Kitabı oku: «A Year with C. S. Lewis: 365 Daily Readings from his Classic Works»
A Year with C. S. Lewis
Daily Readings from His Classic Works
C. S. LEWIS
Edited by Patricia S. Klein
Contents
Cover
Title Page
January
1 Supposing We Really Found Him?
2 Imagine a Mystical Limpet
3 Not Naked but Reclothed
4 O Taste and See
5 Enemies of Goodness
6 A Pleasant Theology
7 Damned Nonsense
8 Something Beyond
9 Somebody Who?
10 A Good Time Was Had by All
11 More Than Mere Kindness
12 Amazing Love, How Can It Be?
13 War in Heaven
14 Blurry Visions of God
15 Our Highest Activity
16 Our Three Responses to God
17 Always Now
18 Just a Bit of Coloured Paper?
19 Traveling Without a Map
20 Gradually the Truth Condenses …
21 From Poetic Myth to Humble Fact
22 God’s Remedies
23 On Authority
24 Finding Comfort
25 We Couldn’t Make It Up
26 Not Like a River but Like a Tree
27 Being Good
28 Finding a Balance
29 A Slip of the Tongue
30 Proceed with Great Caution
31 My Lifeline to the Temporal
February
1 Swimming Lessons Are Better
2 Just a Bit of My Own, Please
3 Count the Cost
4 Begin Again Daily
5 A Critical Distinction
6 Father and Son
7 The Spirit of God
8 Ever New Constructions
9 With a Bit of Coaxing
10 Unequal Love
11 A Good Infection
12 What Christianity Offers
13 The Absurd Claim
14 Not a Matter of Opinion
15 No Shortage of Good Ideas
16 Two Quick Clarifications
17 Bad Gas
18 Competition Rather Than Courtesy
19 Fixed Laws of Nature and Freedom of Will
20 The Holy Eraser
21 Voluntarily United
22 Second-Guessing God’s Wisdom
23 The Core Corruption
24 Human Will, the Weak Point of Creation
25 Becoming Yourself
26 A Real Right and Wrong
27 The Rules
28 Impulse Control
29 Not Moral Perfection
March
1 Morality: A Quick Lesson
2 The Moral Dilemma
3 Just Deserts
4 The Impulse for Vengeance
5 Face the Bad
6 The Truth About Ourselves
7 Time Does Not Cancel Sin
8 Bad Company
9 Virtues in Different Ages
10 Enemy-Occupied Territory
11 A Simple (Albeit Comical) Argument for Christian Theology
12 So What About God’s Authority?
13 Our Imperfect World: Creation in Process
14 Our Imperfect World: Creation Corrupted
15 Once Begun …
16 Correcting Our Arithmetic
17 With Every Choice
18 Understanding Evil
19 The Essential Vice
20 The Proud Competitor
21 How Marriage Reconciles
22 Too Proud to Know God
23 Forget Yourself
24 Dictatorship of Pride
25 A Humble Fault
26 Diabolical Pride
27 School Pride
28 Point of Contact
29 The First Step
30 Humility 101
31 Humility, the Wrong End
April
1 Humility, the Right End
2 The Primary Sin
3 The Gentle Slope to Nothing
4 Closer to God—or Closer to Hell?
5 A Matter of Meanings
6 The Unselfishness Game
7 Half-Hearted Desires
8 A Gradual Turning
9 The Horror of the Same Old Thing
10 The Demand for Novelty
11 The Thrill Is Gone
12 My Time Is My Own
13 Uninspected Assumptions
14 Nuances of Ownership
15 Mine, Mine, Mine
16 A Mother’s Love
17 Domestic Tyranny
18 God at Her Elbow
19 Signs of Attrition
20 Unravelling Souls
21 The Secret Thread
22 The Hint of More
23 A Most Complete Wife
24 A World Starving
25 Welcome to the Family
26 Part of the Mystical Body
