Emotions in storytelling

 Heart or feelings or emotions are central to good storytelling, or maybe to use Forster's word, plot-telling. Consider this quote, with the emphasis I've given it:

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot.

- E. M. Forster,  The Aspects of a Novel. (1956).

on Jesus' need for the Holy Spirit in his life and ministry

 Quite a while back, I came across an article about the nature of the Holy Spirit's work in Jesus' life while he was here on earth; it seemed well worth reading, but I didn't have the time then. I finally got around to reading it. It's excellent. I have pasted the key thought below, but I highly recommend the article.

... Jesus needed to live a perfectly sinless life in the power and by the grace of the Holy Spirit. It was not sufficient for Him--as the second Adam and representative of a new humanity--to merely live according to His Divine nature. What we need as fallen men is a human Redeemer who would gain a human holiness for His people and would die a human death in their place. As was true for Adam so it was for Jesus--the Last Adam. The Savior needed the Holy Spirit to sustain and empower Him to obey His Father, even to the point of death on the cross. (emphasis mine)

The author points out that few theologians have written about this particular aspect of the Trinity's interaction, but Sinclair Ferguson and John Owen do have some discussions of it. The author summarizes those, as well as R. A. Finlayson's thoughts. I was unfamiliar with him.

excerpts on "Language" from Lost in Translation

No, I’m no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves.

***

The very places where language is at its most conventional, where it should be most taken for granted, are the places where I feel the prick of artifice.

***

Telling a joke is like doing a linguistic pirouette. If you fall flat, it means not only that you don’t have the wherewithal to do it well but also that you have misjudged your own skill, that you are fool enough to undertake something you can’t finish – and that lack of self-control or self-knowledge is a lack of grace.

***

So each language has its own distinctive music, and even if one doesn’t know its separate components, one can pretty quickly recognize the propriety of the patterns in which the components are put together, their harmonies and discords.

***

When I speak Polish now, it is infiltrated, permeated, and inflected by the English in my head. Each language modifies the other, crossbreeds with it, fertilizes it. Each language makes the other relative. Like everybody, I am the sum of my languages – the language of my family and childhood, and education and friendship, and love, and the larger, changing world – though perhaps I tend to be more aware than most of the fractures between them, and of the building blocks.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (p. 74, 106, 118, 123, 273). 

And, a thought from this immigrant child, concerning writing "home"...

There is no way, I know, that I can convey the nature of my new life to her, and besides, she is one of the many affections that are only causing me the pain of nostalgia, and that I therefore try to numb or extract from myself like some gnawing scruple, or splinter lodged in a thumb.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (p. 23).