Potterville Nation

Here are a few excerpts from the article "Potterville Nation" which Pastor Williams mentioned on Sunday:

Our lives seldom attain to any glory, not here. Only a few men can be war heroes, like Harry Bailey, or business magnates, like Sam Wainwright. The rest of us, just about everybody, will face the choice that the protagonist, George Bailey, faced all his life. We may recognize the duties that bind us to this spouse, these children, these neighbors, this family history, this utterly ordinary place called Bedford Falls, or we may go our own way, and pursue those objects of appetite that we commonly call “our dreams.”

Potterville is, of course, where we now live. I make no special claim to holiness here. I live in Potterville too, and have helped to make it what it is. But I do notice it. Potterville is a place of abandonment.

We form romantic attachments, we play house. Then we break the attachments, and abandon the house. No harm done, except to our capacity to love, and to cleave only unto one person, till death do us part. We marry, and have children, and abandon the children to the care of strangers. We leave town, not to become a citizen of another town, but to become a citizen of no town at all, and abandon the work of local government to a few meddlers nearby and an army of bureaucrats from far away... Mass entertainment has degraded minds and souls everywhere, and we sigh, and say that it has always been that way, although something tells us that our grandfathers and grandmothers made their own entertainment, with their kin and their neighbors. But those cultural habits have been abandoned, too... Since Potterville is a place of abandonment, the churches follow suit, and abandon their mission. That makes everybody happy. The people of Potterville want to divorce, dispose of their children, and follow their dreams. So the churches avert their eyes, demurely, when their parishioners divorce—for the churches are old ladies in lavender, and must observe certain proprieties. They fairly encourage the people to dispose of their children. Doctrine? Catechism? Confessions? Preaching must submit to the times: the Potterville Times.

No, Bedford Falls cannot satisfy. Nor can your spouse, your children, your neighbors, your body, your anything on earth. But what do we seek, leaving and leaving again? Consider it, next time you are in the Potterville International Airport, to be found wherever planes depart. For Potterville Airport is a peculiar place in this regard, as George Bailey learned, though he had to suffer to learn it. All its planes come from Potterville, and land in Potterville. He who would valiant be, let him turn to the ordinary business at hand. The true pilgrimage is here.

Read the whole article here: Potterville Nation by Anthony Esolen.

Three Kinds of Men

My husband Joe sent me this article last week. It's an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s short essay “Three Kinds of Men” from his collection of essays 'Present Concerns':

“There are three kinds of people in the world.

The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them.

In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them—the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society—and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier’s or a schoolboy’s life, into time “on parade” and “off parade,” “in school” and “out of school.”

But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them “to live is Christ.” These people have got rid of the tiresome business of adjusting the rival claims of Self and God by the simple expedient of rejecting the claims of Self altogether. The old egoistic will has been turned round, reconditioned, and made into a new thing. The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, belongs also to them, for they are His.

And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on …

The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort—it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms the Mercy will receive us.”