Proverbs XVI:32

It is better to be patient than powerful; it is better to have self-control than to conquer a city.

It's the Thought that Counts

For all our offerings, whether of music or martyrdom, are like the intrinsically worthless present of a child, which a father values indeed, but values only for the intention.

- C. S. Lewis

The Judge of All Hearts

Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices...Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends.

- C. S. Lewis

Men of God

There is no one without faults, not even men of God. They are men of God not because they are faultless, but because they know their own faults, they strive against them, they do not hide them, and are ever ready to correct themselves.

- Mohandas Gandhi

Captivating

An evil man is held captive by his own sins; they are ropes that catch and hold him. He will die for lack of self-control; he will be lost because of his incredible folly.

- Proverbs 5: 22-23

Flame

To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.

- George MacDonald

Our Journey Home

The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God witholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and [place] an obstacle [against] our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bath or a football match have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasent inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

- C. S. Lewis

Dear Conscience and Will,

There is a thing wonderful and admirable in the parables, not readily grasped, but specially indicated by the Lord himself--their unintelligibility to the mere intellect. They are addressed to the conscience and not to the intellect, to the will and not to the imagination. They are strong and direct but not definite. They are not meant to explain anything, but to rouse a man to the feeling, 'I am not what I ought to be, I do not the thing I ought to do!' Many maundering interpretations may be given by the wise, with plentiful loss of labour, while the child who uses them for the necessity of walking in the one path will constantly receive light from them. The greatest obscuration of the words of the Lord, as of all true teachers, comes from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them. Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. It was not for our understandings, but our will, that Christ came. He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness.

- George MacDonald

Lewis and MacDonald Part V: Those Who Seek Find

Moved by a desire to change the subject, I asked why
the Solid People, since they were full of love, did not go
down into Hell to rescue the Ghosts. Why were they
content simply to meet them on the plain? One would
have expected a more militant charity.

'Ye will understand that better, perhaps before ye go,'
said he. 'In the meantime, I must tell ye they have come
further for the sake of the Ghosts than ye can understand.
Every one of us lives only to journey further and further
into the mountains. Every one of us has interrupted that
journey and retracted immeasurable distances to come
down today on the mere chance of saving some Ghost.
Of course it is also a joy to do so, but ye cannot blame us
for that! And it would be no use to come further even if it
were possible. The sane would do no good if they made
themselves mad to help madmen.'

'But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the
omnibus at all?'

'Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are
only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to
God, "Thy will be done," and to those whom God says,
in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose
it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No
soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever
miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is
opened.'

Lewis and MacDonald Part IV: The Subtlest of All the Snares

He was silent for a few minutes, and then began again.

'Ye'll understand, there are innumerable forms of this
choice. Sometimes forms that one hardly thought of at all
on Earth. There was a creature that came here not long ago
and went back - Sir Archibald they called him. In his
earthly life he'd been interested in nothing but Survival [i.e., Life After Death].
He'd written a whole shelf-full of books about it. He
began by being philosophical, but in the end he took up
Psychical Research. It grew to be his only occupation -
experimenting, lecturing, running a magazine. And trav-
elling too: digging out queer stories among Tibetan
lamas and being initiated into brotherhoods in Central
Africa. Proofs - and more proofs - and then more proofs
again - were what he wanted. It drove him mad if ever he
saw anyone taking an interest in anything else. He got
into trouble during one of your wars for running up and
down the country telling them not to fight because it
wasted a lot of money that ought to be spent on Research.
Well, in good time, the poor creature died and came here:
and there was no power in the universe would have pre-
vented him staying and going on to the mountains. But do
ye think that did him any good? This country was no use
to him at all. Everyone here had "survived" already.
Nobody took the least interest in the question. There was
nothing more to prove. His occupation was clean gone.
Of course if he would only have admitted that he'd mis-
taken the means for the end and had a good laugh at him-
self he could have begun all over again like a little child
and entered into joy. But he would not do that. He cared
nothing about joy. In the end he went away.'

'How fantastic!' said I.

'Do ye think so?' said the Teacher with a piercing
glance. 'It is nearer to such as you than ye think.
There have been men before now who got so interested in prov-
ing the existence of God that they came to care nothing
for God Himself...as if the good Lord had nothing to do
but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in
spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to
Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never
know a lover of books that with all his first editions and
signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an
organiser of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It
is the subtlest of all the snares.'