27 To Become Really Doggy
28 The Right Job
29 Two Final Points
30 Troughs and Peaks
May
1 Servants Who Become Sons
2 … And Still Obeys
3 At Just That Point in History
4 The Great Weapon
5 The Very Pattern of Reality
6 New Life
7 Vicarious Needs
8 It’s Not Fair
9 Full Surrender
10 With God’s Help
11 Nice Is Not Enough
12 That Some Day We May Ride Bare-Back
13 Recognizing Christ’s New Men
14 Imagine Being Who You Really Are
15 My Own Personality
16 All Good Masters Are Servants
17 God’s Arrangements
18 Blessed Matter
19 Carriers of Christ
20 A Body—Muscular, Vital, and Diverse
21 Should the Church Take the Lead?
22 A Christian Society
23 The Longest Way Round
24 For No Other Purpose
25 A Gentle Welcome
26 Creating Hatred in Church
27 A Suitable Church
28 Hints of Our Future
29 A Curious Consolation
30 Work Offered to God
31 Avoid Clarity
June
1 Untold Millions
2 The Apostolic Witness
3 What the Apostles Meant
4 The Beginning of the New Creation
5 Like a Ghost, Yet Not
6 A Much Stranger Story Than Expected
7 A Whole New Nature
8 No Ordinary People
9 What Did They See and What Did They Think They Saw?
10 Witness Reports
11 Reliable Eyewitnesses?
12 An Idea Why Heaven Is Always “Up”
13 Close Up and Small
14 Fitting into the Pattern
15 How to Think About the Miracles of Jesus
16 Be Careful What You Think You Want
17 Threshold of Belief
18 What the World Is Really Like
19 Discerning What’s Real
20 Everythingism
21 Wild Rumours
22 God in Our Prayers
23 Very Hard, Yet Very Easy
24 The Most Difficult Is the Easiest
25 Let’s Pretend
26 Pretending a Little Less
27 Pretence Becomes Reality
28 As We Become Like Christ
29 Rats in the Cellar
30 And More Rats Yet
July
1 Lead Them by the Nose
2 “I’m as Good as You Are”
3 The Undemocratic Incantation
4 The Tyranny of Democracy
5 The Democratic Imperative
6 Medicine, Not Food
7 New Perspective
8 Coming in Out of the Wind
9 The Full Treatment
10 “I Will Make You Perfect”
11 All or Nothing
12 Faux Humility
13 Simply a Phase
14 Cigars in Heaven
15 Tenderly, Tenderly
16 A Sword in God’s Hand
17 Two Sides of the Truth
18 Transformed
19 The Real Self
20 Defining Our Terms
21 Reflection of the Divine Life
22 Judging by Results
23 Out of Action
24 A Warning or an Encouragement?
25 Love Your Neighbor as Yourself
26 Love the Sinner …
27 The Real Test
28 Love Your Enemy
29 The Thing Called Selves
30 This Terrible Duty
31 Start Small
August
1 Grieving, and Thinking About Grieving
2 A Jab of Red-Hot Memory
3 Alone into the Alone
4 Lament
5 Would I Wish Her Back?
6 Cherishing Our Unhappiness
7 Holy Intentions
8 Hell’s Parody
9 One Flesh
10 I Promise You
11 Falling in Love
12 Being in Love
13 Romance Novels
14 Love Then Marriage—or Marriage Then Love?
15 That Love May Find a Foothold
16 The Least Bad of All Sins
17 Bent Appetites
18 One Reason We Don’t Desire Chastity
19 Another Reason We Don’t Desire Chastity
20 A Final Reason We Don’t Desire Chastity
21 Gluttony of Delicacy
22 Profile of a Glutton: The Demure Little Smile
23 Profile of a Glutton: “All I Want …”
24 In the Know
25 Deadly Annoyances
26 Under the Same Roof
27 “All I Said …”
