Owen Barfield's concept of participation provides the basis of what is needed for Christians, as of 2025

Owen Barfield's concept of participation provides the basis of what is needed for Christians, as of 2025 and going forward. 

Barfield assumes that participation in Divine Creation is both our nature as created beings; and also the proper aim of created beings. 

Creation is in the direction of developing participation in the direction of freely creating in greater consciousness. 

More exactly, that this is our proper aim as Christian beings who have chosen to live by love and therefore in harmony with God's creative will. 

The reason why participation is so centrally and vitally important to Christians, is that it is by participation that there is creation in the first place. 

Creation is itself (if properly understood) a matter of participation; because creation is (as all Christians acknowledge) primarily a matter of love. 

For there to be love in this "relational" and personal Christian sense; there must be distinct beings each with the capacity for loving - and then love needs to be mutually chosen.

The cohesion of divine creation should therefore be understood as an ongoing process of harmonizing the motivations of beings; harmonization through the love between beings. 

In different words; divine creation is (partly) a matter of once indifferent beings, coming to participate-in the creative direction of God's loving nature; through loving God and loving one-another. 

It is this love between Beings that is the basis of the harmony that is creation.

But divine creation is also living, dynamic, continuing, increasing... And by the Christian understanding it is God's intention that Men become fully (and divine) Sons of God; share in the work of creation, and who each contribute something unique (because from themselves), new, and additional-to creation. 

Therefore, the direction of creation is towards greater consciousness and choice among beings - towards an increasingly-active participation - which change must be freely-chosen by each being. 

That is to say; there is a change through time from a mostly passive, mostly unconscious, harmony of creation in which individuals largely serve the divine will and each does not bring much new and additional to the whole...

And towards what must necessarily be a more collegial participation in the work of creation; by which every single being that chooses to live by love, is consciously enabled to contribute that which is unique in himself and which he learns to the totality of creation.

Tolkien: Evil is not able to create anything new...

PS: Hope you all enjoyed this stolen meme...

Old Men in Shorts - versus growth in old age

A phenomenon that has swept my part of the world over the past couple of years is old men out and about on the streets and in shops, wearing shorts - or what Americans call "short pants" - ie. short trousers. 

This used to be very rare, except at the height of summer and on holiday - but nowadays, it's clear that old men have - in droves! - set aside their long trousers, and taken to wearing shorts all the time and in all seasons. 

This weirdly-misguided and counter-productive assertion of continuing youthfulness; fits with the theme of  a thought-provoking post from Francis Berger where he discusses "growing old" with an emphasis on what kind of growing this ought to entail:

"Growing old should refer to the spiritual—that we should use old age to focus on changing, developing, and expanding our spirit; on reflecting on our mortal lives and our memories; on learning lessons yet unlearned; on tying up loose ends and neglected frays from our mortal relationships; on preparing and building up our “self”, our true “self”, for resurrected life."

While the sight of superannuated codgers in cut-off trews seems like a trivial inconvenience, merely an eyesore; I have nonetheless come to regard this as symptomatic of a deep and increasing the spiritual resistance to growing old; which is one of the besetting sins of modern Western civilization. 

The reason is obvious enough; that, without a confident expectation of continued personal existence beyond death - a post-mortal life that is affected by present life; then there really is no benefit but many disadvantages in getting-old, and no viable coherent prospect of growing-old. 

The life of the modern middle-aged and elderly person (including, so far as I can tell, nearly all self-identified Christians) is then inevitably some kind of combination of an always-losing battle to remain (or seem) youthful; and a progressively-increasing terror of physical deterioration, suffering, dying, and then annihilation. 

Frodo's big mistake in first-using the One Ring, and its evil consequences

Tom Bombadil and the hobbits - by Miriam Ellis

It is interesting, and typical of Tolkien, that the wrongly-motivated way in which Frodo begins using the One Ring; subsequently and rapidly has deleterious consequences for him.

Read the whole thing over at The Notion Club Papers blog.

That "somebody else thinks like me" feeling

Colin Wilson in the 1950s. Even if I couldn't write The Outsider like him; 

I could at least wear spectacles and a chunky roll-neck pullover; which I did... 

The "somebody else thinks like me" feeling is probably, mostly, a feature of psychological adolescence; by which I mean that transitional mental phase between childhood and adulthood: it is a feeling I associate with reading particular books, more than anything else.

(Although I did sometimes get the same feeling, albeit very rarely, when meeting a new person.) 

A particularly memorable and clear example was Colin Wilson's The Outsider, which I encountered age 19; at a point when my mind had for several months been increasingly occupied by exactly the matters that were the focus of that book - especially the problem of the triviality, dullness, and alienation of mundane everyday life... 

How there are experiences in which this alienation may apparently be overcome - but that these "moments" of fulfilment are always (it seems) brief and temporary, and incomplete. 

Wilson's book was a thorough and multi-faceted explanation and analysis of the problem; such that I realized "it's not just me" who experienced modern life in this way. 

My initial hope was, naturally enough, that Wilson's writings might be, or might point-to, The Answer; but of course that was not the case. 

(I say "of course" because I now believe that there is no full and permanent "answer" to this problem in this mortal earthly life; because this life is a transitional and learning phase of an eternal soul, so this life is itself a kind of adolescence. Therefore a full answer that is the resolution of the problem is only possible by moving on to spiritual maturity, which lies beyond death.) 

Nonetheless, it was a considerable encouragement to realize that I was one of many people who knew and grappled-with this problem - and who regarded it as a very significant problem. Since there was nobody in My Real Life who talked about such matters, or who seemed to take them with the seriousness that I did - The Outsider book - and those that followed along the same line (both by Wilson and recommended by him) - meant a great deal to me.