Myth and Symbol, from Pageau to Charlotte Mason

In Winter, Old Things are New Again!

I used to hate the cold. Maybe that’s because I grew up in the South. When I went outside, I experienced a compulsive, physiological reaction in which I would hunker down, tighten up, and roll into a ball, even while standing up. Cold was something you had to endure. Get through. Suffer through. Until it was over. Your nervous system was taught to be afraid, in anticipation.

But then my Wyoming-born, cross-country skiing friend said to me once: you know you don’t have to feel like that, right? You don’t have to get cold in anticipation of being cold?

Southerners, you understand me, right?

The sad thing, of course, was that I was depriving myself, in advance, of the whole symbolic education contained within the experience of winter and depriving myself of the full experience of the beauty of winter. You can’t read Greek poetry if you don’t learn Greek grammar. Similarly, you can’t enter fully into the symbolic education of winter if you don’t learn through the experience of it. (And if you want to know what that feels like, I’ve recorded a poem as a little gift for my supporters.)

It’s a time in which gaudy, exterior growth is limited. It’s a time where we put down the roots of the heart. Go deeper. Become more interior. It’s a time for ritual, for chopping wood, for playing music on the piano by a live fire while singing with the kids. It’s a time of beeswax candles and darkness. A time to contemplate the O Antiphons and read Malcolm Guite’s poetic reflections on them, a time to listen to new versions of old poems, like Mike Nowakowski’s setting of Chesterton’s “Chirstmas Carol.”

Do you remember how Lewis describes the spiritual value of encountering the “Saturnine”?

Saturn, whose name in the heavens is Lurga, stood in the Blue Room. His spirit lay upon the house, or even on the whole earth, with a cold pressure such as might flatten the very orb of Tellus to a wafer. Matched against the lead-like burden of his antiquity, the other gods themselves perhaps felt young and ephemeral. It was a mountain of centuries sloping up from the highest antiquity we can conceive, up and up like a mountain whose summit never comes into sight, not to eternity where the thought can rest, but into more and still more time, into freezing wastes and silence of unnameable numbers. It was also strong like a mountain: its age was no mere morass of time where imagination can sink in reverie, but a living, self-remembering duration which repelled lighter intelligences from its structure as granite flings back waves, itself unwithered and undecayed, but able to wither any who approached it unadvised. Ransom and Merlin suffered a sensation of unendurable cold: and all that was strength in Lurga became sorrow as it entered them. Yet Lurga in that room was overmatched. Suddenly a greater spirit came—one whose influence tempered and almost transformed to his own quality the skill of leaping Mercury, the clearness of Mars, the subtler vibration of Venus, and even the numbing weight of Saturn.

In the kitchen his coming was felt. No one afterwards knew how it happened, but somehow the kettle was put on, the hot toddy was brewed. Arthur—the only musician among them—was bidden to get out his fiddle. The chairs were pushed back, the floor cleared. They danced. What they danced no one could remember. It was some round dance, no modern shuffling: it involved beating the floor, clapping of hands, leaping high. And no one, while it lasted, thought himself or his fellows ridiculous… It seemed to each that the room was filled with kings and queens, that the wildness of their dance expressed heroic energy, and its quieter movements had seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies.

It’s also a time to allow oneself a little rest and contentment with what’s been stored up, what was laid up in the harvest. A time to reflect in tranquility and with gratitude on an exhilarating season of work and gathering of ideas.

And here’s what we gathered into the barn!

On the More Christ Podcast, I had a wonderful conversation with Jonathan Pageau and Marcas Ó Conghaile Muirthemne. We talked about my new translation and about the specifically Christian dimensions of the mythic Hero’s Journey:

I also joined Cindy Rollins and her co-host, Dawn Duran, on The New Mason Jar, to talk about Why Literature Still Matters.

We talked about the role of the arts in “closing the gap” between who I am and what I see. How do you keep education from becoming a mere matter of the brain, a train wreck of facts?

We marveled together at how well these ideas synced with Charlotte Mason’s understanding of the role of narrative.

In “Breathing Narnian Air: Loving Modernity as a Medievalist,” I joined Rich Moss at The Heights for a conversation centered on my Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, modern education, and what Lewis called “the inculcation of just sentiments.”

I also had a lot of fun with the wonderfully named and delightfully idiosyncratic Color of Dust podcast.

The team convinced me that our apocalyptic age (as I call it in Why Literature Still Matters) could be the beginning of a new Gold Age!

I think I’m ready for Christmas.