Come Rack! Come Rope!

Our local Chesterton Academy did a production of  Come Rack! Come Rope! The play is an adaptation by Dale Ahlquist and Adrian Ahlquist of the novel by Robert Hugh Benson.

In the novel, Queen Elizabeth only appears once in a scene in which she processes through London. In  the adaptation, they added a scene about William Cecil, Lord Burleigh convincing Elizabeth to execute Mary, Queen of Scots.

The directors asked two teachers and one former teacher - me! - to play the roles of Elizabeth, Burleigh (again, me), and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. 

Part of the pleasure for me was that I was in this production with some of my former students, some of whom I had directed in plays.

Gethsemane (C. S. Lewis)

All may yet be well. This is true. Meanwhile you have the waiting—waiting till the X-rays are developed and till the specialist has completed his observations. And while you wait, you still have to go on living—if only one could go underground, hibernate, sleep it out. And then (for me—I believe you are stronger) the horrible by-products of anxiety, incessant, circular movement of the thoughts, even the Pagan temptation to keep watch for irrational omens. And one prays; but mainly such prayers as are themselves of anguish.

Some people may feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take to them, our share in the Passion of Christ. For the beginning of the Passion—the first move, so to speak—is in Gethsemane. In Gethsemane a very strange and significant thing seems to have happened.

It is clear from many of His sayings that Our Lord had long foreseen His death. He knew what conduct such as His, in a world such as we have made of this, must inevitably lead to. But it is clear that this knowledge must somehow have been withdrawn from Him before He prayed in Gethsemane. He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father’s will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known it would not. That is both a logical and psychological impossibility. You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope—of suspense, anxiety—were at the last moment loosed upon Him—the supposed possibility that, after all, He might, He just conceivably might, be spared the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had been spared: he too at the last moment, he also against all probability. It was not quite impossible…and doubtless He had seen other men crucified…a sight very unlike most of our religious pictures and images.

But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps He would not have been very Man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be man.

At the end, I know, we are told that an angel appeared ‘comforting’ him. But neither comforting in the sixteenth-century English nor in Greek means ‘consoling’. ‘Strengthening’ is more the word. May not the strengthening have consisted of renewed certainty—cold comfort this—that the thing must be endured and therefore could be?

We all try to accept with some sort of submission our afflictions when they actually arrive. But the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God’s will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master.

- C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer 

Good Friday

From The Everlasting Man

All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask: ‘What is truth?’ So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.

Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is his heaven and all is right with the world; since the rumour that God had left his heavens to set it right.

Substack

 

Several of my friends were on the Substack, and suggested I consider posting on it.

The platform is more for writers, and not for the kind of political and theological battles that dominate so many other social media platforms.

I took the plunge. I started posting as "Franciscan Poet." 

As I began posting, I tried to think of a possible identity that would set me apart, and then it hit me that given my post's name, why not some of my poetry? So I created two days on which I would post some of my poetry: Haiku Tuesday, and, in keeping with my Chestertonian roots, Clerihew Thursday. 

I also added a day for another interest: Dad Joke Sunday. 

For the haiku and the clerihews, I posted not just the poems, but also art with them. I also noted if the poems had been published and where. With the clerihews, that means Gilbert.

Here are the first cllerihews:

Albert Einstein
had to pay a traffic fine
for trying to reach the speed of light
in a Packard one night.

Herman Melville
chose to fill
his epic novel with page after page of involved but possibly plagiarized details
about whales. 

Robert Burns

hid behind some ferns.

He feared that he might be shot

by the husband of an auld acquaintance he forgot.  

I'll continue to post there - and, of course, here. I may share some of my posts on both platforms.

And I'm happy to say there are Chesterton and C. S. Lewis fans over there!

 

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