The Sun From Which I See

Seeking A Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 22)

“This is a dream. But a dream I can stand up and walk around in. A dream that has changed the shape of our lives forever.”

John of Swaffham

Hello dear Parish, I’m glad to greet you from my writing desk after the dust and scuffs and craic of the last weeks. I have a longing to stroll into a Devon Greenwood and shake some of these miles off me. But before I scamper off into the heather and dive headlong into the river, I’m feeling my pen scratch across my journal again and enjoying it.

There’s a famous quote from C.S. Lewis where he says that he believes in Christianity as he believes the sun has risen, because by it he sees everything else. I think about this a great deal. These last two years, I’ve seen many things afresh. Some of that includes the fairy tales I’ve been telling. That’s not to imply that a fairy tale is essentially and only Christian, but some can be read from a Christian perspective.

Those like that I am steadily collecting, and some I’ll place here. Let’s start with this old East Anglian tale – I’ll offer some thoughts at the end. For lovers of Bardskull this commentary may seem a wee bit simplistic, but sometimes a bridge rather than a leap is what’s required.

Today’s post moves around a thought I keep having:

Christianity has forgotten it’s a dream.

That’s not all it is, but it’s part. An important part. There’s always exceptions, but I have to push this idea.

And many can sense it: the falling off of the mystical, the idiosyncratic, the sheer visionary vocation of the thing. I know I’ve said this a hundred different ways by now.

In The Pilgrim’s Regress Lewis thought that Christianity was composed of the Big Pictures of the pagans, and the Road of the Jewish People. This made the church – Mother Kirk. And that every now and then Mother Kirk would start to crumble, and The Landlord would start sending out those Big Pictures again, what I’ve called Dreams.

I worry that combined the road is in danger of becoming a multilane highway and the dream often a hallucination.

Like many of us, I’m looking for those Big Dreams. Mother Kirk certainly seems in trouble. Dreams matter, they change the way we behave, operate, reach out to the world. They do another kind of thinking. God has spoken to us within them over and over again. Dreams are dangerous, they can help us remember.

Ok, onto the story.