Weeks 3 & 4 with Mr. Lewis

Ah! I told you all I'm running a little behind... sorry I didn't get around to posting this last week! I've been reading The Screwtape Letters in bits and pieces during my lunch breaks over the past few weeks. Here's one little passage that stuck out to me:

"And since they need change, [God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm..."

There were many amazing passages from the book, but this one really grabbed a hold of me. I love how he writes about the Rhythm of life... with seasons of change and seasons of permanence. As always, he has such an incredible way of putting things into words! I'm not going to give any more quotes from the book, mainly because it really needs to be read and taken as a whole, cohesive message. I found a commentary on the book that will give you a short overview and hopefully entice you to pick it up for yourself:

"For those who don’t know the book, the setup is this: Screwtape himself is a senior devil in the “lowerarchy of Our Father Below.” The letters are directed to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter on Earth, working on one of us— whom they call a “patient.” The letters themselves follow Wormwood’s efforts to tempt the patient, who has (to Screwtape’s “grave displeasure”) by the second letter, become a Christian. The goal of damnation is to “secure his soul forever” — to turn him against God (to Screwtape, “the Enemy” and “our Oppressor”) so that on entering Eternity, the man will become “a brimfull living chalice of despair and horror and astonishment which you can raise to your lips as often as you please.” It turns out that to the devils, we humans are “primarily food.”

I would not, “Hell forbid,” give away the ending of the book, but it will do no harm to say that along the way, the course of temptations recommended by Screwtape follows the three great sources of corruption we humans fall prey to—the World, the Flesh, and finally, the Spirit itself. Cowardice, vanity, lust, ambition, gluttony, spiritual pride—they’re all here, and all in the context of one human being’s search for knowledge of God’s will in the midst of the horror of World War II.

The great lesson Lewis is trying to smuggle into our minds (camouflaged in humor to get around all the defenses erected by Screwtape and his cohorts) is the essential Christian doctrine - what he called elsewhere "mere" Christianity. Chiefly, it is that god is very much alive, that He loves us in ways we do not understand, and that He want us to act from our own wills in accordance with His." -Richard S. Sandor

I absolutely loved this book, it was brilliantly written and incredibly thought provoking.
Alright... I'll try to post Lewis updates from week 5 as soon as I can. Stay tuned!
{xo. Jarah}

week 2 with Mr. Lewis

Happy Sunday everybody! I thought I would start this week off with a favorite quote:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably the earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing..."

{Brooke Fraser wrote this song based on the above quote. I love her music and I think she did an amazing job with the lyrics... if you have a minute, check it out}.

Alright, now off that rabbit trail and on to other highlights from the week...
(Mere Christianity... pages 90- 177).

"But, as I said before, 'the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.' Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the whole basis of a whole life."

"In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that --and therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison--you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God... For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."

"To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God."

"The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbour; act as if you did... When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him."

"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of."

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next."

"Thus if you have really handed yourself over to [God], it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside of you."

"... in Christianity God is not a static thing--not even a person--but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost a kind of dance... The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is not other way to the happiness for which we were made."

"We may be content to remain what we call 'ordinary people": but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility: it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania, it is obedience."

"The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose."

"The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose you life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."

Wow, sorry that ended up being SO long... there were many many other quotes I could have included. I finished Mere Christianity this week... such an incredible book. My head is still swimming with all of the different things presented in its pages. 6 more books to go... tune in next week for excerpts from The Screwtape Letters.

{xo. jarah}

a summer with Mr. Lewis...

... C.S. Lewis, that is. I always try to take on some sort of theme for my summer reading. This year I'm attempting to read through The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. That's 7 books {Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, Miracles and A Grief Observed}, 746 pages... which does not sound like very much, but Mr. Lewis is intense. It seems like I have to stop to catch my breath after each paragraph... his writing style is so beautiful, but incredibly deep and thought provoking. That being said, it's probably going to take me all summer to finish those 746 pages. For the bookworm in me, that makes me sound like a bit of a wimp, but I'm seeking to understand and enjoy each page. So even if it's a bit of a crawl, I'm going to do it!

And I'm going to share some of my favorite quotes with you throughout the course of the summer. Here are some favorites from the past week (Mere Christianity... pages 5 -89):

"Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better."

"We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man... There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake."

"It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not."

"Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect... Reality, in face, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up."

"God created things which had free will... If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only that that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."

"Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other... God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."

"The Central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start."

"The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man."

"[God] wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but he also wants every bit of intelligence we have..."

"I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare... I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him..."

More to come next week...
{xo. jarah}