Into the Lenten Desert: 2) "How Did We Get Here: Why We Need the Medieval Masters" by Dr. Jason Baxter

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty comes from…—my country, a place where I ought to have been born.”

Those lines are from C. S. Lewis’ novel Till We Have Faces. The scene is between two sisters Orual and Psyche, the speaker. Set in the ancient world, Psyche has been chosen to be a human sacrifice to the god of the sacred Mountain where she will be tied till the god—or possibly the beasts (Orual’s fear) take her.

Psyche with a mystical frame of mind looks forward to the encounter with the god. Oruel who has imbibed a rationalistic form of Greek philosophy doesn’t understand at all and, in a sense, thinks her sister quite mad.

Mystics have, perhaps always been a bit misunderstood, but never so much as they are in the rationalistic, technological, materialistic era in which we live. Ours is a disenchanted cosmos where the mystic’s cosmos is quite enchanted.

In this session, Dr. Baxter asks, “How Did We Get Here?: Why We Need the Medieval Masters.”