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Brad
Member Ascendant

since 1999-08-20

Posts 5705
Jejudo, South Korea

0 posted 2004-05-24 11:18 PM

You can't trust someone who can't betray you.

You can't love someone who can't hate you.

The moment something is certain, the moment you no longer worry.

Brad
Member Ascendant

since 1999-08-20

Posts 5705
Jejudo, South Korea

1 posted 2004-05-25 09:42 PM

Well, this one seems to have singularly flopped. Background: I'm wrestling with CS Lewis right now. He's a wonderful writer, but I'm stuck trying to figure out what exactly is lost in giving up the things he asks. It's not that he's wrong, in many ways, I think he's right on target -- he definitely makes you think about how you live your life, but it's what is left out of many of his allegories that bother me.

At the same time, I discovered a, well, mediocre song by "Live" called "Heaven". Mediocre except for one line

"I don't need no one to tell me about Heaven
I see my daughter and I believe"

which, of course, is very much what I tried to get across in the atheist thread. Heaven is here and now, not after you die. And yet some of the things Ron has said about his own family life come back to haunt me, or not haunt me so much, as fulfill the whole idea of what I was trying to say above. The whole reason we have such a thing as love is that we are independent, free agents. Success is not possible without the possibility of failure.

As a side note, I was talking to a friend of mine, explaining or trying to explain many of the things I talked about in the atheist thread and he related a story:

Hung over, work and relationship problems, his alarm went off accidently and, for no particular reason, his radio was attuned to an opera. At that moment, as angry and as frustrated as he was, he realized that nothing was more important than the sheer sound of that opera (He didn't like opera before this moment, he tells me).

I know that feeling.

In the Screwtape letters, Lewis precisely captures this feeling as well when Screwtape admonishes his nephew, "You mean you let him read a book that he actually liked?"

As long as Heaven is seen as an abstraction, it is an obstacle to heaven now.

Aenimal
Member Rara Avis

since 2002-11-18

Posts 7350
the ass-end of space

2 posted 2004-05-26 09:59 AM

I like Lewis' words here. Without the threat of the opposing force the emotion or feeling is hollow. It's the risk that makes the emotion consequential and significant. It's also a matter of balance, one can't exist without the other and decisions lie somewhere in between.

As for heaven, another simple and interesting lyric from breaking into heaven by the stone roses:

How many times do i have to tell you
you don't have to wait to die
you can have it all, anytime you want it
the kingdom's all inside

serenity blaze
Member Empyrean

since 2000-02-02

Posts 27738

3 posted 2004-05-26 01:46 PM

Brad? I liked this alot. And if it helps, I think I'm much clearer on your point now.

Of late, I've become very proficient at recognizing HELL in the here and now, and I'm quite certain that should this keep up, I will gratefully wrap my arms around a slice of "heaven", be it in the moment, or the abstract--er, assuming, some of that is going to come along soon.

er...heh heh?

sigh

(serenity exits, shaking her head and muttering to the sky superstitiously, "alright-already! I get it!")

*snort*

jbouder
Member Elite

since 1999-09-18

Posts 2534
Whole Sort Of Genl Mish Mash

4 posted 2004-05-27 03:47 PM

Brad:

I had to dig up this quote:

quote:
To be human is to be incomplete, yet to yearn for completion; it is to be uncertain yet long for certainty; to be imperfect, yet long for perfection; to be broken, yet crave wholeness. All of these yearnings remain necessarily unsatisfied, for perfection, completion, certainty and wholeness are impossible because we are imperfectly human - or better, because we are perfectly human, which is to say humanly imperfect. Flawedness is the first fact about human beings. And paradoxically, in that imperfect foundation we find not despair but joy.

- Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, "The Spirituality of Imperfection"

I agree with you that to yearn for the perfection of some future, and necessarily abstract Heaven is to do so at the detriment of those imperfect reflections of heaven we have with us in the here and now. This doesn't mean that we ought not hope for future perfection - only that we ought not neglect the imperfect reflections of Heaven - or perhaps those small glimmers of perfection we can apprehend in the imperfect - that we've been gifted with today.

Anyway ... just rambling now.

Jim

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