Good time.

This never quite made it to the blog, so here:

Monday, March 31, 2008

I hope all you people enjoyed Easter Break – it snowed on Easter here! (That probably didn’t happen where you are.)

Nathan and I have been enjoying our break from school. Nathan enjoys the extra time to rest (ahem, sleep). We’ve both been working on vacation reading for the C.S. Lewis course, spending time around the house, jogging/biking to and around Shotover Hill. Dad, Mom, Nathan, Aaron and I all went to Shotover just before sunset yesterday. The boys went exploring on their bikes while Dad, Mom and I walked.

Last weekend was my second time to go to London. I spent a few hours in Westminster Abbey. It’s filled with dead people (in coffins or buried under the floor), memorials, and a thousand years’ worth of history. All the graves and memorials seem to be crammed into the building – several belong to some of the most memorable and influential people in history. Throughout the Abbey are memorials to various people for their service to the empire, or the king, or a particular group of people. But my favorite was the memorial to William Wilberforce…for his service to God and country. (Charles Darwin is buried a few feet from the Wilberforce memorial.) Wilberforce is also buried in the Abbey, in fact, he’s the first one you step on when you walk through the door.

(It was strange to see all the people walking over the graves – first, because they’re graves, and second, because the British, with their long history, seem a little less protective of their national treasure than us, and don’t seem to have a problem walking on them.)

The Abbey is filled with too many things to take in at once. Kings and queens, noblemen and their wives, artists, poets, authors, scientists, soldiers – some important for their title, others for their action – all buried or memorialized in Westminster Abbey. (I never thought I would live so close to the burial site all of those people we learned about in 9th grade British Lit.)

I wonder what my impression of the thousands of faces and images in the Abbey would have been a few hundred years back, before the advent of mass media….

After we went to the Abbey, Nathan and I crossed the road to Parliament Square, where we admired the huge statute of Winston Churchill, then walked across the bridge over the Thames River, past the Salvador Dali art along the river, the London Eye, and the street performers. Then, of course, it started raining. However, we’ve (finally) adopted the handy habit of carrying umbrellas, so even the freezing cold rain didn’t stop us (nor did it stop the kids skateboarding and trick biking under the bridge, which they seem to have claimed as their own, judging by the amount of graffiti they put up). When it was time to head back to Oxford, we boarded the bus. It takes forever to get out of London because it’s so big and busy, but there’s so much to see that it’s okay.

Since I’ve been off, I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, as well as George Sayers’ Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis. I love being surprised that I know the landmarks and places in descriptions of Lewis’ life in Oxford.

I finally read a G.K. Chesterton book – The Man Who was Thursday. It was one of those good-but-bizarre books that I’ll want to read again (so I’ll “get it” a little more). Again, recognizing landmarks in London gave me a funny feeling and definitely made the book come a little more alive – but how much more alive could a book which is subtitled “A Nightmare” and centered on infiltrating and exposing an anarchist ring possibly be?

Then I read Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto. God provided that book at the perfect time (but isn’t His timing always so?) – it really pulled together some of the strands of thought to which last term’s work in Jurisprudence introduced me and gave me a well-reasoned, thoroughly-stated explanation of the Christian position on law and government. Schaeffer knows that our basic understanding of the identity and value of a human being is all wrapped up in the God who is there and has spoken to us. He also knows that a wrong understanding of what a human being is has devastating results, in individual lives, and especially in law and government. In his Manifesto, Schaeffer shows why Christians should be concerned with law and government: mainly, Christ is Lord of all of life. To confine “Christianity” to the spiritual realm only is to deny His Lordship over all of life.

Schaeffer cared about law because he cared about people and understood that ideas affect both individuals and entire societies.

Boundless published some excerpts of Manifesto a while back, which you can (and should) read here: http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001588.cfm.

Schaeffer’s introductory thoughts in A Christian Manifesto:

“The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.
“They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But they have not seen this as a totality – each being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in worldview – that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and view the world and life as a whole. This shift has been away from a world view that was at least vaguely Christian in people’s memory (even if they were not individually Christian) toward something completely different – toward a world view based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance….
“These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results – including sociological and governmental results, and specifically including law.”

Schaeffer's He is There and He is Not Silent, which I read right before we left Louisiana, was extremely helpful to me in the early weeks of last term.

The God Who is There is the first of Schaeffer’s “Trilogy” and is the book I’m reading right now. Being me, I am, of course, reading it last, instead of first. Guess I’ll have to go back and re-read the others. But Schaeffer’s points need a post of their own, so we’ll save it for another day.

That funny-looking, strangely-dressed man understood the times in which he lived…and I’m so thankful that he did.