Faith, Friends and Wordsmithery: A Discussion of Vocation :: Essays Papers

Faith, Friends and Wordsmithery A Discussion of VocationIn professing face literature, pastoring a congregation, and writing poetry, C.S. Lewis, Heidi Neumark, and Kathleen Norris are linked in their search to more than than fully perceive the face of God in their living and writing. Their phantasmal autobiographies account for an evolution in their understandings of vocation and faith, each beholding something akin(predicate) to what Lewis calls Joy, a fleeting desire for something beyond us and this world, often awaken in the write word. Be it writing of the diversity of a southern Bronx church building in Breathing Space, discerning the meaning of astonishing stunner in English literature detailed in Surprised by Joy, or in poetic reflections of ascetic landscape in Dakota, these authors parcel how their vocations as wordsmiths link with their identity as Christians. From early childhood, Lewis was drawn to complex quantity worlds of dressed animals and knights in armor (Surprised by Joy 13). His literary spell with that beyond what sight alone conceives, to that which stimulates the soul, followed him without his keep. It is no surprise that he accepted a fellowship at Magdalen in 1925, and went on to discover English literature, Philosophy (very badly) and the Greats, given his extensive participation with the tangible and abstract in literature, as well as his pictorial expertise in several literary canons (215). Within such a world, Lewis embraced an enduring source of Joy, elusive and yet persistent, throughout the political madhouse of his own life and his dogged rejection of anything resembling the Christian myth (215). Through the written word, Lewis found an understanding of a higher source of living more readily than hed ever experienced in church or in conversation with various religious spokespeople. Throughout his abominable and then blessed years of schooling, Lewis was haunted by the Idea of Autumn, enfleshed through fleeting experiences with Joy in poetry. Finding an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction reading great Nordic works, Lewis was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky desiring something never to be exposit and then finding himself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing he was back in it (17). This central story of his life, this passion for Joy, came to take on many forms as Lewis the boy grew into Lewis the English scholar, and then into Lewis, a Christian. Even after his supreme conversion to Christianity, the old stab of Joy came as often and as sharply as at any time in his life while reading and writing (238).