Joy Abounds...Just Not In Caves

This past week at our church vacation bible school was going on. Elanor, our oldest went all week and had a blast. This year's theme was Cave Quest. Because of the theme I figured hey lets go to a real cave. So, I took the girls to Natural Bridge Caverns.

I was so excited for this day trip. We went when we were young and I loved it. The formations of stalagmites and stalactites are dreamlike. It's hard to believe that there aren't any dwarves, trolls, or fairies living down there.

Everything seemed OK at the time. The girls were in a good mood and ready to go. We got in line to get the rules for going through the cave and the girls were climbing all over the stone wall we lined up by. As we made our way to the cave entrance you could feel the temperature getting cooler and cooler. Then we entered. I was not prepared.

This picture explains our trip under ground.

I know Elanor does not like the dark. This did not cross my mind as a factor in going to the cave. There were lights. I was with her. Well for the whole 70 minute tour Elanor complained about being scared, she did not like the cave, her feet hurt, she was hungry, and the water from the ceiling of the cave kept dropping on her. I kept calling her attention to the formations but nope, they weren't cool. Adeline on the other hand was enthralled with the railing she got to hold onto while on the path. But to top it off, as soon as we exited the cave, with a quarter mile left, Elanor had to pee. Oh man did she have to pee! Getting back to the visitor center for the restroom was torture.

As we finally got back into the car we started to make our way to the Gristmill to meet some friends
for dinner. What I didn't know was my friend had a previous engagement soon so there was not much time. As we parked and made our way there it turned out there was an hour wait for a table. I didn't think anything of it. I made it there, put my name down, found an open area, and the girls were playing. To my dismay my friend called to remind me about how they were pressed for time. They suggested another place so I gathered the girls, made my way back to the car, got the girls in the car, and found our way to the next stop, Newk's. We made our way inside and it was a whole new experience.

The girls were running around acting cute and goofy. They were so excited to see the Glaze's and baby Lily. They were on cloud 9. We ordered our food, got to our booth, and they climbed, jumped, giggled, and entertained. The girls were in heaven. Lily allowed us to bask in her cuteness. I got to catch up with my friends on their new adventure in a new home and new job. And after they left, we ended up ordering MORE food because the girls were still hungry. Elanor ate her whole kid sized pizza and half of the full sized pizza we ordered. I guess the cave took a lot out of her. And during this whole time they continued to jump, climb, and wrestle in our booth.

I had made plans to give them a great adventure in the cave, which failed. But joy was found elsewhere, among friends while breaking bread. We got back home after midnight and I got the girls to bed. That 6 hour round trip mainly for the caves was all worth it for the 30 minutes with friends, laughter, and food.

Check out my friends' YouTube channel: That Catholic Couple

Tolkien, Fiction, and a Willingness to Subdue Belief

I finally finished the biography I've been reading on J.R.R. Tolkien. It was a great read and Tolkien continues to be a fascinating person to me. I would love to have been a fly on the wall eavesdropping on the Inklings gatherings.

Tolkien coined the word "sub-creator". What he meant by this term is a person, an author, poet, writer, that has the ability to create such a world that it can be believe to be true and real. This world is a realm you can truly enter. Here's an excerpt from the biography:

"'What really happens', he wrote, 'is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator". He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. you therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside'...
'Every writer making a secondary world,' he declared, 'wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.'" - Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

The ability of the reader to enter into this secondary world is "the willing suspension of disbelief". I've actually come across Tolkien's "Sub-creator/sub-creation" before in a philosophy class I took on Tolkien. But, it wasn't until finishing this biography that I began to see a connection with faith.

As the truth about reality-about God, the world, and ourselves-is communicated to us in a wide variety of ways, we experience a progressive transformation. We not only think differently and act differently, but we actually begin to desire and feel differently. As we take on the "mind of Christ" we also take on His desires and participate in the dynamics of His active love. - Ralph Martin, The Fulfillment of All Desire: A Guidebook for the journey to God Based on the Wisdom of the Saints

Quite naturally everyone develops their own world view based on their upbringing, culture, religion, politics, entertainment, etc. But, as Christians, to best live out our call to holiness is to try to see the world through God's eyes. We are to strive to conform our wills to His. This makes me think of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit : wisdom, counsel, knowledge, piety, understanding, fortitude, fear of the Lord.

These gifts allow us to suspend our flawed world view and conform it to His to better live this life and spread and defend the faith. Fear of the Lord (awe and wonder) allows us to truly see our relationship to God, he is God and we aren't God. This is not a fear of punishment but a fear of ruining a relationship, the fear of creating a chasm between us and him. This leads to wisdom. Wisdom allows us to take the high ground as in chess or war, to get an eagle eye view of the spiritual realm of the world. Through this we come to see what is owed to God, praise and thanksgiving. Piety allows us to give him that which he is owed. By taking this position of praise and thanksgiving it humbles us to look to God and his Church for knowledge and understanding of things in the spiritual realm. Counsel allows us to used the knowledge and understanding we have to then realize and choose the right, true, and good in situations. Finally, fortitude allows us to then act when it isn't easy.

