Perspectives: Foreboding Confirmations

Two lectures into the discipleship training course here at YWAM has already been insightful, for they have constructed a wonderfully logical way of approaching the faith. I am hearing profundities I have vaguely deduced articulated with refreshing clarity and precision. 

The first series of lectures is by YWAM veteran Paul Hawkins, concerning the character and nature of God. It is a vivifying distillation of theology derived from biblical and practical experience. Which, after reading Sophie's world, I would call a twin approach of knowledge by perception and language, for written records fall under the avenue of linguistics for me. 

He has thus far spoken on how God is a person, or as a trinitarian perspective might suggest, three persons relating in perfect unity. Paul suggests that a person must have intelligence, emotion and volition, three delightfully latinate words. Intelligence is further delineated as the qualities of self-consciousness, reasonability, imagination and memory. He went on to prove that since God has all these qualities, evidenced by the biblical record, we can be confident of His full personhood.

These are several of the points which I found as confirmation of what answers I arrived at as I had meditated on the nature of God and creation. After going to the series of lectures on the nature of the Trinity in 2013, I learnt about the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and the perfect communion that unites them. I felt that while I was never explicitly stated, the reason why God created us to was to extend that perfect source of love and joy to other persons. I had heard previously that we were created in order to worship God. To some extent this is true, but more importantly, we were created to have intimate, personal relationships with Him. To be sure, worship is an essential and beautiful aspect of our relationship with God, but I almost feel that the full realisation of our relationship with God will be more than the word 'worship' can do justice to. I daresay we are called to be more than worshippers, we are called to be children of God, fellow partakers in that inheritance which Christ has already received.

Second, he spoke about the intensity of God's emotions, which I am very glad to have assurance on now. I had sensed that as one comes to know God and to understand Christ, one does not approach a sort of tranquil enlightenment, at utter acceptance of the world. Conversely, we move into greater and stronger emotional and motivational states, for God is a God of crazy love, of impartial compassion and righteous anger. As we know Him more, our hearts likewise imitate His perspectives and emotions. Just as the opposite of love is not hatred, but apathy, the opposite of God's emotional intensity could be viewed as an emotional insensitivity, which is wont to develop if one is detached from God for an extended period of time, living a purposeless life, where emotions are not a boon but a bane. The tranquility of monastery life and buddhist apotheosis seems appealing, but it resolves the suffering of the world in a philosophical sense, not in the practical sense which will compel positive action which God desires. It is an answer that appeals to the world, that we must come to accept the suffering and distress as part of a grander whole, that there is no good and evil, but only oneness where duality is a refracted dispersal of unity. There is a mysticism to it, but it is not what a believer in the Christian God is drawn to. The Christian God calls us to fix what is unjust, to work against exploitation and disease and poverty, to do what we can to heal the brokenness of this world, instead of denying our sense of morality in a series of noble, but misguided, mental gymnastic manoeuvres.

Third, his central point was 'What you believe about God will affect what you believe about everything else.' This reminds me very much of a much loved quote from C. S. Lewis 'I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.' It ties in with a principle that I have experienced in my own life, that once I learned about the nature of God, through bible studies and prayer, personal experience and the testimonies of others, I become increasingly able to make sense of an otherwise inconsistent and irrational world. When one learns about one aspect of God, it augments one's faith in all the other characteristics one has already observed. And the more one learns about Him, the more one can say 'There is none like You.' without a sliver of doubt.

A Biennial Review

I began conceiving the world of Eldwan as a vast work of synthesis, a creative platform for me to wrestle with the twin giants of Biblical record and modern scientific knowledge. These past two years have afforded me the time to reflect, acquire information, and weave ever more of what I have learnt into the fabric of my sub-creation. I am glad for them, for I doubt that I will have such leisurely temporal abundance when my education resumes in eight short months.

It has come a long way, though I suppose in retrospect, many of my earlier posts seem juvenile and poorly informed. In particular, the ones on language, for which I was certainly inadequately versed in the vernacular of grammar and linguistics. As such, the development of Tas Eldwaraj is suspended until I have studied a few more languages; a checklist of which now includes Hebrew, French, Chinese and Greek, and perhaps German and Japanese. Just as how one must play and familarise oneself with pre-existing music before innovating with compositions of one's own, it seems sensible to me to immerse my mental faculties in ablutions of existing languages before returning to construct my own.

The history of Eldwan has been greatly enriched through my readings of non-fiction history, a newfound love of which is making me question my former myopic academic affinity with the natural sciences. I never imagined what it would spiral into when I first began to carry those central characters in my idle thoughts.

My writing encountered quite an obstacle with the influx of new information received from the faith bible institute creationism class. In particular, the relationship between continental drift, extinction and the deluge. I had constructed the movement of Eldwan's elves around the idea that continental drift occurred at the time of the fall of humankind, while the flood was a local event occurring between the ages of light and water. This is not in alignment with the suggested interpretation of the Noahic flood from the creationism class, and so I was caught in a dilemma between abandoning what I had developed for Eldwan, or accurately representing what could approximate the Biblical account in an alternate universe. I have resolved, as of the writing of this post, to remain with my original ideas. This does risk misrepresentation and confusion with regard to the literal creationism and flood account, which I feel sorely, for I would hate to add another poorly supported idea to the general confusion surrounding this topic. However, I also feel the need to write something distinct, something apart from what has happened in this universe. I find myself prone to mixing what I would like to be true with what actually is, and in writing something so similar to the development of this world has admittedly, been confusing for me. 

