One such work is 'Christ and the Media', a
transcript of his 1976 London Lectures in Contemporary
Christianity, on 'the Media'. If you're a little fazed,
this may just change your life!
It so happens for the past months, here and
elsewhere, I have been wholly preoccupied with thinking and
talking about this reality of Christ in contra-distinction to
the fantasy so evident on every hand in our 20th Century
world. It might seem a little thing, but for me it has
been a rather tremendous experience, culminating in being here
in this church and speaking these words to you.
From what I have said, you know I am
convinced that hard and testing days lie ahead; the more so
because the prophecy about the false shepherds within the fold
will be amply fulfilled, indeed is being fulfilled already.
In the nature of things, my own part in these apocalyptic
prospects is strictly limited, and I cannot pretend that I
wish it were otherwise. How beautiful always is the end
of a journey! how exquisite the twilight when a day is ending!
How glorious are the closing bars of the Missa Solemnis,
triumphally echoing as they do, all that has gone before!
Even so, I felt induced to renew my purpose to serve and live
in the reality of Christ, and scribbled down as it were, my
operational orders for such time as remains to me in this
world. I venture now to repeat them in case they might
be helpful to any who hear or read what I have had to say in
these lectures. Here they are:
1 Seek endlessly for God
and for his hand in all creation, in the tiniest atom or
electron as in the wide expanse of the universe, in our own
innermost being as in all fellow-creatures. So, looking,
we find him, finding him we love him, and realise that in
every great word ever spoken or written we hear his voice, as
in every mean or sordid word we lose it, shutting ourselves
off from the glory of his utterance.
2 Live abstemiously.
Living otherwise - what Pascal calls 'licking the earth' -
imprisons us in a tiny dark dungeon of the ego, and involves
us in the pitiless servitude of the senses. So,
imprisoned and enslaved, we are cut off from God and from the
light of his love.
3 Love and consider all
men and women as brothers and sisters, caring for them exactly
as we should for Jesus himself if we had the inexpressible
honour of ministering to him.
4 Read the Bible and
associated literature, especially mystical works like the
Metaphysical Poets and The Cloud of Unknowing. These are
the literature of the Kingdom proclaimed in the New Testament;
words which became flesh and have dwelt among us, full of
grace and truth. Who would live in a new country and not
bother to study its literature? I would add here an
extra little codicil particularly my own: Love laughter, which
sounds loudly as heaven's gates swing open, and dies away as
they shut.
Finally:
5 Know Jesus and follow
his Way, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, whithersoever it may lead;
through pleasant pastures, over formidable hills, into sloughs
and along the valley of the Shadow of Death itself, but always
with the light of the celestial city, not just in prospect,
but in one's very eye. Thereby we may learn to live and
learn to die.
Thus fortified, we can laugh at the media in Rabelais, in the person of
Panurge, laughed at the antics of
carnal men; as Cervantes, in the person of Don Quixote,
laughed at the antics of crusading men; as Shakespeare, in the
person of Sir John Falstaff, laughed at the antics of mortal
men.....