When reading fiction that gives us worlds we can truly enter we are willing to suspend our disbelief and abide by the rules and laws of these worlds. Works like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter give us such terrain. We come to understand that magic, wizards, hobbits, elves, house elves, dwarves, dragons, ents, aurors, dementors, orcs, and balrogs, rings of power, horcruxes, and a dark lord truly exist. There truly is a wizarding world, Lothlorien, Azkaban, Rivendell, The Ministry of Magic, the Forbidden Forest, Mirkwood, The Shire, Hogwarts, Gondor, Mordor, and Mount Doom, and we know how to get there.

As we come to see this world as it truly is, through the eyes of it's Creator, we see that there is more to it than meets the eye, the seen and unseen. We are more than just creatures, we are adopted sons and daughters. God is more than a creator and clock maker, he is a bridegroom inviting us, his bride, to his wedding feast. There is a heaven, a hell, virtues, vices, graces, angels and demons, and there is a narrow path that is not easy but must be taken. Jesus came to live amongst us and die for our sins so that we could be with him in heaven for eternity. He left behind a Church and the Holy Spirit to help guide us.

If we have a willingness to suspend our belief that there is no rhyme or reason, that there is no purpose to our existence, that we become tree food at the end of our life and that's it, then we will be able to truly journey through this life because a journey has a destination.

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. - Romans 12:2

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. - John 14:6

Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength. Take to heart these words which I command you today. Keep repeating them to your children. Recite them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them on your arm as a sign and let them be as a pendant on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates." - Deuteronomy 6:1-9

Here's a great video from Bishop Robert Barron on Confirmation and The Gifts of the Holy Spirit

Bishop Barron on Lord of the Rings: Part 1

Bishop Barron on Lord of the Rings: Part 2

There's Nothing New Under the Sun - But Did You Love?

It's kind of exhausting, the world we live in, where society is all about attention seeking and everyone narcissistically trying to 'be different". No one wants to look like everyone else but in turn looks like everyone they surround themselves with. In the age of social media everyone feels like they have to one up someone else because everyone else is living a better, happier, more exciting life. Everyone wants to become famous because that means they've made it, all eyes are looking on them.

Like I mentioned in a previous post I'm reading a biography about J.R.R Tolkien. In a short passage
it talks about how a man who has so impacted the world of literature and the imaginations of generations who lead what seems to be a simple boring life:

And after this you might say, nothing else really happened. Tolkien came back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of English Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where he spent the first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of eighty-one. it was the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen. And that would be that - apart from the strange fact that during these years when 'nothing happened' he wrote two books which have become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers. It is a strange paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford Professor whose specialization was the West Midland dialect of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden.

The following paragraph bears a great question:

Or is it? Is not the opposite precisely true? Should we not wonder instead at the fact that a mind of such brilliance and imagination should be happy to be contained in the petty routine of academic and domestic life; that man whose soul longed for the sound of the waves breaking against the Cornish coast should be content to talk to old ladies in the lounge of a hotel at a middle-class watering-place; that a poet in whom joy leapt up at the sight and smell of logs crackling in the grate of a country inn should be willing to sit in front of his own hearth warmed by an electric fire with simulated glowing coal? What do we make of that?

In the end, when death is on our doorstep, it's not about how we look or the things we've accumulated. It's about how we lived, how we spent our time. This man loved his wife beyond measure. In his first quest story and the center of The Silmarillion the two main lovers, Beren and Luthien, are in fact Tolkien and his wife, Edith. The story was inspired by a time the took a walk in some woods and he recalls, "Her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes bright, and she could sing - and dance." In a letter Tolkien wrote to his son 50 years after Edith's death he said, "She was (and knew she was) my Luthien."

I think the most powerful thing is not that Tolkien made his wife into a key character, not that he had Luthien written on her gravestone, not that she was Luthien, but that she KNEW she was his Luthien. Who cares what you look like, or what you have, or if you stand out. There's nothing new under the sun. This is coming from a guy with dreads and a beard (those aren't new, they've just been made trendy). How have you loved? Do the people in your life know they are loved?



Updated:
Watch Bishop Barron's video on The Great Divorce:
Bishop Barron on C.S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce"
In C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce the narrator sees a great procession with a woman being praised and honored at the front. He thinks to himself that this must be Mary, the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven. His guide tells him no, that Sarah Smith. She was a woman on earth of no great stature. She was an ordinary woman. She ran a boarding house. The people she met became part of her family and she even cared for animals. Yet, as Bishop Barron says, "In the eyes of heaven she's honored to the nth degree."