Reflections on God … Man … Life
I saw Voyage of the Dawn Treader last night. In preparation for it, I watched The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian earlier this week. It’s a great way to fill a week. Watching these films took me back to the first time I read The Chronicles of Narnia. They were actually some of the last Lewis works I tackled, probably because I wasn’t attracted to the idea of spending my time with children’s books. Yet, once… Read more »
In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a senior devil—Screwtape—gives advice to a junior devil—Wormwood—under his tutelage. Reading this “advice” provides excellent insight into how God works in our lives. For instance, on the subject of prayer, what might a devil say? Here’s one possibility: Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them… Read more »
Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not [as some modern people think] a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought… Read more »
I first read The Screwtape Letters more than 35 years ago. This little book remains one of C. S. Lewis’s most fascinating ventures. He puts himself into the place of a senior devil named Screwtape, who writes advice to a junior devil called Wormwood. It’s a witty piece of writing and its popularity continues today. In fact, if one had to trace the beginning of Lewis’s emergence into the public consciousness, one must begin with Screwtape. Even Time magazine recognized… Read more »
More insight from C. S. Lewis: People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into… Read more »
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was “The sort of person who is always snooping round to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.” And I’m afraid that is the sort of idea that the word Morality raises in a good many people’s minds: something that interferes, something that stops you having a good… Read more »
We’ve never seen men and women as they were intended to be. We’ve never seen animals the way they were before the Fall. We see only marred remnants of what once was. Likewise, we’ve never seen nature unchained and undiminished. We’ve only seen it cursed and decaying. Yet even now we see a great deal that pleases and excites us, moving our hearts to worship. If the “wrong side” of Heaven can be so beautiful, what will the right side… Read more »