Friendship

One asks, why discuss, why relate, why have friendships? Two answers come to mind. As iron sharpens iron, it helps us to interact, we growth through interaction. But then the question comes, if we dwelt in perfection, we would have no need thereof, as a device for our sanctification. Yet, we would still desire friendship.

"And God created man" and prescribed that he spend some of his time working so as to eat and some of his time sleeping. When not engaged with these, God prescribed that man "be fruitful and multiply." But, when not working, eating, sleeping, making love, or caring for children, God prescribed that man enjoy creating music, reading books, playing tennis, and having conversations.

Perhaps it is one of greatest secrets of "love thy neighbor" that it is good not only as a command, not only as a means to one's perfection and the happiness that comes from virtue, but also for its own sake. The best and happiest activity of man is to love his neighbor, it is the primary diversion (in the Arisotelian sense) which God has prescribed for our boredom.

The path

Eric Liddell compared faith to running in a race. It is an apt comparison. The act of running brings pain and anguish, but it also brings health and joy. At the end of a race, one has not done anything to add to or take away, but only strengthened the inner man, as it were, in the process of travelling along the road laid out by God. In the film Shadowlands, C.S Lewis says of prayer, that "it doesn't change God, it changes me." Faith perhaps, is the same. We run our race, doing the best we can with our feeble legs, and then, we find, as we journey, that we are transformed. We are given hart's feet and set upon the high places. The latter verb is the operative term. Were we to clamber by our unaided legs to the highest peak, still we would be unable to leap and bound upon the snowy crags.

Those who have never responded to the trumpet call, who have never felt the exhilaration of victory, and the blessings of peace…they cannot understand that for which we who labor strive so fervently. Our resolve flows from a vision they cannot comprehend and an end they cannot see. We race towards our hearts’ desire, a sunrise so glorious that we glimpse it only in our dreams.

“….With wind on our faces and wings on our heels….”

Sentiments

An expression in words of the deepest of our sentiments would be impossible; our sentiments flow from the gut and rarely do they give rise to accurate descriptive language. Hence, we honor the poets who describe for us the ebb and flow of our spirits. But music describes our spiritual innards with greater experiential precision. The minor strains match more exactly the sadness or angst we feel than the words with which we describe them. The sounds, the music are feelings also, sensual experiences like the chemicals within our bodies. Then too, the more nebulous nature of music allows it to adapt itself, malleable, to the particularities of our feeling. A description of mood can hit or miss the mark, but a powerful melody sweeps emotion along with it, melding with it, until the feelings within the breast reflect the tool, the music, which has sounded its depths. Equivalent to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, we cannot know both the language of our emotion in its musical expression and the pure emotion itself; the contact between the two forces a metamorphosis.

Many emotions are simply longings, ‘yearning for the infinite’. The eager hands of the poor and rich alike grasp at transcendence, and it slips, ever more quickly, through their desperate fingers.

Are we condemned to a brave new world of such tepid quality? And what could redeem our hopes of a deep world except for the sacred and the inspirational. History has been, among other things, the process of unveiling men’s eyes from the various misconceptions piled up to obstruct their weak vision. However, when all the obstacles are cast aside, the remnant is power. The answer to the riddles lies with Thrasymachus. Once all pretensions have been laid aside, there is only power. However, thus power for good as well as evil. The lust to rule emerges, undisguised, from its lair, but rising up to challenge it, the sacrifice of a Lamb.

“But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all,

Because He gave his innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him,

And on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud,

‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.”