Dec. 28 - Till We Have Faces

One of my favorite books is C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, which is a modified version of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Unlike the traditional mythological story, however, the protagonist here is Psyche's sister, Orual, who is terribly ugly and eventually begins wearing a veil to hide her face.

Orual loves Psyche as if she were her own child, and when the gods destroy their relationship and send Psyche into exile, Orual essentially shakes her fists at them and demands some answers. But the gods don't answer, and Orual concludes that they are mean, tortuous beings. As she nears the end of her life, she documents her story so it can live on and readers can judge for themselves whether the gods are just.

Some time after completing her story, Orual has a vision in which she is given the opportunity to make her accusations against the gods. She has her manuscript with her and reads it over and over again before them, until she is interrupted -- at which point she begins to understand, among other things, that stating her objections was itself the answer. And here's the part that still gives me goosebumps:

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

Why, indeed, should they hear the babble we think we mean? But also, why is it sometimes so difficult to know what we really do mean?

Like Orual reading her life's story, I find myself reading my own blog posts again and again ... and again and again and again. I'm not really sure why. I don't feel a complaint against God building up. Maybe it just helps in trying to get past my own babble (which is probably all that comes out when I talk to people) to uncover what's stewing at the center of my soul.

I don't know whether anyone is still checking this blog, since it began as a way to provide updates about Garrett's VOGM treatment, and that story has now sadly ended, but I'm finding it's still useful for sorting out my own thoughts in the wake of his death. I just feel a need to write everything down -- fill in the blanks from his last day here, record random thoughts and memories, try to determine what I really make of all this. And while that focus on Garrett's life is therapeutic, so is including other day-to-day observations, like Jonathan thinking the word "Acapulco" is hysterical, or appreciating how Chris consistently makes better scrambled eggs than I do.

There is still life after death. Now I'm just trying to figure it out.