28 I Believe in the Forgiveness of Sins
29 Forgiving Versus Excusing
30 Two Remedies for Excuses
31 As We Forgive Others
September
1 No Exceptions
2 Past, Present, and Future
3 Life on the Edge of a Precipice
4 The Imaginary Claims of War and Religion
5 The Claims of War: Render unto Caesar
6 The Claims of Religion: Do All to the Glory of God
7 Learning as Vocation
8 Learning as a Necessary Weapon
9 What Is Charity?
10 The Rule of Love
11 Compound Interest
12 No Manufactured Feelings
13 On Giving
14 Is It Really Kindness?
15 Wise as Serpents
16 Not Just About Falling Down
17 When Worlds Collide
18 Faith in Training
19 Real Temptation
20 Not Really So Bad
21 Lessons from Practising Christian Virtues
22 Like the Spokes of a Wheel
23 Leaving It to God
24 A First Faint Gleam of Heaven
25 Faith or Works
26 God in Tandem
27 Follow Thou Me
28 Fantasy Virtues
29 Where Is God?
30 At Peace
October
1 Blurred Vision
2 Mustn’t Grumble
3 The Great Iconoclast
4 A Chuckle in the Darkness
5 Reconciling Human Suffering with a God Who Loves
6 The Source of Pain
7 Surrender
8 The Rebellious Self
9 God’s Megaphone
10 Clinging to Our Own Lives
11 Tender Words
12 Surrender in Obedience
13 Collaborators in Creation
14 Don’t Stone the Messenger
15 One Man’s Tale of Tribulation
16 The Products of Suffering
17 To Produce the Complex Good
18 Some Pleasant Inns
19 To Stop One Tooth from Aching
20 Heaven Will Work Backwards
21 Present at the Creation of the World
22 A Defence Against the Enemy of Excitement
23 A Defence Against the Enemy of Frustration
24 A Defence Against the Enemy of Fear
25 Death Is Real
26 How God Can Answer Prayer
27 Time Reconsidered
28 Our Contribution to the Cosmic Shape
29 Not a Film Unrolling
30 Our Keenest Pleasure
31 On Enemy Ground
November
1 Real Pleasure
2 Raw Material
3 Scientific Theories
4 Scientific Observation
5 Science or Magic?
6 From Dream to Waking
7 Turn the Other Cheek?
8 What “Turn the Other Cheek” Doesn’t Mean
9 Virtue’s Testing Point
10 How to Create a Coward
11 A Logical Conclusion to Pacifist Politics
12 Weighing the Costs
13 Weighing Hell’s Miseries
14 Of Heaven and Earth
15 No Chocolates?
16 A Gradual Change
17 The Sweet, Secret Desire
18 Well Done
19 Perfect Humility
20 The Promise of Glory
21 Overheard Messages
22 To Be at Last Summoned Inside
23 Is It Wrong to Want Heaven?
24 Aim at Heaven
25 Books for Grown-Ups
26 Comparing Cats and Dogs
27 Sooner or Later They Fell
28 The Place of Finality and Darkness
29 Shall Hell Veto Heaven?
30 Must Pity Die?
December
1 Hell’s Doors
2 Left Alone
3 A Detestable Doctrine
4 You Be the Judge
5 Viewing the Remains
6 Either-Or
7 Choose Now, Choose Well
8 Thy Will Be Done
9 Better to Reign in Hell
10 The Man Who Mistook the Means for the End
11 To the Extreme
12 From Outsider to Insider
13 From Vanity into Pride
14 To Be on the Inside
15 The Sly Impulse
16 A Permanent Mainspring of Human Action
17 Why Avoid Becoming an “Inner Ringer”?
18 Discovering Your Own Ring of True Friendship
19 The Obstinate Tin Soldier
20 One Tin Soldier Comes Alive
21 A God Distinct
22 Think of It Like This
23 Everywhere the Great Enters the Little
24 God Descends to Reascend
25 The Grand Miracle
26 The Signature of the Soul
27 A New and Secret Name
28 To Drink Joy from the Fountain of Joy
29 A Hymn to God’s Creation
30 Heaven’s Revels
31 Glory as Brightness, Splendour, Luminosity
Sources by Book
Sources by Day
Sources by Selection Title
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
JANUARY
1 Supposing We Really Found Him?
It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive’. And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
—from Miracles
January 1911 Lewis (age twelve) enrolls at Cherbourg Preparatory School in Malvern.
2 Imagine a Mystical Limpet
Why are many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose a mystical limpet, a sage among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. But then there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet’s words is simply and solely the negatives. From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs.
—from Miracles
January 1914 Lewis and childhood Belfast friend Arthur Greeves begin what would be a lifelong correspondence.
3 Not Naked but Reclothed
Our own situation is much like that of the erudite limpets. Great prophets and saints have an intuition of God which is positive and concrete in the highest degree. Because, just touching the fringes of His being, they have seen that He is plenitude of life and energy and joy, therefore (and for no other reason) they have to pronounce that He transcends those limitations which we call personality, passion, change, materiality, and the like. The positive quality in Him which repels these limitations is their only ground for all the negatives. But when we come limping after and try to construct an intellectual or ‘enlightened’ religion, we take over these negatives (infinite, immaterial, impassible, immutable, etc.) and use them unchecked by any positive intuition. At each step we have to strip off from our idea of God some human attribute. But the only real reason for stripping off the human attribute is to make room for putting in some positive divine attribute. In St Paul’s language, the purpose of all this unclothing is not that our idea of God should reach nakedness but that it should be reclothed. But unhappily we have no means of doing the reclothing. When we have removed from our idea of God some puny human characteristic, we (as merely erudite or intelligent enquirers) have no resources from which to supply that blindingly real and concrete attribute of Deity which ought to replace it. Thus at each step in the process of refinement our idea of God contains less, and the fatal pictures come in (an endless, silent sea, an empty sky beyond all stars, a dome of white radiance) and we reach at last mere zero and worship a nonentity.
—from Miracles
1892 J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis’s longtime friend, colleague, and fellow Inkling (a group of friends who meet regularly from about 1930 to 1963 to share writings, good conversation, and the odd pint), is born in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