Lewis and MacDonald Part III: Heaven and Hell Are Only States of Mind?

'Is that not very hard, Sir?'

'I mean, that is the real sense of what they will say. In
the actual language of the Lost, the words will be differ-
ent, no doubt. One will say he has always served his
country right or wrong; and another that he has sacrificed
everything to his Art; and some that they've never been
taken in, and some that, thank God, they've always
looked after Number One, and nearly all, that, at least
they've been true to themselves.'

'And the Saved?'

'Ah, the Saved...what happens to them is best
described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when
they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they
look back, to have been a well; and where present experi-
ence saw only salt deserts, memory truthfully records
that the pools were full of water.'

'Then those people are right to say that Heaven and
Hell are only states of mind?'

'Hush,' he said sternly. 'Do not blaspheme. Hell is a
state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every
state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the crea-
ture within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end,
Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is real-
ity itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can
be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable
remains.'

'But there is a real choice after death? My Roman
Catholic friends would be surprised, for to them the souls in
Purgatory are already saved. And my Protestant friends
would like it no better, for they'd say that the tree lies as it falls.'

'They're both right, maybe. Do not fash yourself with
such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations
of choice and Time till you are beyond both. And ye were
not brought here to study such curiosities. What concerns
you is the nature of the choice itself: and that ye can watch
them making.'

'Well, Sir,' I said, 'That also needs explaining. What do
they choose, these souls who go back (I have yet seen no
others)? And how can they choose it?'

'Milton was right,' said my Teacher. 'The choice of
every lost soul can be expressed in the words "Better to
reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." There is always
something they insist on keeping even at the price of mis-
ery. There is always something they prefer to joy - that is,
to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that
would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was
sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life
it has a hundred fine names - Achilles' wrath and Corio-
lanus' grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-
Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.'

'Then is no one lost through the undignified vices, Sir?
Through mere sensuality?'

'Some are, no doubt. The sensualist, I'll allow ye,
begins by pursuing a real pleasure, though a small one.
His sin is the less. But the time comes on when, though
the pleasure becomes less and less and the craving fiercer
and fiercer, and though he knows that joy can never come
that way, yet he prefers to joy the mere fondling of unap-
peasable lust and would not have it taken from him. He'd
fight to death to keep it. He'd like well to be able to
scratch; but even when he can scratch no more he'd rather
itch than not.'

Lewis and MacDonald Part II: Heaven and Hell Work Backwards

'It depends on the way ye're using the words. If they
leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To
any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had bet-
ter not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye
understand.' (Here he smiled at me.) 'Ye can call it the
Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay
here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can
call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the
Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will
have been Hell even from the beginning.'

I suppose he saw that I looked puzzled, for presently
he spoke again.

'Son,' he said, 'ye cannot in your present state understand
eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the
Timeless he brought no message back. But ye can get some
likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they
are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley
but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those
who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all
their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to
have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They
say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make
up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will
work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.
And some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this
and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how
damnation will spread back and back into their past and
contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin
even before death. The good man's past begins to change so
that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the
quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to
his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is
why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the
twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say
"We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven," and the
Lost, "We are always in Hell." And both will speak truly.'

Lewis and MacDonald Part I: An Imagined Meeting

What follows is the first post in a series of excerpts from C. S. Lewis' novel The Great Divorce. These excerpts represent my favorite part of the book. The body of excerpts is a fictional account of Lewis meeting his "Master" "Teacher" for the first time. In reality, Lewis never met MacDonald during his natural life. If I remember right, MacDonald died before Lewis was born.

One thing that's so entertaining to me about this part of the story is that this meeting must have been something that Lewis desperately longed for in vain. When faced with the impossibility of a real meeting, Lewis made use of his vivid imagination, sharp intellect, unique scope of theology, and avid reverence of MacDonald and the quality of his writings to conjure up his idea of what a meeting between the two might be like. The other, more significant, part of this excerpt that makes it my favorite is the treatment of the topic that the two characters are discussing: Heaven and Hell. Those two places, after all, are what the book is primarily about.

