After the joy of reading Walker Percy's and Flannery O'Connor's letters, this book of C.S. Lewis's letters proved irresistible. Flipping at random:
To Allan C. Emery on the reason for the fairy-tale version of the Passion in The Lion, the Witch & The Wardrobe:
We approach the real story in the Gospels with the knowledge that we ought to feel certain things about it. And this, by a familiar psychological law, can hinder us from doing so. The dutiful effort prevents the spontaneous feeling; just as if you say to an old friend during a brief reunion 'Now let's have a good talk' both suddenly find themselves with nothing to say. Make it a fairy-tale and the reader is taken off his guard. (Unless ye become as little children...)To Mary Willis Shelburne:
Yes - it is sometimes hard to obey St Paul's 'Rejoice.' We must try to take life moment by moment. The actual present is usually pretty tolerable, I think, if only we refrain from adding to its burden that of the past and the future. How right Our Lord is about 'sufficient to the day'. Do even pious people in their reverence for the more radiantly divine element in His sayings, sometimes attend too little to their sheer practical common-sense?To Stuart Robertson:
On this point as on others the N.T. is highly paradoxical. St. Paul at the outset of an epistle sometimes talks as if the converts whom he is addressing were already wholly new creatures, already in the world of light, their old nature completely crucified. Yet by the end of the same epistle he will be warning the same people to avoid the very grossest vices.
Of himself he speaks sometimes as if his reward was perfectly sure: elsewhere he fears lest, having preached to others, he should be himself a castaway.
Our Lord Himself sometimes speaks as if all depended on faith, yet in the parable of the sheep and the goats all seems to depend on works: even works done or undone by those who had no idea what they were doing or undoing....For practical purposes, however, it seems to me we must usually live by the second visiton 'working out our own salvation in fear and trembling' (but it adds 'for' - not 'though' - but 'for' - 'it is God who worketh in us').
And in this temporal process surely God saves different souls in different ways? To preach instantaneous conversion and eternal security as if they must be the experiences of all who are saved, seems to me v. dangerous: the very way to drive some into presumption and others into despair. How v. different were the callings of the disciples.
No comments:
Post a Comment