Up Date: A Wonderful Birthday- I just found out I am going to be a great grandmother. My granddaughter Melissa and her husband Spencer are expecting their first child in November.
----------- picture by Penny Juncker
-Because it is my birthday and I have decided to have a bit of fun, I am posting some quotes by Dorothy Sayers from a little booklet I have called Strong Meat. It was written partly as an explanation to some young men who asked about her play, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged."
"There is a popular school of thought (or, more strictly, of feeling) which violently resents the operation of Time upon the human spirit. It looks upon age as something between a crime and an insult. Its prophets have banished from their savage vocabulary all such words as 'adult,' 'mature.' 'experienced,' 'venerable'; they know only snarling and sneering epithets, like 'middle-aged,' 'elderly,' 'stuffy,' 'senile' and 'decrepit.' With these they flagellate that which they themselves are, or must shortly become, as though abuse were an incantation to exorcise the inexorable. Theirs is neither the thoughtless courage that 'makes mouths at the invisible event,' nor the reasoned courage that forsees the event and endures it; still less is it the ecstatic courage that embraces and subdues the event. It is the vicious and desperate fury of a trapped beast; and it is not a pretty sight.
Such men, finding no value for the world as it is, proclaim very loudly their faith in the future, 'which is in the hands of the young.' With this flattery, they bind their own burden on the shoulders of the next generation. For their own failures, Time alone is to blame--not Sin, which is expitable, but Time which is irreparable. From the relentless reality of age they seek escape into a fantasy of youth--their own or other people's. ... Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward, we must believe in age.
'Except,' said Christ, 'ye become as little children'--and the words are sometimes quoted to justify the flight into infantilism. Now, children differ in many ways, but they have one thing in common. ... All normal children (however much we discourage them) look forward to growing up. 'Except ye become as little children,' except you can wake on your fiftieth [67th] birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, 'ye cannot see the Kingdom of God.' One must not only die daily, but every day one must be born again."
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"Let us, in Heaven's name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slip-shod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious--others will pass into the Kingdom of heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like Him? We do Him singularly little honour by watering down His personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.
It is the dogma that is the drama--not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death--but the terrifying assertion that the same God Who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realise that here is something that a man might be glad to believe."
2 comments:
Wow, Dorothy Sayers sure has some quotable quotes in there:
"Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ."
The trouble with progressive theology is that it's all about adapting Christ to men and women.
"It is the vicious and desperate fury of a trapped beast; and it is not a pretty sight."
The other day I saw a debate in blog comments between a progressive and Bruce Byrne. Bruce had impeccable logic and finally the progressive didn't have anything left to argue, so she descended into saying something like, "Wow, Bruce, you've talked me into a corner. Woo woo, good for you! You must be proud of yourself!" In other words, the desperate fury of a trapped beast.
And of course, congratulations on the great-grandchild to come, and on your birthday! :-) You are 9 1/2 years older than me.
Yes, she is almost as quotable as C.S. Lewis.
I read Bruce Byrne's "impeccable logic." He is both a kind and intelligent debater. I never thought to connect that off balanced comment with Sayer's description of a trapped beast, but I think you are right.
On the last it was so fun she came over today with her mother, my daughter Jenny, and one of her sisters, who had just broke her arm, poor thing. Anyway when we were right in the middle of our conversation, Melissa said "Grandma we have another surprise for you. There is another person here for your birthday." It took me awhile to realize what she was saying.
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