Bent Roads and a Vanishing Light

 

Bent Roads and a Vanishing Light


 And there is not now upon Earth any place abiding where the   memory of a time without evil is preserved. For…the world was   diminished, for Valinor and Eressa (the dwellings of the gods) were   taken from it into the realm of hidden things…and they longed ever   to  escape from the shadows of their exile and to see in some   fashion  the light that dies not; for the sorrow of the thought of death   had pursued them over the deeps of the sea. Thus it was that great   mariners among them would still search the empty seas…But they   found it not. And those that sailed far came only to new lands, and   found them like to the old lands, and subject to death. And those that   sailed furthest set but a girdle around the Earth and returned weary   at last to the place of their beginning; and they said: ‘All roads are   now bent.’
  J. R. R. Tolkein The Silmarillion

 “Mist hangs above hills/ above mist hangs stone face of mountain”*

 Bent roads and a vanishing light, diminished world and innocence   lost; in the foothills of heaven, no pass, no route, but the dark path   that all avoid.
 “Make of this, our Paradise, and let us live our backs turned to   Death.  And He whose face is seen beyond this range, Him we will   forget.”

 “The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who   makes everything small,”  Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake   Zarathustra).

 But a peopled Paradise is paradise no more, if the gods no longer   dwell and evil lives closer than next door. Uninvited Death crashes   every party. Empty bottles on the floor. Platitudes and ‘God loves   everyone’ from a million unfelt miles away didn’t dead bolt the door,   didn’t save the town. There are reasons for unhappiness.

 “Crossed sticks lie on earth/ between crossed sticks – pile of ash” *

 W. H. Auden, in his poem, “September 1, 1939”:
 Faces along the bar
 Cling to their average day:
 The lights must never go out,
 The music must always play …
 Lest we should see where we are,
 Lost in a haunted wood,
 Children afraid of the night
 Who have never been happy or good.

 She stood up and spoke with a tremor in her voice, Sunday night.   Many difficult years, husband stricken, children back in   the Philippines, BUT “God has been faithful –He has been with me   through it all. He is good. He brought me here”.  The battle to believe   –real. The consolation of a near God –real. The dead life, the   haunted wood, tossed out. Faith traced in the aching contours of a   life examined. Abraham Herschel and his words about Job’s   God: “Not an uncle. God is an earthquake.” The shaking that makes   us uncomfortable with this world, shaking us onto solid ground.

 “And the Dance flows on/ everything flows toward the rim of that   shining Cup”*

 “When the Christian church collaborates with a pagan culture by   covering up death, it seals its own death warrant. For the whole   reason for the church’s existence, its whole message, is a “good   news” or gospel about a God who became man in order to solve the   problem of death and the problem of sin, which is its root…When   faith and death thus meet, it is death, not faith, that is changed.   “Death, Thou shalt die’ (John Donne). But when death and platitudes   meet, it is the platitudes that are changed. That is why platitudes fear   to face death: they fear their own death in that encounter.”
 Peter Kreeft,  Love is Stronger than Death (from which this article is   derived)

 “$10,000 fine for that antler, sir.” Listen to the warden. Rodents need   their calcium chew. Sometimes the Church seems to say, “You can’t   take God home with you, that’s against the rules; just take a little   nibble now and then and don’t forget your greens.” Aren’t we more   than weasels and voles, small things, nasty and nice, eking out an   existence in a diminished world? Adopt the role, squeak it out: Death   will reveal the farce. The bigger part of us will burst through this sorry   mess, - in Him, through Him, because of Him. Must Religion be a   tough gnaw only, a divine discard, an antler in a haunted wood and   not the rutting male thing of noble bearing, bugling us to follow him   as  he jousts Death from the path and the undying light dawns   through the straight-trunked trees?

 We are not good, but we can be changed. He is not an uncle, but He   can become Father. Why be weary longer? Why live as if Life isn’t   preparation for Death? Respice finem, look to the end. The end of   faith is God in all and over all. A godless world is Death.

  “Only where we’ve been, a faint and fading glow”*

   *”No Footprints”, Bruce Cockburn

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