I find it both startling and sad that you never experienced joy as a child that was so beyond description that it still echos in the present.
Hi, Zaffiroborant,
I had long since quoted the words of Wordsworth and agreed with them. I’ll add more of his
“Ode on Intimations of Immortality”:
"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;–
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Code:
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,–
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong:
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng.
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday;–
Thou child of joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!
Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel–I feel it all.
O evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning
This sweet May-morning;
And the children are culling
On every side
In a thousand valleys far and wide
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm:–
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
–But there’s a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look’d upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
I certainly did experience that kind of “joy” as a youngster and a child. So have my children, though I didn’t observe that they were as excited about going on hikes as I had been as a child.
But there is a difference between knowledgeable joy–the joy of really understanding our own personality better through having “found it out” by being confronted with needs to make changes, and the joy of interacting with others and watching them overcome challenges in their lives and realize that Christ is helping them do that–than the joy of a child who is delighting in the world of nature and a world to be explored.
I think Gerard Manley Hopkins captured that understanding of “knowledgeable joy” in several of his poems such as “Patience”.
I also think that William Shakespeare showed the difference in works such as “Hamlet”.
So I think great thinkers have explored the difference between “innocent joy” and “knowledgeable joy” and have expressed that there is a difference.
Hopefully, as Wordsworth intimated, we move back during the course of our lives to delighting in nature as we did as a child, but part of being able to do that is when we recognize that “the world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers–little we see in Nature that is ours.”
Knowing Christ can help us do that. Then we can become “like a little child” and experience the “newness of life” that Christ described was a part of being “born again.”
That would be death like hair and nail cells, right.
If you think hair and nail cells are just exactly like an egg cell ready to follow the genetic course of its DNA capability to form a life with all its complexities and miracles of the formation of life in the womb, then I guess I see things differently. I think the death of an egg cell is a much different kind of death than the death of a skin cell or a hair cell or a nail cell. I think a woman would also think that there is quite a difference, based on having observed what they go through. (I don’t know that that topic needs to be explored in any more depth, to not make anyone uncomfortable.)
Have a nice day, Zaffiroborant and Jay53.
You have no evidence that it would be comparative to a 5 or 7 year old. Just as I don’t have any evidence that it would not. You are making assumptions.
But, that still doesn’t support your theory that Eve couldn’t have children unless she sinned.
You apologize for asking “pointed questions”, however, as I said, they were NOT questions, despite the fact that you put a question mark on the end. You falsely ascribed a belief to me that I have never expressed or implied and then had the audacity to wish me peace and a happy Easter. That is your passive-aggressiveness at its best.