Tag: C.S. Lewis

Those Who Water Flowers

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Thank God that there are solid folk
Who water flowers and roll the lawn,
And sit and sew and talk and smoke,
And snore all through the summer dawn.
Who pass untroubled nights and days
Full-fed and sleepily content,
Rejoicing in each other’s praise,
Respectable and innocent.
Who feel the things that all men feel,
And think in well-worn grooves of thought,
Whose honest spirits never reel
Before man’s mystery, overwrought.
~C. S. Lewis from “In Praise of Solid People”
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rosebud9614

Summer Will Come True

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photo by Harry Rodenberger
photo by Harry Rodenberger

 

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I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.
~C.S. Lewis

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photo by Kate Steensma

The Corner Has Been Turned

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…To be sure, it feels wintry enough still:
but often in the very early spring it feels like that.
Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale.
A man really ought to say,
‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’
in the same spirit in which he says ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’

Because we know what is coming behind the crocus.
The spring comes slowly down this way;
but the great thing is that the corner has been turned.
There is, of course, this difference that in the natural spring
the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not.
We can.
We have the power either of withstanding the spring,
and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on …
to which He is calling us.
It remains with us to follow or not,
to die in this winter,
or to go on into that spring and that summer.
~C.S. Lewis–in The Grand Miracle, God in the Dock

 

Whether mid-winter or early autumn
the crocus are unexpected,
surprising even to the observant.

Hidden potential beneath the surface,
an incubation readily triggered
by advancing or retreating light from above.

Waiting with temerity,
to be called forth from earthly grime
and granted reprieve from indefinite interment.

A luminous gift of hope and beauty
borne from a humble bulb;
so plain and only dirt adorned.

Summoned, the deep lavender harbinger rises
from sleeping frosted ground in February
or spent topsoil, exhausted in October.

These bold blossoms do not pause
for snow and ice nor hesitate to pierce through
a musty carpet of fallen leaves.

They break free to surge skyward
cloaked in tightly bound brilliance,
spaced strategically to be deployed against the darkness.

Slowly unfurling, the violet petals peel to reveal golden crowns,
royally renouncing the chill of winter’s beginning and end,
staying brazenly alive when little else is.

In the end,  they painfully wilt, deeply bruised and purple
under the Sun’s reflection made manifest;
returning defeated, inglorious, fallen, to dust.

They will rise yet again.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

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The Flow of Quiet

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the very moment you wake up each morning….
All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals.
And the first job each morning consists in shoving them all back;
in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view,
letting that larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.
~C.S. Lewis

It takes determination to keep the wild animals at bay;
they leap and snarl and roar with expectations,
yet all this day warrants
is calm quiet,
a peaceful flow of the hours.

Rather than be thrown to the lions,
I will listen to them purr.

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Back Up the Sunbeam

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photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun…
C.S. Lewis

We so easily forget from Whom and Where we come, the purpose for which we are created and sent forth, how bright and everlasting our origins.  If we fail to live and serve as intended, it is our own failing, fault and responsibility, not that of the Creator.

When our light shines so that others see, we are the beam and not the source.  The path leads back to the Son and the Father and we are a mere pathway.

May we illuminate as we are illuminated.

Amen.

photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

 

 

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A Mourne Kind of Morning

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I have seen landscapes [in the Mourne Mountains] which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.
~C.S. Lewis

The Mournes have a mystical quality to them, bewitching the traveler and inspiring C.S. Lewis as a child growing up near here to create Narnia as an adult.

We have seen these mountains silhouetted in the distance, and have driven through them, descending into coastal villages surrounded by miles and miles of stone fences checker boarding the farmland.

We need to always keep wonder close at hand and never cease to wonder at the fairy tales in our own back yard.

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Waiting to be Filled

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

My God, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton’s prayer, “Give us time!”  It never stops…. You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.  You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.  You’ll have fish left over.  The creek is the one great giver.  It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation.  This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day. 
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Good things as well as bad, you know are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
~C.S. Lewis- Mere Christianity

…the room was filled by a presence that in a strange way was both about me and within me like a light or warmth. I was overwhelming possessed by someone who was not myself.  And yet, I felt more myself than ever before.  I was filled with intense happiness and almost unbearable joy as I had never known before or never known since.  And overall, there was a deep sense of peace and security and certainty.
~C. S. Lewis

A Heart Inclined

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
~C. S. Lewis

I’ve been following Kathleen Mulhern’s blog “Dry Bones” where she is currently illuminating Blaise Pascal’s fascinating discussions on faith and belief (i.e. Pascal’s Wager).   I am learning how “seeking is as good as seeing” (Julian of Norwich).

What Pascal determines is that one must “incline the heart” toward belief in God, to “desire” to fill that “God-shaped hole” in our lives:

I tell you that you will gain even in this life, and that at every step you take along this road you will see that your gain is so certain and your risk so negligible that in the end you will realize that you have wagered on something certain and infinite for which you have paid nothing.
~Blaise Pascal

If we do not know spiritual hopelessness, we cannot hope. If we do not know spiritual wretchedness, we cannot find the happiness we long for. If we do not see the abyss at our feet, we cannot believe there is a way across it; if we are not willing to descend into its depths, which lie in our own souls, we will never ascend the heights on the other side.
~Kathleen Mulhern from “Dry Bones”

Inexorable Love

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photo by Josh Scholten

“God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.”
C.S. Lewis

Relentless, unstoppable, inescapable, inevitable, unavoidable, irrevocable, unalterable, unceasing love.  It has always been, is now, and always will be.

It is a gift almost too much to bear knowing He bought it through suffering.  Nothing I have done warrants such loving grace.   Therefore I become inexorable too–nonstop and continuously–expressing gratitude, forgiveness, wonder.

The intolerable welcomed.
The inconceivable borne and born.
The incredible believed.

Longing for Longing

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“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…
to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
~C.S. Lewis

Like children who long for Christmas,
anticipating for weeks
what that moment will be like
when they see gifts piled high under the tree–

we revel in our longing.

It is the sweetness
of “already but not yet”,
knowing with eager expectancy
there is more to come,
just a bit out of reach
but still intensely seen and felt,
something more wonderful,
a place more beautiful than we can ever imagine…