This book by Mark Vernon is a fascinatingly erudite, mindblowingly holistically-applicable and thoroughly thought-provoking exploration of the work of Owen Barfield - probably the least well-known of the main Oxford literary threesome of the inklings, though the other two better known members of this club both cited him as of key inspiration early on in their artistic and intellectual careers.* In it, we're taken on an invigorating mystical romp across the history of an element absolutely central to the metaphysical efficacy of this predominant world religion: that all good, true and proper parts of one's life have their root and essence in the shared life of God - something as bafflingly simple as endlessly complex, a perennial truism that lies at the heart-core of all religions, if not in doctrine then I believe in pragmatic reality; yet it's a notion the sincere realisation of doesn't seem to have been very far up the pastoral or otherwise priority lists of most Christian leaders across the history of the Church and its faith.
Barfield's work is incredibly potent, drawing on language, psychology, social and historical and cultural considerations, philosophy and poetry in its purest sense - Vernon re-examines the person and teachings of Christ through the lens of Barfield's analysis of said mystical truth; and the theological and practical out-worked upshots herein are massive. World-shaking. The raw powers of inner reflectivity and the human imagination, when enthralled to True Goodness & Beauty, as given in the gospels, is incredible - but to see the scope of such raging paradoxes in their fullness one must accept the mystical element for what it is: once discovered and thusly inhabited, it is not something, I don't think, one can easily then just step back from, if at all, as it is of a profundity, breadth, joy, seriousness, playfulness, creativity and noisy silence that to enter the psychospiritual headspace, the lived consciousness talked about by Christ and Barfield and Vernon, utterly transforms everything about who you think you are and how you think you can be in the world. Which shouldn't sound like much of a surprise, as this is the core promise of Christianity as a faith: but I hope it doesn't sound like a callous barb to say that my gradual apprehension of my lived experience of this fact, the secret hiding in plain sight in Christ's apostolic succession, has been far more like the 'second birth' of a transformative, actual conversion than the course of personally walking with God that led to my being baptised as a pre-teen. Can you become a Christian twice? I'm not even sure the answer to that matters. I've been very lucky to have grown up with such exposure to the faith, but in all the honesty of my heart and mind - I feel luckier to have meandered to the extents I have on that walk so that Jesus found me all the more truly and powerfully somewhere on the border-lands.
I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in consciousness and the human experience, regardless of what credence you may or may not lend to the Christian faith. Vernon's writing is accessible, entertaining and illuminating, and while readers who come at this book from within a church may find it opens up some strange wondrous new doors, it may also be for you very hard going because the perspective of gospel reality in here is so wild: and for that reason I think readers who remain skeptical of most organized forms of Christian community and faith will find this a refreshingly original, and starkly eye-opening take on the whole matter. I'm going to add some of Owen Barfield's stuff onto my reading pile, then probably read this again relatively soon...
* These being of course J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis - and it shows.
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