Change Your Mind
Wanderer (Part Two)
At church. Clearly filled entirely with strident young men as recent articles are to make us believe. St Pancras, Exeter, with friends and Father Porphyrios.
“My whole body became listening. All of Russia was listening. The wolves, the deer, the fish, the old women by the hearth. At least that’s how it felt. I opened myself entirely to these words of fire. I was ready to be consumed.”
I Have a Moment
I can’t quite believe it, but I don’t have to do a great deal for about a month. I have an appetite to write, but quite what I don’t know. Whatever is happening right now I suppose. It feels too hot to visit Greece, though I am drawing a memo in the dust to go back to Crete or nearby and tell The Odyssey in October 2026. It will be ten years since I last told it over there, and my 55th birthday.
Regarding Cambridge and the Faculty of Divinity: I have sorted a lovely Shepherd Hut to stay in belonging to my friends James and Helen, overlooking the River Cam and the very path that C.S. Lewis used to walk between Magdalene college and the Green Dragon pub. I will sip my dark roast coffee and peer out in case I catch the ancestral shape of our man striding his pipey and tweedy way through whatever big thoughts he was having at the time. I love this photo of him – Lewis looks about to dig into an ancient fable of marvel and truth, and he can’t wait to tell you about it.
‘Jack of Hearts’ as Malcolm Guite calls Lewis. We all need books of that size and age hanging around. I may need a few less at this point.
I’ve been reading part three of Harry Lee Poe’s big biography of Lewis and came upon this glorious paragraph:
Owen Barfield often remarked that he believed in evolution but had never changed his mind about everything, while Lewis did not believe in evolution and was changing his mind all the time. A change of mind is the definition of the Greek word ‘metanoia’, which English translations of the New Testament remark as ‘repentance’. The heart of dying with Christ involves constantly changing one’s mind about things: attitudes, habits, behaviours… the goal of life is to become human.
I want to change my mind. Or more accurately, be receptive to God changing it.
Not in a zombified, cultish, drink the Kool-aid manner, but in the sense of a continual opening to dare-I-say-it grace? To more reality, more imagination and more freedom, even when that very doorway paradoxically comes with an understanding of limit. My mind has often been a fearful, defended and judgemental place. Thieves of my time and energy everywhere. Avaunt, you cullions!
These last four years have been a gloriously strange journeying into changing-my-mind. I recommend it.
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Ok, onwards to part two of Wanderer. I will place part one of the audio below, in case you want to catch up first. We remember an earnest young man wandering the ancient trackways of Russia, trying to find out what ‘praying without ceasing’ looks like. After what he views as a few false starts, he comes to a teacher who he can really vent to.