Levavi oculos meos in montes

“Oh, that won’t do!’ said Bilbo. ‘Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?’ ‘It will do well, if it ever comes to that,’ said Frodo. ‘Ah!’ said Sam. ‘And where will they live? That’s what I often wonder.” The worst dyscatastrophe seems to be that day when our very God was killed, by us.   There are reverberations of that event not just after, but before the event took place.   "He was despised and rejected"; "He came to his own, but his own knew Him not" "Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified" "if my enemy despised me, I could bear it, but it is you, my companion, my close friend, with whom I walked" But of course, that event was preceded by the Fall; and followed by Resurrection.   There was eucatastrophe hidden in the Fall ( o Happy Fault! ) and eucatastrophe embedded at the very heart of the Crucifixion.   Flannery O'Connor writes: There is something in u...

“He fell into a sleep as it were into an abyss of shadow and waking he was cold as stone, and his heart barren and forsaken” (165).  ~ Beren and Luthien,   Dyscatastrophe and Eucatastrophe Last year, I got on board with Bible in a Year rather late, and missed more than I actually followed, so I probably read (or listened to) only a quarter of the Bible in the year.  This year, I get to start close to the New Year, but if you are like me, and have to sometimes catch up several episodes at a time, you can, like me, go to Youtube, turn the settings to X2 speed, and read the captions instead of listening.     Father Mike comments that things went downhill FAST after the creation, at least in the terse Biblical telling.   You go from Genesis 1 and 2, where everything is created and it is GOOD, to where it all turns wrong.   Then it gets more and more wrong -- again, fast.   By Day 5 in the Ascension schedule, you have seen the...

 I read Chinua Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart , when I was 15 or 16.   I believe it was assigned in my 10th grade English class, though it might have been 11th grade.   I was attending an international school in Switzerland, run on mostly British lines with reference to O and A Levels, though an International Baccalaureate degree was also available. I don't remember much of the plot detail of the book, just my ongoing feeling of "NO!  NO! Just... don't!" as the protagonist made mistake after mistake that even a 15 or 16 year old could see wasn't going to turn out well for anyone.    I have never had the heart to pick up the book again, though now I think perhaps I should.. perhaps for Lent? The reason that the book has stuck with me, besides that its title refers to an endlessly evocative Yeats poem which I only heard of later, is that I was living in parallel with its storyline, and I realized it dimly at the time, and it horrified me....

 Eucatastrophe  and  Evangelium Tolkien writes: "The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. "   ( OFS )  From CS Lewis, quoted here : Tirian looked round again and could hardly believe his eyes. There was the blue sky overhead, and grassy country spreading as fa...