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Ghosts and Refracted Light

Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.   George MacDonald

 This is a day in our lives from almost 20 years ago.   How gradually things change and how little one knows what to expect in the future!  Twenty years before that day in 2006, we were waiting for our firstborn child to arrive, and twenty years before that, the Vatican Council was still going on.

I was typing search terms into Duck Duck Go this morning, for the purpose of changing the blog's title.    I searched "splintered light" and "hourbook" and "scriptorium" and "Logres".     Splintered light comes from a Tolkien poem expressing a theme about storywriting process that he often returned to in his life and work:  

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right

(used or misused). The right has not decayed.

We make still by the law in which we're made.”

"Logres" is the old word for the southeastern part of England which King Arthur ruled, according to legend.   CS Lewis made use of the term following Owen Barfield and Charles Williams.    There is an interesting article about America's Logres here.  

Here is the quote from CS Lewis on Logres:  

“There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it- it will do as well as another. And then… gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting.” -- Logres and the Matter of Britain 

 No time left to try to tie this together.    There is something under it all though, about haunting and the corners where you almost see something, and refracted light.    And no doubt, the wise men from the East following the star.   

 

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