Here, then, are some of my favorite quotes from them. (I thought about tracking down sources for all of them but decided to take the lazy route instead, sacrificing the joy of the hunt to you, dear reader, should you so desire to do source checking. :))

Oh, and they’re in no particular order. (Well, generally short to long, but that’s about it.)

C.S. Lewis

“Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”

“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”

“Nothing is yet in its true form.”

“The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

“You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.”

“Hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is ‘the darkness outside’, the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity.”

“You will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.”

“The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.”

“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time — waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God — it changes me.”

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”

“No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.”

“It is a good rule…to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”

“It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.”

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding.”

“The neat sorting-out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.”

“He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”

“But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are ‘on’ concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.”

“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”

“The safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”

“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.”

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

“[The fairy tale] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be more like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. All stories in which children have adventures and successes are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations.”

“In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale? — really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: this reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’. The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves.”

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story…. This canon seems to me most obviously true of that particular type of children’s story which is dearest to my own taste, the fantasy or fairy tale. Now the modern critical world uses ‘adult’ as a term of approval. It is hostile to what it calls ‘nostalgia’ and contemptuous of what it calls ‘Peter Pantheism’. Hence a man who admits dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his fifty-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested development…. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? … I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I have grown but only that I had changed.”

George MacDonald

“No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.”

“All that is not God is death.”

“Afflictions are but the shadows of God’s wings.”

“Philosophy is really homesickness.”

“Attitudes are more important than facts.”

“Fear is faithlessness.”

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”

“How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.”

“Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.”

“Brothers, sisters, have you found our King? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God.”

“Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.”

“I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good.”

“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.”

“There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.”

“God is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself.”

“Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”

“A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”

“It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.”

“Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.”

“God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth. How often we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desired haven.”

“No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it — no place to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”

“Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”

“The world is full of resurrections. Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it — the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.

G.K. Chesterton

“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.”

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

“In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends.”

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”

“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”

“I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be defeated.”

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”

“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

“Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.”

“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

“‘Free verse’? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture’.”

“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”

“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”

“The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.”

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

“I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

“The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.”

“All government is an ugly necessity.”

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.”

“Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.”

“The only defensible war is a war of defense.”

“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”

“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.”

“The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.”

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

“[To an atheist] the universe is the most exquisite masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.”

“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”

“Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord James is dead’ to people who never knew Lord James was alive.”

“Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”

“The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

“It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

“Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front–”

“The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”

“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?”

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”

“We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.”

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

“There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel.”

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”

1. I’ve read 19 books so far this year. Yeah, Houston, I’m in trouble. Considering how things are going I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it to 80, so I’m going to revise the goal to 50. (I guess I could always read thirty Berenstain Bears books, but that feels like cheating. ;))

2. The only C.S. Lewis book I’ve read that I hadn’t already read is Letters to Malcolm.

3. Nada on Jane Austen. But it’s not too late, since luckily she didn’t write that much. (Wait, what am I saying?!? I wish she’d written forty more books. Oh well. I wonder if she’s still writing… Do they publish books in the next life?)

4. I’ve decided to ditch Out of Time for now and focus on new novels instead. We’ll see if NaNoWriMo happens this year. (I have another project that takes precedence. More on that in a few weeks.)

5. I’ve already written five short plays this year so far, had two performed with two others in production, and directed two (not my own), so we’re good. Finally, a resolution I’ve managed to keep! Oh, wait, one full-length play. Um, haven’t done that yet. Uncheck. Drat.

6. No screenplay yet.

7. No songs yet, either.

8. And not a single Riverglen Press title yet either. Why am I even bothering to look at these resolutions? It’s just depressing. :P

9. I did redesign Top of the Mountains and am still satisfied with the look, which is good. I ended up nixing BenjaminCrowder.com. (I haven’t yet reached equilibrium with any of my sites other than Top of the Mountains, though. There’ll be a new site in the next little bit which will reincarnate the original BenjaminCrowder.com but with a new name. And I haven’t figured out all the other details, but nobody cares about those but me, so I’ll just do it when I do it and leave it at that. :))

10. No 3D film yet.

11. The daily drawing thing only lasted a week or so. It wasn’t as feasible (given my schedule and other projects) as I thought.

12. On and off on the one-day reply thing. Right now I’m just trying to keep my inbox below 25 emails so it all fits on one screen, because I know that as soon as something slips to the next page, it’s off the radar and I completely forget about it.

13. Um…still working on it, I guess?

When I think about all the time I waste and how I could be so much more productive, I want to stop sleeping. But I’ve already learned that that’s a bad idea. :)

But that’s not even what I wanted to blog about tonight. I just got back from seeing Prince Caspian. I haven’t read the book in a long time, so comparisons there are useless (because I frankly can’t remember what was in the book and what wasn’t, though there are a few bits I know for sure weren’t in the book :)). Overall, though, I liked it. It wasn’t perfect, and it’s not my favorite movie ever or anything, but it was worth it.

