C.S. Lewis

I have been on a kick of reading books about faith/religion/Christianity lately. I read "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton, which is an autobiographical book about how he grew up and eventually became a Catholic, and then a Trappist monk. In the end it really got me thinking about the value of contemplation in my faith, and how that can help me to see things and desire things that God might want for me more than what I want for myself when I am not trying to "tune in" to God much.

I have read a lot of C.S. Lewis in the last couple of weeks as well. He has a lot of short little books! First I read "The Problem of Pain", then "The Great Divorce", then "A Grief Observed". All of them were really good. I had to return the first two to the library already, but here are some good quotes from "A Grief Observed", which were journal reflections he had after his wife of only a few years died of cancer. It really tested his own beliefs about pain, which he had written about in "The Problem of Pain", but also showed he was human too!

"And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness."

"Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously.' Apparently it's like that. Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or a Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."

"Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he's had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he'll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has 'got over it.' But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again."

"For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives --to both, but perhaps especially to the woman--a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted."

"To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees."

--A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis