I was cleaning my office, looking through all the papers and found lots of stuff I didn't even know anymore I had. See what you can make out of it.
Transformation
Till We Have Faces (by C.S. Lewis)
a modern telling of the legend of Cupid and Psyche
The principal character of this novel is Orual, the Queen of Glome, who was an unwanted and unloved daughter of the ruling King. She has two sisters who are both more attractive then she. In fact, so great his/her ugliness that Orual hides her face behind a veil. But as the Queen, Orual is strong-willed, independent, and successful in her own way. Though served selflessly by her ministers, tutor, bodyguard, servants, and others, she is constantly critical of them. She even keeps a notebook of complaints is a room and about everyone around her, including her two sisters. At the end of the novel she reads her litany of complaints to the gods.
As she begins to read, rebuking everyone around her, for the first time she hears her own authentic voice speaking: "There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice." When she concludes, only silence prevails and there is no response. But suddenly she realises that "The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered." although the shortcomings, foibles, and ingratitude she had ascribed to others were nothing but aspects of her limited self. When she realised this, she came to know herself for the first time.
Orual now had a face. Thus, she could come face to face with the gods. She demonstrates this simultaneous discovery in spiritual awakening.
In the words of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich:
Our passing life which we have here does not know in our senses what our self is, but we know in our faith. And when we know and see, truly and clearly, what our self is, then we shall truly and clearly see and know our Lord God in the fullness of joy.
In short, Orual was nothing but the complaining self; it was not a conscious, deliberate choice, but this was her naked reality. She could neither negate this self nor transcend it. Rather in a fully acknowledging her nature, her karmic evil, a transformation occurred, enabling her to come face to face with the gods..