Over the past few years I’ve noticed an interesting evolution in my tastes. Before, I was all over Narnia. Loved it. Ate it up. Said they were my favorite books. But since then I’ve started siding more with Tolkien — make no mistake, the Chronicles are still dear to me, but they now feel more…hmm…pastiche is the word Tolkien used, I think. And that’s part of it. I don’t really know how to describe it, other than to say that Tolkien’s Middle-Earth feels like it fits better together, like it’s more realistic (in a fantasy way), more believable, more grown-up. (Sidenote: since Narnia was ostensibly written for children, of course, that’s not a fault of the books; I’ve just grown up, that’s all.)

So, the stories of Narnia no longer feel like the best writing in the world, no. But the real reason I loved them, and the trait that remains in them even now, is the Christian symbolism. I don’t quite know why it works so powerfully (at least for me), but it does, and it’s amazing. And it makes up for whatever faults the tales may have. The deeper story is what counts, in spite of the chinks in the surface armor.

Anyway, my favorite bits from the movie were the Christian parts, definitely. But the fight scenes were quite well done, I thought — I felt gripped and involved in a way that usually doesn’t happen. And I didn’t mind the additions that weren’t in the book.

In summary, Prince Caspian isn’t a great work of art the way the Lord of the Rings movies are, but it’s still worth it. (And LOTR’s Christian symbolism isn’t exactly overt. It’s there, and that’s good, but it would really be nice to have something else that mixes Narnia’s symbolism with LOTR’s artistic pinnacle. Or at least I think it would be nice; maybe it wouldn’t work. Who knows?)

[tags]Prince Caspian, Narnia, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien[/tags]

But I don’t just mean reciting a long list of names. I’ve done that, and it feels flat and doesn’t do much of anything. The difference, I think, comes in slowing down to ponder about the person you’re praying for and what their needs might be. (And as C.S. Lewis says in The Screwtape Letters, we also have to honestly be ready to do something about it.)

When I pray that way — really, sincerely focused on someone else — it’s almost like a conduit opens straight into the heart of heaven. That’s when I feel closest to Christ in my prayers. It’s incredible.

The older I get, the more I find that so much in the gospel hinges on turning our focus outward. In the words of C. Terry Warner:

No matter how rigorous, a quest to be true when undertaken on one’s own behalf can never put to silence the disquieting voice that says, “You’re not honest, simple, solid, and true. You’re still in it for yourself. It’s your own agenda that you care most about.” Stubbornly setting out to be true cannot be glorious if I do not lift my focus higher than myself.

It’s an utter paradox, really — lose your life that you might find it. Focus on others in order to be true to yourself. Look outward so you can see inside. And yet it’s true. Not only is it one of the core principles of the gospel, but it’s the only way to really be happy, too.

Now, though, I’ve realized which books are my favorites — books like Crime and Punishment, Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre. I like lots of other types of books as well, but the books that have really changed my life — the books that have made me who I am — are mostly the classics. They’re at the very top of my list. I don’t know how I didn’t realize this all along. :)

The catalyst for this epiphany was actually that I started reading The Brothers Karamazov and talking about it with said friend, and almost from page one I was in love with the book. (In fact, it already feels like it’s going to claim the title as king of my favorites.) It’s so good. I love Dostoevsky. And Tolstoy. I’m not entirely sure why I love the Russians most of all, but I do, unequivocally. Here’s a beautiful quote I just came across in Karamazov a few hours ago, for example: “If you repent, you love, and if you love, you are with God. Love redeems and saves everything.” Mmm.

Anyway, there does seem to be a higher activation energy needed to get into a classic (to stick with the chemistry metaphor), but once you get in it’s pretty easy to keep going, I’ve found. I can’t wait to read the rest of Dostoevsky. And the Jane Austen novels I haven’t read yet. And…and…and… :)

You will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. (p. 111)

Mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eternal moment St Peter — he will forgive me if I am wrong — forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, ‘an acquired taste’ — and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind. (pp. 54–55)

Hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is ‘the darkness outside’, the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity. (p. 129)

[tags]C.S. Lewis[/tags]

A thought and then an epiphany. How could a good God let bad things happen? Till now, I’ve just assumed that it’s part of the test — that God planned it in, planting trials and obstacles in our lives for our growth. Life is a time of testing and probation, so that makes sense.

But what about abuse? There are other examples, of course, but I have a really hard time believing God plans for his children to be abused, even if it is for their good. That’s just messed up. That’s not the God I know. And yet we talk about God’s hand in our lives, pushing things into place, maneuvering events and contacts in precisely the best way that will turn us from fallen humans into gods and goddesses. What gives?

