Thunder of an 'age-old anvil'

"Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing-"- Hopkins

Today, like every day, is history. But today is the kind of history that is printed in textbooks and which college students study as part of the cause and effect leading up to colossal events; the kind of history one does not see every day of the year. Today, news of Kim Jong Il's death was released, plunging North Korea into frantic grief, and the world into frantic trepidation. This announcement has struck the pond of world events like a well-aimed pebble. It is too soon to tell, yet, how far the ripples will go, or when they will strike the shore.
One little ripple which a Chinese friend showed me on Facebook today is this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSWN6Qj98lw.
For me, it is the most poignant sight of the year. As I watched, I suddenly realized that the most tragic love, most tragic faith, is that which is utterly misplaced. Men who cry out in despair to deaf idols are not merely guilty of sin, they are the great voice of hopelessness in the universe, they are the blackest depth of soundless grief revolving in the bleakest cell of unapproachable pain. And so, I found myself weeping with this people. An oppressor, torturer, and madman tore terrifying tears today from his people. Not the usual tears of hunger, of fear, of injustice, of pain, of loss which have haunted North Korea for so long, but strange, unnatural tears. Dignified Asian men of solemn ages and high position are here seen sobbing and convulsing before the nation like little children. As I watched the writhing mob, it were as though every woman wept for her child, every man for his beloved, every child for his parents. My heart is still shaking; the emotion, the rawness of it, clawed at me from the screen as the video played.

God have mercy on this people, for they are "...a people plundered and looted, all of them trapped in pits or hidden away in prisons. They have become plunder, with no one to rescue them; they have been made loot, with no one to say, 'Send them back.'" (Isaiah 42:22)

In only a week we will celebrate the coming to earth of God in the flesh, of the King of eternity who throws off the slavery of the heart and soul, and beckons the world into the kingdom of light. In only a week, well fed and surrounded safely by all we love, we will sing with smug satisfaction the soaring hymns of hope and joy. And while we sing, and eat, and laugh, Korea mourns. While we marvel at the glorious mercy of God, North Korea is dying in starved, brutal ignorance. While we luxuriate in 'holiday cheer' the few people of that nation blessed with the knowledge of, and faith in, Christ, are laying down their lives in starkly joyous surrender, 'That the Lamb who was slain might have the full reward of His suffering.'

May God have mercy not on North Korea only, may God have mercy on us, the sleeping church. My own callousness is hideous to me, my selfishness more than I can bear.

Today, like every day, is a solemn one in the history of the world. Tomorrow, still, is an undiscovered treasure in our hands. Faced with this great and terrible world, swaying in the agony of its pain, how will we live? How must I live my daily life?

Reading List for Christmas Break

The best part of Christmas break is the possession of hours and hours to read. Something tells me that this Christmas break will be a bit too busy for that, as I prepare to fly out for Angers, France at the beginning of January. However, the other best part of Christmas break is creating unrealistic, beautiful goals, so I made a reading list anyway. It is as follows:

'Factory Girls'- Leslie T. Chang (I already started this, and it's so, so excellent. :-) )
'The Gay Genius'- Lin Yutang*
'Le Petit Nicolas'- Sempé/Goscinny
'Vacances du Petit Nicolas'- Sempé/Goscinny
'Les Récrés du Petit Nicolas'- Sempé/Goscinny
'Cultural Literacy'- E.D. Hirsch
'Persuasion'- Jane Austen*
'Graded French Reader'-
'501 French Verbs'
'From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya'- Ruth Tucker*
'Too True To Be Good'- George Bernard Shaw*
Assorted poetry with a heavy slant towards Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kipling, and Christina Rossetti.*
'Muslims, Christians, and Jesus'- Carl Medearis
'I Chose Freedom'- Victor Kravchenko*
'At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl- Inge Jens
'The Short Life of Sophie Scholl'- Hermann Vinke*
'The Great Divorce'- C.S. Lewis*

Realistic expectations cannot be too highly applauded. :-P
Marked items are those which I have already read (4-5 times ;-) ), or those which I have nearly finished, and simply need to come back to. These are the 'low priority' listings.

Technically, I could check 'The Great Divorce' off the list, because I read it yesterday in my first act of Christmas Break Independence, but I already want to go back and re-read it.
It offered a lot to ponder, and it helped me come to terms with some ideas I'd been struggling with. Accepting the goodness and justice of God in a world that makes a mockery of both concepts, and, what is even more difficult, applying these known characteristics of God to certain agonizing instances in the Old Testament, has kept me awake... way too many nights this semester. I've felt heart-broken and confused, frustrated and angry as I try to make sense of the world and its Maker.
Seeing though, through Lewis' clever device, just how deceptive and self-serving, how empty and enslaving human arguments are against the overwhelming Holiness that is God, I was painfully broken and humbled. As I listened to the querulous questions and demands of the ghosts, who obstinately refused to enter Paradise, who were unable to recognize how much better God Himself was than the shabby ephemeral concepts of him, and themselves, which they insisted upon retaining, I recognized myself, and my own pride- my own intellectual falsehoods and stubborn, egocentric opinions... and healthy, shamed humility rolled in. It was like a breath of fresh, cool air- sharp, but invigorating and sweet with life.

You should read 'The Great Divorce' too, and if you're not convinced, the following excerpts will prove it to you:

"'Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.'
'The saying is almost too hard for us.'
'Ah, but it's cruel not to say it. They that know have grown afraid to speak. That is why sorrows that used to purify now only fester... [Y]ou and I must be clear. There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.'"

"Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken."

"'What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.'
'Ye see it does not.'
'I feel in a way that it ought to.'
'That sounds very merciful; but see what lurks behind it.'
'What?'
'The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should veto Heaven.'"

"Ye must distinguish. The action of Pity will live forever: but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of Pity, the Pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty- that will die. It was used as a weapon of bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken."

"[The action of Pity is] a weapon on the other side. It leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world's garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses."

"Time is the very lens through which ye see- small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope- something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all."

"That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory."

"Milton was right... The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy- that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks."

"There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organiser of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares."

"Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already."

"...no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods."

I think I'm a little in love with C.S. Lewis all over again... Then again, how could anyone help being so? :-) #christiangirlproblems