Baked Beans and Bundles

If ever there was an excellent observation about good food, this is it. Elizabeth Goudge just vindicated my vocation here in these two sentences:

It is possible that good food had been as instrumental in accomplishing the spiritual salvation of Jo Isaacson as the Hollys' kindness. Thoughts of suicide do not flourish in an aroma of baked beans, and belief in God is strengthened, not weakened, by a well-cooked ham...

I believe it was Catherine Marshall that invented the term, "my bundle." "Bundles" are the people that God puts in my path. You know, the darling individuals that pop up frequently in your days (and sometimes minutes) and become "yours." I love Mrs Holly's matter-of-fact attitude toward Mr Isaacson, clearly her "bundle," in the remainder of this passage:

...She'd not had an easy time with Mr. Isaacson; and, if her compassion had not be strengthened by the conviction, shared with Mr. Holly, that in a world gone mad with destruction everything that could be salvaged must be salvaged, bones and chocolate paper and immortal souls, it is possible that after a reasonable time had passed she might have looked about her for another lodging for him and given herself a bit of rest from those eccentricities in Mr. Isaacson that she did not particularly appreciate... She wished she could push Mr Isaacson on to some other woman to look after; it was, she felt strongly, some other woman's turn now; but she was determined not to do it until she could find a woman capable of carrying on Mr. Isaacson's rehabilitation as expertly as she was doing herself. And then, as she would say to Mr. Holly, we can't pick and choose in this world, and if the Lord had seen fit to send her Mr. Isaacson to care for, rather than a nice little boy and girl, she'd best get on with it...

Elizabeth Goudge, The Castle on the Hill (pgs. 247-248)

Ahhh!

CS Lewis did it again. My thinking is fixed again. Reading Mr Lewis' arguments is like receiving a mental chiropractic adjustment. This particular passage from The Four Loves recently walloped a huge curvy crick out of my philosophy:

It remains certainly true that all natural loves can be inordinate. Inordinate does not mean "insufficiently cautious." Nor does it mean "too big." It is not a quantitative term. It is probably impossible to love any human being simply "too much." We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy. But even this must be refined upon. Otherwise we shall trouble some who are very much on the right road but alarmed because they cannot feel towards God so warm a sensible emotion as they feel for the earthly Beloved. It is much to be wished--at least I think so--that we all, at all times, could. We must pray that this gift should be given us. But the question whether we are loving God or the earthly Beloved "more" is not, so far as concerns our Christian duty, a question about the comparative intensity of two feelings. The real question is, which (when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose, or put first? To which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?

Lewis, The Four Loves, pg. 170-171