Eldwan is not the universe we live in, it takes elements of reality, but not all of it, and that is one of the quintessential charms of fantasy. I hope you'll have patience with me, dear reader, as the metamorphosis of Eldwan from inconsistent ideas and pre-fabricated characters to a coherent mythos continues this solar revolution.

Vignette: Mere Meaning 1

There was a crone who used to visit the town library, the building I was privileged to live just across from. So I noticed her, a hunched wrinkled devotee of the written word, always in a pastel blouse with a black skirt and shoes, entering and exiting between the Ionic columns of that noble edifice. She brought a trolley with her, which changed its contents like the clouds gracing the sky, that is, frequently and never the with repetition. If she was really reading at such an astonishing pace, I thought that she must have broken a Guiness record for speedreading. Then one day she simply didn't show, nor the next. I looked out for her in the obituaries, but her face never showed between all the comforting verses and condolences. She came over to exchange words with me sometimes, that's how I knew her appearance. I supposed that she must have exhausted all the books in our library and moved on to graze on greener intellectual pastures.

A year passed. About the next September, and I decided to take a longer route for my evening jog, so ended up running through a neighbourhood I didn't know all too well. There, I saw her again, sitting on a bench out on a veranda. My curiousity broke my run, a conversation like a beckoning golden apple to Diana, and I walked up to her fence and rang the doorbell. There was no response from her. I thought she might have suffered a stroke; that would explain her sudden literary cessation. Panting, I watched her for awhile, earphones still tuned to Dvorak's New World. A crescendo reminded me that I might want to put aside the music to catch any faint utterances from her lips, so I did. Yet she was motionless, as still as a terracotta footsoldier, and as silent as one too. Poor dear, trapped in that body. What good was acquiring all the knowledge of the world if it could not be articulated?

The door to her house opened, and a middle-aged man emerged. He wore slacks and an oversized T-shirt; a thin, anaemic man, who looked like he might evaporate at any moment. He walked over to her with a tray of food, then lifted his head and saw me by their gate. Be amiable, I thought, so I waved to him. He traversed the short path to the gate and greeted me.

'We don't get many visitors,' he said, 'My name is Alef, but most people call me Al, I'm her eldest son.'

He told me she had a stroke some time ago, I suppose that must have been when her mobility was compromised. I asked about her trips to the library, telling him I used to see her cart volume after volume out of those holy halls. He told me she was a linguist by training, that she enjoyed cataloguing the way that written languages developed and how they were used. She had been working on a massive project during the sunset of her life, he said, and the stress must have got to to her during those final frenetic weeks. One morning she had become as mute as Zechariah, and things had deteriorated from there.

'She hardly communicates now. I just feed and clothe her, my siblings help me to support her financially, but they're all preoccupied with their own affairs.'

'Well,' I said, 'at least she has you. I was puzzled by the disappearance of a fellow ardent of our town library. I'm sorry to hear she's like this now.'

'She was a kind mother, sharp-tongued but well-intentioned. She'd always complain about how none of us could understand her because we children only conversed and comprehended in one language, and not to mention in a language like English that obscures meaning so.'

'It must have been interesting to be raised by a linguist. '

'I don't think so, at least, not by her. She kept most of her work separate from our domestic life. What she did try to do was teach us nouns and verbs in multiple languages as we were growing up, we three children took to that with varying degrees of affinity.'

'My family only utilises English.'

'My mother would not approve, that I can say for certain. You mentioned the library, do you enjoy reading?'

'Indubitably. Anything from Homer, Cicero and Dante to Melville, Asimov and Dickens or Sun Tzu, Murakami and Narayan to Tufail, Khayyam and Oz.'

We heard a clatter as I uttered my statement. Turning in its direction of origin, I saw Al's mother, teeth grit, trying to bend down for her culinary utensils. Al responded with fluid attentiveness and went into the house to obtain a replacement set. I moved beside her and lowered myself to pick them up.

Standing where I was, I became aware of two letters which she had fashioned by arranging her rice on the plate. 'L' and 'A'. She waved for the chopsticks, but Al soon emerged and passed her a clean pair. She got to work, forming 'T' and 'I', and as she was working on the last letter, Al said to me, 'She wants you to go and learn Latin.'

'Learning languages has never been a high priority for me.'

She frowned, and turned her face away like a schoolgirl offended by the ignorance her class' resident unscholarly clown. Al chuckled, 'She doesn't wish to see you again unless you do so.'

'I'll get to it someday then. I'd best be off, sorry to have taken up quite a bit of time!'

'Not at all, I'm enjoying this disruption of monotony. Goodbye!'

'Goodbye!'

As I ran back to the pavement, Al called out, 'You might want to check the origin of that word 'Goodbye''. I snorted, vaguely amused. Waving to them both, I resumed my jog and reflected on the oddity of this encounter.