I’ve thought a lot about this, but it wasn’t till tonight that I finally hit upon an explanation that made sense to me. First, God can see the end from the beginning. Past, present, and future are rolled into one for him. As C.S. Lewis says, time is like a line drawn on a piece of paper, and God can see the whole paper.

Second, because God sees it all at once, he knows what evil things will befall us in the future. He doesn’t cause them; he witnesses them. We still have our agency — and so do the people who make evil happen. Sure, God could force everyone to do good, but that dumbs down the universe and turns this from real life into a puppet show.

Third, and here’s where the epiphany happened for me, because God is good, and because he loves us, he takes the misfortunes that happen to us and finds some way to turn it to our good. Abuse is evil, but God has the power to take such a horrible thing and magically bring some good out of it. That’s what God does. And if we’re open to it, he can do that with every bad thing that happens to us in our lives. Sure, we’ll get more good out of some things than others, but the amazing thing is that God can get anything good out of something bad. It’s a miracle.

God doesn’t make evil happen, but he saves us and redeems us by taking whatever does happen (which is largely up to the agency of other people) and transforming it into good. Which means that God isn’t some mischievous, conniving gamemaster intent on putting us through hell “for our good.” God isn’t running around casting obstacles in our way so we’ll trip up and fall. The obstacles come of their own accord; in his infinite wisdom and power, though, God can take whatever does come and help us grow from it.

As Paul says, “all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28).

Thoughts?

In the Lord of the Rings, all of Hobbiton was paralyzed by Saruman and just a few dozen of the Big Folk. Why? Because, after a few killings, everyone became too fearful to fight. They shut their doors and tried to blot out the bad stuff. The good folks locked themselves in, and those who had consented to evil were free to do as they pleased. This is a whole lot of unpleasantness. Turning the other cheek is OK in theory, but if evil is real, and if we want to spare the “least of these” some of the vast suffering available for the dispensing, aren’t we obliged to kick up a fuss? C. S. Lewis thought so. In his essay “Why I am not a Pacifist,” he methodically lays out the moral need to resist evil. Thomas Aquinas, likewise, helped to define what a “just war” was. And if a saint says we should defend the innocent, who am I to argue?

That feels right. But at the same time, as Jef mentions, we’ve got Christ telling us to turn the other cheek, effectively advocating a policy of non-violence.

So, where’s the line? Is it a personal rule? (Meaning, is it okay to resist evil if the victim is someone else, but not yourself? Is the line a circle around you, with unacceptable resistance inside and acceptable resistance outside?)

Or is it a matter of degree? If someone’s trying to kill you, turning the other cheek may or may not be the best idea. (And of course it depends on the situation.) But now that I’ve said that, I’m thinking back to the people in the Book of Mormon who knelt down on the ground and let the Lamanites slay them.

Then again, I don’t think that necessarily counts. The reason they didn’t even try to fight was that (1) they’d already been a very bloodthirsty people and (2) because of that, they’d taken a vow of non-violence to atone for what they’d already done. Most of us aren’t bloodthirsty and won’t have taken a vow like that because there’s not much if anything to atone for (in that regard).

Besides, the history of the Saints is chock-full of us defending ourselves from attackers, whether in the Book of Mormon or at Haun’s Mill or pretty much anywhere there’s been a covenant people.

If Jesus really meant non-resistance, then that’s what we ought to do, of course. But somehow I have a hard time believing he wants us to just throw up our hands and give up, flinging the door wide open for evil to come slaughter us both physically and spiritually.

Believe it or not, what all of this boils down to is the nature of hope. J.R.R. Tolkien described the Catholic worldview as a “long defeat”. That is, the Christian believes that things will continue getting worse and worse here on planet earth until the final days. But, that doesn’t mean we can just hole up and wait things out. There are plenty of Sarumans still out there, plenty of Slubgobs and Screwtapes. And they may win a lot of skirmishes over the next months and years and even centuries, but they’ve already lost the war.

Quite true. Holing up is not an option.

I don’t know where the line is between turning the other cheek and defending yourself and your family (any thoughts?), but generally speaking, the Spirit will let us know if we’re in the wrong. Let’s just hope we’re still in tune enough to notice it.

[tags]C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Book of Mormon, Mormon, LDS[/tags]

Now, I don’t really care that she said it, and I wasn’t offended in the least (though her embarrassment was mildly contagious). I’m not judging her. Really.

With that disclaimer past us, then, some words from Mere Christianity came to mind as I continued my walk home:

Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding.

Food for thought. Makes me wonder where I think I’m doing well because the door to my cellar hasn’t been opened suddenly for a while. There’s definitely room for improvement. :)

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life…we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good…. It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore…. And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. “Unless a seed die…”

Thoughts? (I agree with Lewis, by the way. :))

[tags]C.S. Lewis[/tags]