Gone Camping...Again

For those of you who did not know, I am leaving for Yosemite on the 28th (at 3:00AM...) with the Hinds family. The trip that I had planned with my brother for the end of the semester fell through and he is in Kansas right now. On his way home he will be driving through the Colorado Rockies and then move on to Utah for a few nights, camping at random camp grounds for about a week. So, why am I telling you my brother's plans? This will be my first camping trip without my brother and for this reason it does not feel like I am going camping this up coming week.


I will be in Yosemite from the 28th to the 5th of July. From there I am going to San Francisco to visit Karyn until the 13th.

Sadly I didn't finish any posts...so I will not be able to leave you with anything intellectually or emotively stimulating before I leave for Yosemite. And I probably will not be posting anything while I am in San Francisco with Karyn.

On the bright side, maybe I will finally catch the elusive Marmot:

(^Elusive Marmot^)

Maybe, just maybe...I am feeling lucky...


On a more serious note: Here is a brief reflection on my personal experiences with the beauty of nature.

My mother once told me (before I left on a camping trip with my brother), "You are going to see things that declare the glory of God." Camping for me now is a time of continual meditation, prayer, and praise. But camping has not always been like this for me.


Ever since a young age I have been profoundly impacted by the beauty of nature. When I was around the age of eight I nearly fell off a cliff because I was absolutely captivated by the mountain scape and vast forests that filled my eyes and imagination. From that point on, when I went camping, I wanted to see the beauty of nature and have similar experiences, a desire that when kept "under the sun" turns sickly--I began to simply seek to love nature when I went camping and it was not until the last few years that God has helped me to hear it declare His glory.


It was a sort of idol for me. I took the light of nature's beauty and warped it into something of a strange and dark light. As a result, nature became distant to me, probably because I was distancing myself from Beauty Himself. "Nature 'dies' on those who try to live for a love of nature" (The Four Loves, 22). I felt as though nature was developing a sort of cold indifference towards me and I felt like I was blind to her stunning splendor while everyone else could see it--because I became consumed with that rush of excitement that nearly sent me off a cliff when I was eight years old.


My chief problem was that I did not seek God and know Him as glorious so that nature could inform my understanding of what the word "glory" means (without the tangible wonders that God has made, glory would remain a rather abstract and distant notion). I did not seek God even though beauty abounded around me--I just wanted beautiful things, not Beauty Himself. Instead of glorifying God, I got stuck at the sense of glory that nature is continually speaking to mankind and thought that the glory I heard of belonged simply to nature--never thinking of ascribing it to anything or anyone above nature.

In contrast with this way of looking at nature, I find the voice of George MacDonald's soul (printed in a poem) rather convicting by its purity:

"My Lord, I find that nothing else will do,
But follow where thou goest, sit at thy feet,
And where I have thee not, still run to meet.
Roses are scentless, hopeless are the morns,
Rest is but weakness, laughter crackling thorns,
If thou, the Truth, do not make them the true:
Thou art my life, O Christ, and nothing else will do."

We are taught by our Lord that those who are pure in heart shall see God (Matthew 5:8). As for what that means, purity of heart, perhaps is to seek one thing (singular commitment, integrity, the full unity of the heart), and the object of that pursuit is what the Psalmist seeks, "One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple...You have said, 'Seek my face.' My heart says to you, 'Your face, LORD, do I seek'" (Psalm 27:4, 8). Christ in his teaching on the mount reaffirms the Palmist's confidence in God's goodness to bless those who seek Him with Himself (Psalm 27:13). Surely we shall, in the words of Paul, see Him "face to face" (1Cor.13:12), and in seeing Him we shall be like Him and behold His glory forever (1John 3:2-3). Only in this purity, this singular love for God can anything be pure (Titus 1:15). Beauty is only beauty because of God.

So I leave you with this: "Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart." And this is fundamental blessedness: that God's face should shine upon you (Numbers 6:24-26). If we can be so captivated by a dim spark of His infinite glory...how glorious is our God!

