epershand

I'm still coming down from FOGcon, which was incredible and exhilarating and fun and emotionally exhausting (featuring both baby's first time being on a ConCom and baby's first time being on a panel, with bonus hanging out with Pat Murphy and chilling over a cigarette with Terry Bisson and apparently missing pantsless geography lessons by like two minutes and meeting so many incredibly cool people who I'd only known from a distance or over the internet before.) And I have a bunch of different posts about random things in my head.

But before I completely collapse into sleep tonight I just want to throw out in defense of CS Lewis's ungainly but (I think) ultimately delightful Christianity the following ungainly but (I think) ultimately delightful poem about the nature of prayer and metaphor. (I've posted it before but I think it bears repeating.)

Footnote to All Prayers
-- C.S. Lewis

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in mimetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Though take them at their word.

Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great,
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.