Life in the Slow Lane

An interesting time in the beautiful city of Ely, where Lucy and I are helping lead an Engaged Encounter Weekend.

The spring is sprung, the gardens are lovely, and it’s great to be alive, especially around one of the most glorious Cathedrals in the world. Who am I, to be alive in such a place on a spring day such as this?

Yet, as my old training incumbent used to say, every silver lining has a cloud. The cloud here is the unavailability of a fast data network my dongle can access through T-Mobile. All I can get is a strong but utterly, pathetically slow GPRS network. So out goes any notion of a film review on Michael Caine’s latest, because I couldn't conceive of moving video files around at this connection speed. I suddenly am brought hard up against the reality of life at last century’s connection speeds. Uploading a modest snail takes almost 10 minutes!! O Life how short, Eternity How long!

And I just wonder whether, among other reactions to the current depression, the government might care to consider upgrading the infrastructure of this country à la Singapore. Fast free data for all. This would stimulate business, commerce, life, industry, social development. It would be comparatively cheap, certainly compared to some of the things money has been lavished on just recently. And some people would find such a plan at least as effective an investment for the future as paying out plushy six figure annual pensions for Fred the Shred and his layabout incompetent chums.

Any merit?

Ely in the Spring

In Ely with Lucy to help present another Engaged Encounter weekend for 14 couples preparing for marriage. Just in case anyone should think less modern societies always get marriage and family right, it was interesting to note (in the Great Missenden curry place) a story in the Sunday Mirror about a Bulgarian farmer who got fed up with his wife’s infertility and swapped her for a goat. Now if Cardinal Wolsey, brainy and ambitious as he was, had had the native wit to come up with that one, the course of history could have been very different...

One interesting C. S. Lewis quotation caught my eye this evening, after someone had asked about the difference between loving someone and being in love:

What we call “being in love” is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty. Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling.
The promise of marriage, made when I am in love, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way He might as well promise never to have a headache or always to feel hungry.
Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go. But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense — love as distinct from “being in love” — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. “Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity; this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.

It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run being in love was the explosion that started it.