hostel due to a miscommunication on booking). We'd just finished sacrament meeting on the grass outside the beautiful, massive manor (there were parapets, from which I saw a punk-bearded dude watch us now and then). Sometimes the wind would rustle through the towering trees and shake loose the blossoms from the flowering ones--a rain of fluttering white petals made for a beautiful moment or two in the meeting. I was pretty tired during the meeting though. Afterwards I was hot from being in the sun for an hour and a half--my ears had been sunburned from hiking Ben Lomond and they were cooking again from behind--but I was so tired I simply slumped down backwards after the closing prayer. What wonder were this!? As my back "mmm-ed" in sleepy relief as I rested it on the grass, I realized my face felt wonderful, whereas I'd expected to have the sunlight blasting redly through even my closed eyelids. But no. I wanted to look but didn't dare lest the sun would sear me even worsely should I open them up--it was waiting to pounce. I sat up and turned--so curious was I--and lo: a 12 foot tree stump with one mostly amputated branch reaching only a foot or two over. It hadn't been able to reach and shade me before, but when I laid down, it was just in reach to cover my face, or at least my ears and eyes, so I had a nap. There were no other trees within the well kept green field, just around the edges. :)
One other VERY cool thing to me is how Wordsworth was friends with Thomas DeQuincey AND Sir Walter Scott--whom I love almost above all else (Arthur Hallam perhaps holding that spot, or at least vying, along with CS Lewis, as far as ideologists go). The whole lot of these famous people from the era were actually friends! I loved that. I loved that the world was small enough that all could be playing a prominent part in it--"all" being those whom I know well enough to love from it; and what I really mean is that most eras were too fragmented to have been defined by a community or two, and the Romantics, here, all knew one another, or at least much of one another. I longed to see Coleridge coming over Helvellyn (mtn) from Keswick to visit Grasmere, to chat at Dove Cottage with Wordsworth where they revolutionized poetry and Britain (and me) by reacting against a poetic style of merely wit and launched a successful crusade for a literature of feeling, of living, of reality. And adding to that DeQuincey who struggled with opium eating coming in to stay (and eventually buy the cottage) and Walter Scott the great idealist coming in to stay in a certain bedroom often, where I stood when I thought of this.
I just realized that I loved how they were friends. I loved them because their ideas were moving, and while I read them I felt the spirit of communion, which I believe bespeaks their truth; and so I suppose I love them because when I enter in their hearts, or their art, I feel more at home, and then to imagine all of them together sharing that in waking reality I just long for it so badly. A noble people. Deeds to be done yet, daring as I do to hope to belong in some way to a group so noble they enterprised to topple an entrenched ideology of their time and establish one that privileged meaning, feeling, and truth.
Hiking between Malham and Earby--perhaps my favorite stretch of trail in England, sheepfolds and hills and Shirelike landscapes everywhere--I listened to some music from the LOTR musical. One of the most beautiful things you could do. After entering close to Malham we also passed a little nook in a river where the far bank jutted out towards us. Wild garlic was everywhere--spiky starburst blossoms with long aloe-vera-like leaves--and then an old bench appeared with a wooden fence behind it. Just a narrow little place for sitting. A rustic gate swiveled barely on its hinges a few feet further on with a garden behind it, through which one could apparently walk to get to this little sitting spot beside the river and under the trees which overcast everything.
Lastly lately I've been thinking about how following God's will and following my happiness are really the same thing. It's all simply about the truth. God is the truth, but so am I. He is also his hopes for my happiness (love), which are relative to who I truly am. That doesn't excuse sin, just explain the way there is so much independence and latitude that he allows for me to choose things in my life (who to marry, which ice cream to buy, etc.): whatever I want. Do good things--the specifics are up to you. Whatever makes you happy. As Stevenson (I'll mangle it sorta) said: "There is no duty we so much underrate as that of being happy."
God save the Queen.
Oh--PS--Zane, I was thinking about driving on the right side of the road, now that I am here:
"And the home, of the, BRAVE!"
Love,
Bentley
