Brazil

Images of a Busy Week in Brazil

humming bird

Botanic Gardens - Rio de Janeiro

Costa Brava Restaurant

We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

Mantiqueira Sierra

Rio-Paris Flight

Sunset and First Evening Star

A Brazilian Breakfast and a Short Story of Redemption

“If you had asked medieval writers 'Why do you not make up a brand-new story of your own?' I think they might have replied (in effect) 'Surely we are not yet reduced to that?' Spin something out of one's own head when the world teems with so many noble deeds, wholesome examples, pitiful tragedies, strange adventures, and merry jests which have never yet been been written before? - - - ”
- - -
It was six o’cclok of a Sunday morning and the sun was rising behind the Pedra da Gavea no Rio de Janeiro.

We were at the Barra da Tijuca savouring a delicious Brazilian breakfast at a very nice hotel, which we could not afford if had to pay for it ourselves.

As the waiter approached with coffee and milk and gently served us, Paulo noticed his accent and said “you must be a Nordestino (from the Northeast of Brasil).”  When the waiter mentioned the region, Paulo replied “I am actually from the same area and I travelled in a caçuá (woven baskets which hangs over a horse’s back) through that region (the poorest of Brazil) when I was one month old.”

Adriana then said: “you have a beautiful name (Moses), a great leader of the people of Israel. “ He replied: “Yes, and I have a similar story.  When I was born I was swapped by mistake with another baby whose mother had a name similar to my mom.  Eight days later I was rescued and came home.  My grandfather a protestant Christian said to the family:  “there is only one name appropriate for him: Moses, because he was rescued from the hands of Pharaoh.”

“Now I am 32 years old and an elder in a protestant church here in Rio de Janeiro and am always preaching the good news of Jesus.”

 We said that we were also protestant Christians  - - - to which he was very happy to hear - left to help other customers and wished us a good breakfast.

The food seemed to taste even better, as we enjoyed it with tears of joy.  Can we start the Lord’s day in a more special way?

“God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” 1 Corinthians 1:27


“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal - - But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

Cheers,

Paulo and Adriana

It is Hard (to) Work in Rio

Blues Skies - From our Hotel



Blue skies smiling on me
Nothing but blue skies do I see
Blue birds singing a song
Nothing but blue skies from now on.

I never saw the sun shining so bright
When you're in love everythings right
Watching all the days hurrying by
When you're in love my how they fly


Those blue days all of them gone
And nothing but blue sky from now on

We Praise - Eindhoven- May 13, 2010

Images

A Special Day: Santa Cruz and Manchester CIty

Os Guerreiros do Arruda 

and the Boys in Blue

Valeu Esperar

After 25 Years

After 44 Years

The Ideal Woman - No Need of Children or Husband

A Quote in celebration of Mother's Day

 . . .

I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she was naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her innermost spirit shone through her clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer's features as a lip or an eye.

But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

‘Is it?... is it?’ I whispered to my guide.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on Earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’

‘She seems to be... well, a person of particular importance?’

‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’

‘And who are these gigantic people… look! They’re like emeralds.. who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?’

‘Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.’

‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’

‘They are her sons and daughters.’

‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’

‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – every girl that met her was her daughter.’

‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.’

C.S. Lewis ~The Great Divorce, Chapter XII

A Special Gift: Discovering the Abilities of Children and Students

The importance of paying attention to the potential abilities of our children and students (even at an young age) – and encourage them in the right direction.

“I do not think there can be much doubt as to the genuine and lasting quality of Clive’s individual abilities.  He was born with the literary temperament, and we have to face that fact with all it implies  . . . [I]t is the maturity and originality of his literary judgments which is so unusual and surprising.  By an unerring instinct he detects first rate quality in literary workmanship, and the second rate does not interest him in any way.  Now you will observe that these endowments, in themselves remarkable, do not facilitate the work of the teacher  . . . The ideal pupil for University Scholarship purposes is a boy gifted with memory, receptiveness, patience, and strict attention to grammatical accuracy . . .  The fact is that a critical and original faculty, whatever may be its promise for the future, is as much a hindrance as a help in the drudgery of early classical training.  Clive has ideas of his own, and is not at all the sort of boy to be made a mere receptive machine  . . ." W.T. Kirkpatrick (1915, writing to CSL’s father)

CSL and his father Albert Lewis (1918)

Photo courtesy or the Marion E. Wade Collection, Wheaton College, Illinois.

C.S. Lewis: My Life's Journey - David Payne

If you have an hour and half to spare and would like to see a great presentation click on the youtube below:

Be prepared to think, laugh, and cry.

What a Journey

According Bruce Edwards “ Lewis was a man who lived his life before Pilate. That is to say, I believe Lewis carried out his daily tasks as teacher, citizen, and believer as one who knew he was always before a skeptical inquisitor"

Owen Barfield, Lewis' longtime friend and lifetime intellectual combatant, once declared that
"Somehow what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.” 

Enjoy

Quotes of Day: On Fame and Intolerance

“We are told that nothing so much beguiles those who have some natural excellence but are not yet perfected in virtue as the desire for fame.  It is a maxim from the Agricola of Tacitus; it will later blossom into Milton’s line about “that last infirmity of the noble mind.”  
CS Lewis The Discarded Image


“One sad result of making English Literature a ‘subject’ at schools and universities is that the reading of great authors is, from early years, stamped upon the minds of conscientious and submissive young people as something meritorious. When the young person in question is an agnostic whose ancestors were Puritans, you get a very regrettable state of mind. The Puritan conscience works on without the Puritan theology–like millstones grinding nothing; like digestive juices working on an empty stomach and producing ulcers. The unhappy youth applies to literature all the scruples, the rigorism, the self-examination, the distrust of pleasure, which his forebears applied to the spiritual life; and perhaps soon all the intolerance and self-righteousness.” 
CS Lewis An Experiment in Criticism

Christenwetenschapper als rolmodel - The Disinterested and Intentional Approach