A Pilgrim's Progress

"And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love." [Robert Willis, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral quoting Robert Lewis Stevenson in his sermon: "A Pilgrim's Progress"]
All Saints Church, Pasadena | Sunday, November 17, 2013.
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[@brunodsouza7875]

The Dean of Canterbury is a catalyst for me, for the many of the possibility of beauty, grandeur and Communion of Christ's Church...

[@edithcunningham5713]

Travels with a Donkey was on our must-read English Book List back in the 1940s in England.

[@alindley3128]

C.S. Lewis also used the quadruped as a metaphor for the body, like Modestine the Donkey of Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Narnia stories, first in The Horse and his Boy, of course, and also in The Last Battle, twice. The Unicorn named Jewel and Prince Tirian seem to symbolize Lewis as a young man, while Puzzle the Donkey and the Ape symbolize the author Lewis as he self deprecatingly saws himself at that age, as he was writing, greyhaired like the Donkey and cunning from surviving decades of university politics at Oxford, like the Ape. And the Ape in vanity wraps Puzzle the Donkey in a lion's skin, to convince the Narnians that the poor Donkey is really divine, as if Lewis' books were divine writ, only he, himself knew they weren't really. And the children in the novel knew better and got the lion's skin off the donkey just in time. I guess Lewis' academic skills, when he started out, were those of a warhorse, while his emotional skills, according to his portrayal in The Horse and His Boy, were those of a young boy escaping from slavery to freedom. I'd like to think that somewhere in the Heavens, there really is a garden with trees whose fruit tastes like ....all the good parts of a MacDonald's hamburger in a fresh fruit, the way Lewis imagines in the final scenes in The Last Battle. Our human brains require a certain amount of protein to learn and be clever. I can't imagine an australopithicus creature figuring out how to grow a patch of beans, and also a patch of rice, figuring out how to dig clay out of a stream bank, mold it into a pot, fire it in a kiln, harvest the rice and beans and put them all into a fired clay pot together with water to cook them....all for the very first time, all while subsisting until that moment on raw, proteinless vegetarian foods. I think Lewis' heavenly fruit trees should give us a good thought experiment to use when we think of how human evolution must have happened. (To confess my rather unconventional theory, in light of all the nutritional deficiency diseases that we humans are cursed with on this planet, I cannot imagine how we could possibly have evolved here naturally. We're not suited to this planet at all. We're not at all suited to hunt or to eat meat, yet the plants are deficient in protein, iron, vitamins like B12, necessary fats, and other nutrients we need to survive and can only get from eating animal products. And the sunlight is too strong, and the oxygen too low, the day cycle too short, and most of the herbivores would have been far too big for us to handle for a long time. It's not the saber toothed tigers that would have done the most damage, rather, it would have been the giant deer trampling and eating the gardens. I suppose fish and seafood would have been easier to gather. Not that it matters now. It's not worth publishing or arguing about, when there are so many other, more important topics to study and write up for publication. This one is really only worth a brief comment on you tube.)

[@roymathews3852]

Dean Robert, always an inspiration!

[@NigelGresswell]

Wonderful. Being from England myself so lovely to celebrate Jesus together with the Dean of Westminster at All Saints.

[@teresamarkham8929]

What a message. Thank you.