a brutal teacher

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."

C.S.Lewis

There are times in one's life that are deserving of special remembrance. Times when our life's narrative took an unexpected turn and shocked us into a silent reverence or shuddered revulsion.

How does one mark these passages? Ought one mark these passages? The good experiences become shrouded in magical memory, taking on mythical wondrousness through the filter of time's passage. The bad experiences are shrouded in a different magic, that of the power of repression. We layer them in forgetfulness in the hope that it will offer a measure of shelter from the frigid blasts of cold reality these harsh lessons proved to be.

We have a saying back home... Let me write it the way it sounds when one of my countrymen would say it aliud. "ats baitter felt than telt." This Ullans sentence would be translated into English as: "It is better experienced than explained."

My belief system is better experienced than explained. As is an understanding of my marriage or my ministry, or my life.

The education offered by an erudite experience is worth much for the discerning pupil. Unfortunately discerning pupils tend to be in short supply in this world.

My query this afternoon is if gentle experiences are as instructive as brutal ones? I so long to enter a semester or two of gentle instruction by tutors who wear kid's gloves and handle me with exquisite care. But I worry that such lessons might not prove instructive. That such experiences are merely the vacation times between terms of intense learning.

What do you think? Do you think? Should we think such thoughts?