God bless you all.

Gone Camping!

Letters to Malcolm, by C. S. Lewis

I think I am struck a bit more by C.S. Lewis' wisdom after reading some of the fathers of modern thought. But, I am not going to be writing on the moderns today chums (despite the fact that chapter VII of the book in question has some good thoughts on science and Determinism). Instead I have decided to post three quotations from C.S. Lewis' work Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. I recommend the book.

So here they are.

In answer to the question, "What are we doing in prayer if we are not informing or reminding God?":

"We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can...Ordinarily, to be known by God is to be, for this purpose, in the category of things. We are like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of divine knowledge. But when we (a) become aware of the fact--the preset fact, not the generalisation--and (b) assent with all our will to be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unvieled. Not that any veil could have baffled this sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view." (20-21)

Concerning anxiety:

"Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ...the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God's will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians not Stoics." (41, 43)

Being considered vs. being a cause:

"To think of our prayers as just 'causes' would suggest that the whole importance of petitionary prayer lay in the achievement of the thing asked for. But really, for our spiritual life as a whole, the 'being taken into account,' or 'considered,' matters more than being granted. Religious people don't talk about the 'results' of prayer; they talk of its being 'answered' or 'heard.' someone said 'A suitor wants his suit to be heard as well as granted.' in suits to God, is they are really religious acts at all and not merely attempts at magic, this is even more so. We can bear to be refused but not to be ignored. In other words, our faith can survive many refusals if they are really refusals and not mere disregards. The apparent stone will be bread to us if we believe that a Father's hand put it into ours, in mercy or in justice or even in rebuke. it is hard and bitter, yet it can be chewed and swallowed. But if, having prayed for our heart's desire and got it, we then became convinced that this was a mere accident--that providential designs which had only some quite different end just couldn't help throwing out this satisfaction for us as a by-product--then the apparent bread would become a stone. A pretty stone, perhaps, or even a precious stone. But not edible to the soul." (52-53)

God Bless.

(P.S. I was going to post more this past week but I got sick...actually I am still sick, that is why I can only manage a post full of quotations--where the substance of the post comes from someone else).

Ideas...

This could easily turn into a post on simple and complex ideas, analyzing John Locke's Epistemological system as found in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding...

...or it could turn into a post on Descartes' view of the mind and its ability to effectively search out the depths of creation, leading into his discussion on the senses and intellect, which in turn could be compared and contrasted with Locke and Hume. I could look at quotations such as, "It is the intellect alone which corrects the error of the senses; and it is not possible to produce any case in which error results from our trusting the operation of the mind more than the senses" (pg. 65) and other curious claims...

...or I could just focus on Hume and write about the vivacity, or liveliness of ideas and the way our impressions give intelligibility to our words. I could consider whether or not men can only talk intelligently about things that have come into empirical actuality--can I abstract? And question whether or not, as a human being, I can have certainty about anything in the physical (and dare I say, spiritual) world. I could look into his division between Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact and ask the question "Where is epistemology?" which leads to the question "What is the nature of Hume's epistemological claims? Is he dogmatic or simply saying that this system is just the most likely?" Ending on a discussion of miracles and probability and asking whether or not his view of probability necessitates the uniformity of nature, something he says is merely a habit and not really justifiable...

...But this post will not venture to grapple with these topics...posts may come in which I pursue them, but those are posts for another day. Rather this post is another catalog of ideas--ideas that I have right now and would like to write on in the future--should I be given a future along with thoughts conjoined with words so that I can give prosaic utterance to my questions, dilemmas, insights, and even (God help me) erroneous beliefs for the sake of edifying and being edified. May the community of Christ be used to temper my thoughts and challenge me.

[--Rambling starts here--] some of the following questions will be poorly phrased, but I am at least curious and excited about learning again...two forces that and I have found to be quite helpful in academia.

