End result

Humans throughout history have had varied and notoriously weird takes on death.  Today's been rather full of it, in ways.  This morning I was reading C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, which is the published edition of the journals he wrote after the early death of his wife from cancer.   And then one of our hamsters died this afternoon (Requiescat in pace, Charley Pattertwig) and we held a funeral, and we watched an episode of the Cosby Show in which Rudy's goldfish dies, and my anthropology professor was talking about these royal tombs he helped excavate a few years ago in South America.

So it got me to wondering (as if my day wasn't already morbid enough) why people do the things they do to dead bodies.  I mean, physically disposing of remains makes sense.  But then people hold funerals.  And I don't see anything wrong with funerals at all, but they are kind of curious phenomena to me.  What real purpose do they serve?  It's strange that everyone has something for which they want to be remembered, as if the being remembered was the important thing.  It's odd that people imagine a graveside is the somehow the best or the most appropriate place to do that remembering.

And why do people wish to be buried with things?  Especially all of those ancient royal families.  Clearly they believed in an afterlife, or else they wouldn't have taken civilizations' worth of wealth and thousand of fellow human beings literally to their graves with them.  It's odd that everyone thought the afterlife, whatever it be, would be stratified the same way as this life.  Nobody ever wondered if they might come into the afterlife the same way as this life—that is, out of a womb and absolutely penniless?  That somehow material objects transcended some cosmic boundary, even though obviously people's bodies didn't.  If I were dying, and I believed I was going to an afterlife very similar to the present, would I be afraid to die alone?  Probably.  So, why did they slaughter hundreds of servants and cattle to take with them, instead of a family member (that probably would have gone over poorly) or a lover (that might not have been the reputation they wanted to wake up with, I suppose)?  And if I were a servant in this life and my dying king had me executed five minutes post his death, so I could share his large and dank and expensive tomb, what would I do if I did wake up "on the other side"?  I would run, that's what.

It boggles me, frankly, to think about how very different people's minds actually worked pre-Renaissance, in societies where independence wasn't taught and pursued as a crucial goal of someone's life.  "The divine right of kings" really meant something transcendent to people, and people used it in ways that weren't necessarily meant to get people to respect "the Lord's anointed".

Death is something people have never understood, and do not understand, and never will.  Obviously, I have beliefs about death, but I still "know" next to nothing about it, aside from the purely corporeal aspects, and even modern science has raging debates over that.  Death is a bizarre phenomenon, which makes sense, considering it wasn't meant to be at all.  I don't know where this post is going/has gone.  It's just something I've been thinking about today.  Eh.

A figuratively true story:

    The weary girl looked her demons in the face with new boldness of true and firm knowledge.
    "You cannot have me," she avowed.
    Thunder rolled in over the mountain; rain slashed through the sky and drenched her diminutive form, rode the air she breathed and tried to drown her from the inside out, as the darkness had done for so long before.
    But the girl raised her voice, and her heavy fists, and veritably roared at them, defying them as she ought to have done sooner.  "You cannot have me!  There is no authority left unclaimed here for you!"  She might have been weeping, or sobbing, but one could not tell against the rain.
    "My Lover has paid the price for me.  Did you see him?  I know you did; what he gave ripped the world in two and stitched it back together again.  He paid my ransom with his own life, and it matters not that you did not get to keep him.  The price has been paid, and you cannot have me."
    She spoke words of her Father, repeated the words he had said to her, and to people who had come ages before her.  The dark ones recognized the illocution and fell back in a fury that mangled their forms beyond recognition, screaming as loudly as the storm.  Still she pressed against them with words she knew to be true.
    Finally the girl whispered once more, and her voice, always soft, still rang through to their ears, burning them as surely as if she was breathing fire.
    She lit a single guttering match in the rain and burned their names from her book, every one.
    "You cannot have me."
    The young woman turned away from them, turned her back on the mountains and the demons, and went back to her house on the hill, the house she had been given by her Father where she dwelled with her Lover, and settled back into bed.  A lullaby of safety and amazement stoppered her ears against the rain, and the arms of her Lover, when she had called his name, shielded her from the demons who might have dared to follow—thus untroubled she slept at last.