The following dialogue takes place after Lewis, who's character began the story by riding a bus out of Hell (a.k.a. the grey town) and onto the plains of Heaven, begins to feel the effects of the ultimate reality of Heaven on his shadowy Ghostly form. Lewis' character clumsily and sometimes painfully stumbles around the plain for some time before coming face to face with the guide assigned to him to aid in the journey to the mountains of "Deep Heaven", George MacDonald. Without further delay, here is excerpt I:

'I don't know you, Sir,' said I, taking my seat beside
him.

'My name is George,' he answered. 'George Mac-
Donald.'

'Oh!' I cried. 'Then you can tell me! You at least will
not deceive me.' Then, supposing that these expressions
of confidence needed some explanation, I tried, trembling
to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I
tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead
Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being
then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the
first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the
New Life. I started to confess how long that Life had
delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly
and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom
had more than an accidental connexion with it, how hard
I had tried not to see that the true name of the quality
which first met me in his books is Holiness. He laid his
hand on mine and stopped me.

'Son,' he said, 'Your love - all love - is of inexpressible
value to me. But it may save precious time' (here he sud-
denly looked very Scotch) 'if I inform ye that I am already
well acquianted with these biographical details. In fact, I
have noticed that your memory misleads you in one or
two particulars.'

'Oh!' said I, and became still.
'Ye had started,' said my Teacher, 'to talk of something
more profitable.'

'Sir,' said I, 'I had almost forgotten it, and I have no
anxiety about the answer now, though I have still a
curiosity. It is about these Ghosts. Do any of them stay?
Can they stay? Is any real choice offered them? How
do they come to be here?'

'Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with
your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not
to mention Jeremy Taylor.'

'The name is familiar, Sir, but I'm afraid I've forgotten
what it means.'

'It means that the damned have holidays - excursions,
ye understand.'

'Excursions to this country?'

'For those that will take them. Of course most of the
silly creatures don't. They prefer taking trips back to
Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye
call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership
of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye
get what's called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their
children. Or literary ghosts hang about public libraries to
see if anyone's still reading their books.'

'But if they come here they can really stay?'

'Aye. Ye'll have heard that the emperor Trajan did.'

'But I don't understand. Is judgement not final? Is
there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?'

The Classical, Ancient, Unoriginal Ethic of Christ

A Christian who understands his own religion laughs when unbelievers expect to trouble him by the assertion that Jesus uttered no command which had not been anticipated by the Rabbis - few, indeed, which cannot be paralleled in classical, ancient Egyptian, Ninevite, Babylonian, or Chinese texts. We have long recognized that truth with rejoicing. Our faith is not pinned on a crank.

- C. S. Lewis

Gratitude

Double major crazy mad props to the lady of the house for the will and skill to meld the best of two templates together and make this blog the best that it can be: Respect.

There is no Business Parallel

It is a very small matter to you whether the man give you your rights or not; it is life or death to you whether or not you give him his. Whether he pay you what you count his debt or no, you will be compelled to pay him all you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he you a million, you must pay him the pound whether he pay you the million or not; there is no business-parallel here. If, owing you love, he gives you hate, you, owing him love, have yet to pay it. A love unpaid you, a justice undone you, a praise withheld from you, a judgment passed on you without judgment, will not absolve you of the debt of a love unpaid, a justice not done, a praise withheld, a false judgment passed: these uttermost farthings--not to speak of such debts as the world itself counts grievous wrongs--you must pay him, whether he pay you or not.

- George MacDonald

Self Defense

When men speak ill of you, live so as nobody may believe them.

- Plato

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

...to try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse; that the only way to make them good is to be good - remembering well the [plank] and the [speck]; that the time for speaking comes rarely, [that] the time for being [good] never departs.

- George MacDonald

Born on the Wild (hill-)Side

But the rejoicing in heaven is greatest over the sheep that has wandered the farthest - perhaps was born on the wild hill-side, and not in the fold at all. For such a prodigal, the elder brother in heaven prays thus - "Lord, think about my poor brother more than about me, for I know thee, and am at rest in thee. I am with thee always."

- George MacDonald

It Is Better to Forget About Yourself Altogether

How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow-men. I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He had never known them. Any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good--above all, that we are better than someone else--I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

- C. S. Lewis