So, what are ideas? How do we acquire them? I have been quite fascinated this last semester with the questions: What are the limits of the human mind? What counts as epistemic justification? What should we think about? How do/should we talk about what we know? and does the variety of expression (i.e. Shakespeare, Donne, Locke) that we give to the same topics and questions (i.e. intellect, romance, family, etc.) as well as the types of questions we can even ask tell us anything about what we can know and how we come to know? Are there different types of knowledge? How should we go about constructing an epistemology? These are all potential posts...some I have written on already but I have not invested substantially in any of them.

I want to write on man's satanic propensity to exalt himself above the heavens on account of his understanding (Considering how Milton uses the mind in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained). I want to examine the posture/approach that authors such as Descartes, Locke, and Hume take in their epistemic endeavors. I want to look at what their projected, self-professed purpose in light of their method and ask what claims claims about the capacity and proper place of the human mind are implied by their approach in their projects. How does the way they approach the question reveal what they are assuming? How should I even think about what my mind is doing when I think about a given element of reality? What is the mind's place in the life of a human being and what is the body’s place? I want to write something on the way we should even go about asking questions. To hold fast to some of our beliefs while being open to the redaction and reformation of other beliefs that we have. How should we look at finding truth?

...even better I would love to compare Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, and Hume on the mind...but that project is just TOO big...

To go back to two of the questions I asked above ("How so/should we talk about what we know? and does the variety of expression [from Shakespeare, to Donne, to Locke] on the same topics/questions [intellect, romance, family, etc.] and the types of questions we can ask tell us anything about what we can know and how we come to know?"): I have been fascinated by the ways in which men have talked about facets of the human experience over the centuries, seeing how different people have contributed to the great discussion in different ways. This last semester, while studying for don rags, I found that all the texts we read were connected, and that they each contributed something significant to the way I think about "the domestic." Either by their kinship with truth or by their conflict, they have helped me in asking how we should understand and contribute to our life on earth in community with our fellow man. I loved seeing what questions and themes would come up again as the years progressed, but I was also curious about what questions and themes were being ignored--the absence of ideas and what the silence said about the time. But again, does poetic expression and analytical expression tell us that there are different types of truths? Are there different kinds of knowledge? Are these different forms of expression breaking the human experience into its different parts and trying to provide insight into a part of our existence?

I also want to write about Locke's view of equality and Hobbes' view of equality and both of their grounds for justifying the claim that all men are equal. Are these sufficient reasons to believe that all men are equal? Is there any reason for believing equality without an appeal to the Image of God?

I also want to write about Hamlet. I have acquired a deep and abiding love for that play. The question of identity permeates the whole text--even in matters of madness, soliloquies, love, etc. I was fascinated by Shakespeare and how he went about trying to show me domestic life and what it means to be human. His plays truly served as a "mirror" to nature. I want to write about how he accomplishes this and what I have learned from him.

I also want to reflect on loving others, after finding in myself a strange principle of reciprocity in the way I think about other people. This vice has been illumined to me through Gods use of some Chapels, readings from the semester, and fellowship with my Grace Group, in conjunction with some rather potent feelings that I have had lately.

I also want to write about words and their use. I would look particularly at Locke's description of words along with Hume's, and accommodate their claims with the various uses of words that I have observed over my two years in Torrey (i.e. Sophists, Plato, Henry V, Scripture, etc.). In addition to these texts I would include thoughts from Josef Pieper's Essay, "Abuse of Language--Abuse of Power." I would also want to look at Jeannine K. Brown's book "Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics: Scripture as Communication." What is communication? How does it work? How does God communicate with us through His Scriptures?

I also want to write about the personal development that I have gone through this last semester and how my thoughts on "change" have affected the way I look at life. I am a person who easily condemns himself to habit; in doing this I ignore the reality of God's transformative grace. After looking to Scripture and seeing what God has to say about the possibility of change, I am compelled to ask how His grace should affect the way that I look at myself in the present, past, and future. How should my perception of myself and others be affected by God's salvific purpose being worked out in the here and now? What should my life look like in light of God's will (our sanctification, uniting us under the headship of Christ and reconciling us to Himself through the one body of Christ, being like Him and knowing the Father, etc.)?