What Lucy Found There

          "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Tumnus."
          "I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Tumnus," said Lucy.
          "And may I ask, O Lucy Daughter of Eve," said Mr Tumnus, "how you have come into Narnia?"
          "Narnia? What's that?" said Lucy.
          "This is the land of Narnia," said the Faun, "where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea. And you - you have come from the wild woods of the west?"
          "I - I got in through the wardrobe in the spare room," said Lucy.
          "Ah!" said Mr Tumnus in a rather melancholy voice, "if only I had worked harder at geography when I was a little Faun, I should no doubt know all about those strange countries. It is too late now."
          "But they aren't countries at all," said Lucy, almost laughing. "It's only just back there - at least - I'm not sure. It is summer there."
          "Meanwhile," said Mr Tumnus, "it is winter in Narnia, and has been for ever so long, and we shall both catch cold if we stand here talking in the snow. Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?"

———————

That is, of course, the sort of opening snapshot of Narnia, from C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This passage has in my mind quite a bit over the last week or so. I'm not truly sure why.

There's so much change and choice and possibility in this little scene.
I wonder which of it is mine?

"I took from me pocket ten sovereigns bright…"

God is sovereign.  All the time.

And I had kind of a revelation about that tonight (while at WorshipArts camp worship night, you guys rock, by the way).

When things are really hard, and it feels like half of my life is completely falling apart, I've always been fairly capable of saying (most of the time, at least) that God is sovereign—that He sees me, that He knows where this is going.  It's easier to trust when I can't see a week ahead of me.  But He's not just sovereign in the lows, He is sovereign in the highs, too.

Whoa.  Way to overlook the flip side of the shiny coin, Kiersten.

 

When things are going fantastically, when all the pieces fit together, when the sun is shining and I'm getting at least seven hours of sleep every night, God is still in control.  He still knows where things are going.  I don't have to carry the torch alone.  My effort isn't going to necessarily win or lose me the day.  God is in control, even then.  And frankly, I don't think about that much.  When it's out of my hands, it's relatively easy to put it all into His hands.  But when I've worked hard and things are going swell?  Then it's all on my shoulders.  Then it's all my responsibility to keep it going.  But that's just not true.  God demands just as much of my trust when I'm on solid ground as when it feels like I'm falling.  

God is sovereign.  All the time.  It is never, ever out of His hands.  He can juggle most anything, good as well as bad.

(Unrelated aside: the title is from Irish folk song "The Wild Rover."  First thing that popped into my head for a title. Also, it was featured in one of the Bloody Jack books.  I freaked out when I saw it:  "I OWN THAT SONG! HA!")

I'm always excited about new music purchases, but especially this one, because I've been debating about buying it for months—and then finally remembered I have a gift card.  And it is now sitting in my iTunes, and I'm awfully happy.

Merlin

Simple.
Unravel time.
And mind the moon on your way out.

I found my long-lost first attempt at a novel…the one I wrote when I was twelve.

It's like a 53,000-word ode to melodrama and fantasy clichés in prose form.
Complete, of course, with a partial Elvish/unicorn dictionary, complete character glossary and pronunciation guide, “A Comprehensive Guide To All the Fantastical Creatures”, six pages of prophetic poetry in ancient Elvish which has no translation, a calendar, elvish numerical system, the complete lineage of 1500 years’ worth of centaur queens (even though only one was ever referenced in the story), and an episode of American Idol.


Reading it now, it's kind of half excited nostalgia and half "I'm-going-to-go-jump-off-a-cliff-and-never-come-back."

The Field Sobriety Test

I'm trying so hard right now, and I think I'm doing some things right, and I'm definitely doing a couple of things wrong, and there are a great many more things that I have no idea how they ought to be done or whether I'm putting my feet right at all. And it hurts—so very much sometimes.
A whole lot of things hurt right now that seem like they ought not to.