"I journey forth rejoicing"

Tonight is my last night in the United States for the next two months! I am thrilled to be returning to England. I am also nervous about being away from home, about the plane ride, about missing everyone while I'm gone. Tonight we had a prayer meeting open to all students in the program. A group of us gathered and presented our fears and excitements before the Lord, and I definitely feel more at peace about everything. This fellowship is going to be amazing. I felt God giving me the last four verses of Ephesians 2 to pray for this group. I love the idea of a group of people being built into a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit, and I truly pray we may experience that this summer.

In many ways this has been a difficult week: I have been unusually tired, felt headachy, and had a very difficult time settling down to my work. Nevertheless, my first major writing assignment is finished less painfully than I expected. I took time off to have a devo under a tree this afternoon, and that helped my energy level so much. Once again I am reminded that when I find time for God, He finds time for my needs.
Class has been so wonderful--particularly fascinating has been the description of the evolution of attitude in England from the late Victorian to post-War periods in my Modern British class. I am thrilled to be launching into W.B. Yeats when we pick up in Durham.

Blessings to you all!

I am going to include here my first journal, which was an assignment both for my Modern British and Lewis classes. It is me processing the idea of longing in their literature:

Perhaps the central idea in C.S. Lewis’ work and certainly the most compelling for me, is his conception of longing—an experience so beautiful it is painful, so exquisite and fleeting that it is impossible to capture, and so much more numinous than mere happiness that he can only term it joy. Lewis believed that all people, simply because they are human, must occasionally experience joy. He explains this in his famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” writing that because God created us for Himself, we desire Him and desire heaven even when we do not know it. “Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object.” He reiterates this concept in many other places: through Jewel’s rapturous outburst on finding Aslan’s country in The Last Battle, through Istra’s longing for the Mountain in Till We Have Faces, through the rapturous vision of God Wormwood’s patient is said to experience upon death in the final epistle of The Screwtape Letters. He discusses his own experiences of this longing in his Surprised by Joy, the title of which clearly demonstrates the centrality of this principle to his spiritual life.
One of Lewis’ points in “The Weight of Glory” is that most people do not know that their desire is for heaven. As he says, “Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.” This was true of Lewis himself. He loved the longing for its own sake when he first experienced it and only realized after encountering Christ what it was he truly desired and why he desired it.
Thinking about this theme over the past several days has reminded me of the longing expressed in some of Thomas Hardy’s poetry. Since this is a journal and not a paper, I am going to feel free to compare and contrast the longing expressed in Hardy’s poetry and the joy Lewis describes, because I think it will help me understand both concepts better.
Longing is a much less self-conscious theme in Hardy’s poetry. The situations in which he experiences it bear striking similarities to those which Lewis relates. In “The Darkling Thrush,” he tells how birdsong on a bleak night gave him that sense of desire. “The Oxen” is his reflection on the folk belief related to him in childhood that in the first moments of Christmas Day, animals knelt in their stables to honor the coming of Christ. He confesses that if someone came to him and asked him to come and see them, he would go with him to the stable, “Hoping it might be so.”
Nevertheless, his poetry is not about longing as an entity in itself, probably because he recognizes what he is longing for. Hardy is very conscious of the loss of meaning in his life. This awareness can be found in “The Darkling Thrush,” where he says:
“So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.”
The language expresses a sense of wistfulness for this blessed Hope: Hardy says he could believe. He wants to believe that something could lighten the bleak prospects of, “The Century’s corpse outleant.”
Hardy’s and Lewis’ approach to their longing seem to come from opposite angles. Lewis understood what the longing truly meant in retrospect, but was completely ignorant of its source or meaning when he actually experienced. This is why he sought to capture those experiences for their own sake—because he did not recognize that, “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.” In retrospect, he recognizes this truth, and recognizes exactly why that longing exists. His initial ignorance could be attributed to the fact that he abandoned his faith very young—officially at the age of 15--and a significant part of his education came from atheist William Kirkpatrick.
Hardy, on the other hand, was a devout Anglican. The introduction to his work in our anthology states that he seriously considered becoming a priest until the age of 25. Therefore, he had experienced the reality that gave meaning to the beauty. Thus, when he hears the thrush’s song, he wants to believe that it heralds some sort of hope for the world—he misses that assurance of salvation. We can see the connection between moments of longing and his religious experience in both previously mentioned poems. In “The Darkling Thrush,” he uses specifically Anglican terminology, calling the thrush’s tune an “evensong,” and, “carolings,” and he capitalizes Hope to emphasize that it is a proper name—based on the context, a name for God. “The Oxen” relates a specifically Christian idea—of it he says, “So fair a fancy few would weave / in these years!” before recognizing his own desire to see this beautiful sight. Obviously, Hardy knew that he longed for the beauty of the Christian faith to be a reality. He simply would not believe that this was the case. In so doing, he refused to accept what Lewis later realized: that this longing was actually an evidence for the truth of the religion he so reluctantly abandoned. He knew that he was on the wrong side of the door, as Lewis put it, but he did not believe the other side he desired truly existed.
This might be the key to Hardy’s intensely depressing work. While he claimed to be a “meliorist”, one who thought that humans could better the world by their own efforts, as our anthology explains, his writings do little to demonstrate this belief. Rather they present life as a hopelessly bleak string of meaningless events, similar to the harsh, grey world of the winter world that is the setting of “The Darkling Thrush.” While he claims to support the lie Lewis repudiates, that happiness may be found on this earth by human effort, his works seem to reveal a deep-seated dissatisfaction with this idea.
While the two men’s spiritual journeys took almost precisely opposite courses, both Lewis and Hardy demonstrate the truth St. Augustine expressed in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”