Footnote to all Prayers, C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis

"Footnote to All Prayers"

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

Happy (belated ) Birthday C.S. Lewis!! 29th of November

His face to shine upon you

THE Lord bless you

and keep you:

The Lord make His face to shine upon you,

and be gracious unto you:

The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,

and give you peace.

~Numbers 6: 24-26

In preparation for a "Deep Church Theology" group that we'll be having in about a month, I've been re-reading the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.  In it,  Lewis makes the wonderful, obvious, wise, and often forgotten, point that our days are not "our own," and that every moment of our lives are not, really, "our own."  We do not create time, we can not make a minute longer than 60 seconds, we cannot make a day longer than 24 hours.  It is all gift.  We go through most of our days under the illusion that we do have control of them.  In the midst of coasting through a rather ordinary day, we can be shocked into deeper awareness by tragedy and sadness.   In the midst of a rather hum drum day, we can see the sun shining gloriously over a field - and we remember that we are but the created, not the creator.

The more that we can cultivate the practice of gratitude for all that we are and all that we have, the better and richer our lives may be.  The more that we can accept the blessings that the Lord has shown us, the deeper and more abundant our lives may be.

May we each accept the blessings of this day, and respond with gratitude for them.

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey

Christianity Is Not One More Bit Of Good Advice

Here's a quote from C.S. Lewis to chew on a bit!



"If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference."

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1943)

Hat tip to Creedal Christian:
Creedal Christian: Christianity Is Not One More Bit Of Good Advice

Remembering John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis - November 22, 1963

C.S. Lewis

John F. Kennedy

45 years ago today, John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis died. Two of my heroes and inspirations died on the same day. My own interest in politics, and faith, and writing, and justice were all impacted by these two individuals, and I am quite surprised that I hadn't noticed until this evening that they died on the same day. Though I was born a few years after their deaths, I remember them fondly, and am thankful for their presence among us and their legacies.

~ The Rev. Peter M. Carey

God will make us good because He loves us

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good,
but that God will make us good because He loves us;
just as the roof of a sunhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright,
but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.

~C.S.Lewis (1898-1963)

hat tip goes to Frank Logue over at Irenic Thoughts...

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In the end a sort of quietness, C.S. Lewis

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been–if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you–you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.

~C.S. Lewis

hat-tip TitusOneNine

Birthday today of C.S. Lewis, Lousia May Alcott, and Madeleine L'Engle

Three of my favorite authors all have their birthdays today, C.S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott and Madeleine L'Engle. In their own ways, each of these authors have informed my understanding and helped to form me as a person. Recently, I have been thinking much about C.S. Lewis in part, I think because we purchased two wardrobes when we moved into our house. Wardrobes always remind me of C.S. Lewis's wonderful book, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" in which the wardrobe was an entry point into the magical land of Narnia, so I remember C.S. Lewis today along with authors who shared his birthday, Louisa May Alcott and Madeleine L'Engle

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey

From Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac"

It's the birthday of C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis, (books by this author) born in Belfast (1898), who grew up an Anglican, but he found religion cold and boring. He preferred the Irish, Norse, and Greek myths he read in storybooks. He created an imaginary world called Boxen and wrote stories about it. He said, "My two chief literary pleasures [were] 'dressed animals' and 'knights in armour.' As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats."

He became a teacher at Oxford, where he taught literature and mythology, and it was there that he met J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Christian, and they would take long walks around the Oxford grounds, debating the existence of God. The morning after one of those walks, Lewis went with his brother to the zoo. He said, "When we set out [for the zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion."

Lewis went on to become a prominent Christian apologist in the world, recording a series of radio lectures about Christianity, broadcast during World War II. People gathered around their radios to listen to him during bombing raids. At the same time, Lewis was taking evacuee children from London into his house, and they all seemed poorly educated and unimaginative to him.

So he began thinking about how he could give contemporary children what he had gotten from the fairy tales he read when he was a child. One day, one of the evacuee children asked him what was inside the big wardrobe in his house, and that gave him an idea for a story about four children — named Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmund — who are staying at a country house during World War II when they discover a secret doorway in the back of an old wardrobe that leads to a land called Narnia. The first of seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950). Today, the Narnia books still sell about a million copies a year