I also want to write about God's will (Prompted by devotions and chapels). What is the biblical witness, how should we approach the topic? Does God have a specific plan for our life? How much is God concerned with what I do? Is the will of God a point that we need to hit a circle that we simply need to live in? Does the Wisdom lit. help here? What is God's will for us?

I also want to write about integrity and pray with the Psalmist "Unite my heart to fear your name." I want to look at how the Psalmist looks at God and follow him as he follows closely after the Lover of his soul. (I specifically want to look at lament and ask how we ought to lament, I also want to look at Psalms 1; 19; and 119, exploring the truth that God has given us about His word and ask how we are supposed to look at life according to these and other psalms [like Psalms 27]--world view stuff).

I want to write about Job and the other wisdom texts we read this semester! I loved going through these texts! I want to know what implications the wisdom genre has on the way we think about the Christian life and Scripture. I want to ask, what is wisdom?

I want to write on 1John. In addition to my church going through this book in Church, I had to translate the whole epistle for my Greek class. It was fantastic! So I wanted to write out a few reflections I have from that whole experience. Specifically about 3:6 and other verses of the like that have confused many of the Christians I have known. I also want to write about love in the epistle and how righteousness works throughout the text.

I also want to talk about how I have come to look at my life in terms of temptation and vice. I have realized that in my life I never left room for feelings and thoughts that would be called "temptation." I erred by identifying myself too closely with every thought in my head and every impulse/feeling I have felt. In doing so I not only lost any distinction between sin and temptation, I also hindered spiritual growth by doing so. Rather than saying, "Lord, I am tempted" and bringing myself to God for aid, praying with the Psalmist "I am yours; save me" (Psalm 119:94), I would needlessly surrender the battle and consider myself defeated.

I want to write on what I call “presuming on perfection” along with something Pascal called the "Error of Stoicism: thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes" (C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, pg. 11). I want to frame the discussion, as Lewis does, in the context of prayer and general devotion.

I want to also write about living a life concerned with God's pleasure and glory and exploring that by which we as human beings--as Christians, should be motivated. How does the frame that we intellectually and emotionally put our lives into affect the way we live? How can we change this frame? I want to use Psalms, Milton, and Dante here. What is the value system that we live with and how do we construct that system?

I want to write about trust--a continuation of the Hosea post that asks, "What does it look like to trust God in the day to day? How do I trust Him while doing my work?" a post asking, “Now what?”

Finally...I have been quite convicted the past few days about my ignorance on this next question that I want to pursue: What is the best way to teach? Is there a “best” way? Practically, how should I go about teaching? How can I help others to have an experience similar to the one I have had in Torrey, which I believe has been profoundly helpful in my life? How can I help others? What can I do to help them see clearer and ask good questions? ...How do you get people to care? I find that I look at life in a different way than most people...not in terms of the answers that I would give to questions, but in terms of why I want to answer the question and how I go about it (still quite flawed in this actually...in the words of MacDonald "it troubles me that I am not better," having such a good Teacher and being under His instruction for years now). I believe going through Torrey has helped (not in itself though--rather it helps when done as it is intended to be done: With God's grace prospering our efforts and pursuit of actualizing the Mind of Christ in us)...how can I help others?





So here are some of the things I want to write on...but LORD what should I write on? May I yield to your direction. Let this yielding though not be an excuse for sloth and a failure to commit myself, but help me to use the gifts that you have given me, proclaim your goodness with which you lavish me and all of your creation. Help me to strive--but to trust you--to work out my salvation with fear and trembling, for you are working in me both to will and to do for your good pleasure. God be pleased...help.

Glory to God in the highest! Glory to God!