C.S. Lewis Sunday - Progress

"Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? ... We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Related Post:

Tag, You're It!

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Count the Cost

"Law, in his terrible, cool voice, said,...'If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead.' Those are hard words to take. Will it really make no difference whether it was women or patriotism, cocaine or art, whiskey or a seat in the Cabinet, money or science? Well, surely no difference that matters. We shall have missed the end for which we are formed and rejected the only thing that satisfies. Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well? 

"It is a remarkable fact that on this subject Heaven and Hell speak with one voice. The tempter tells me, 'Take care. Think how much this good resolve, the acceptance of this Grace, is going to cost.' But Our Lord equally tells us to count the cost. Even in human affairs great importance is attached to the agreement of those whose testimony hardly ever agrees. Here, more. Between them it would seem to be pretty clear that paddling [near the shore] is of little consequence. What matters, what Heaven desires and Hell fears, is precisely that further step, out of our depth, out of our own control." 

--C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Shine

"She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression." 

--C.S. Lewis,The Screwtape Letters

Do you know someone who has a hero complex? You know, someone who always seems to be hovering around in people's business so they can be the first to swoop in to the rescue of all the poor, unfortunate souls around them? Well, I do. And generally, I try to be grateful for any help I receive from them. But sometimes, I can't help but notice that some people's service seems more about getting what they need out of life than giving what others need.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that hero-complex helping isn't valuable. It's still helping, regardless of the motivation behind it. And I'm also not saying that all conspicuous service is the hero-complex brand of helping. I've just given a lot of thought to how truly humble service could be achieved, and the following picture quote illustrates one of the answers I found in my journey to overcome my own hero-complex. If you want to help people, no need to bust out your super spandex unitard and cape. Live uprightly, care deeply, and just stand there shining! If people need you more directly, they'll come on their own terms. Afterall, it's not about the helper, it's about helping. 

C.S. Lewis Sunday - A Great Secret

"Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his 'gratitude', you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self...we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - A New Perspective

"Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse -- so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Diabolical Pride

"The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course it is very right, and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks. But the Proud man has a different reason for not caring. He says 'Why should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were worth anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am I the sort of man to blush with pleasure at a compliment like some chit of a girl at her first dance? No, I am an integrated, adult personality. All I have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals--or, in a word, because I'm That Kind of Chap. If the mob like it, let them. They're nothing to me.' In this way real thorough-going pride may act as a check on vanity; for, as I said a moment ago, the devil loves 'curing' a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure our vanity."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Related Link:

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Pride: Spiritual Cancer

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Pride is Competition

"If you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, 'How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off? The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive -- is competitive by its very nature -- while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Pride and Vanity

"Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her love, the saved soul to whom Christ says 'Well done,' are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking 'I have pleased him; all is well.' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.' The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom. That is why vanity, though it is the sort of Pride which shows most on the surface, is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a child-like and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - What 'Turn the Other Cheek' DOESN'T Mean

"Does anyone suppose that Our Lord's hearers understood to mean that if a homicidal maniac, attempting to murder a third party, tried to knock me out of the way, I must stand aside and let him get his victim? I at any rate think it impossible they could have so understood Him. I think it equally impossible that they supposed Him to mean that the best way of bringing up a child was to let it hit its parents whenever it was in a temper, or, when it had grabbed at the jam, to give it the honey also. I think the meaning of the words was perfectly clear -- 'Insofar as you are simply an angry man who has been hurt, mortify your anger and do not hit back.'"

--C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

"Why I Am Not a Pacifist"

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Becoming a Palace

"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 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 going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

"The command Be ye therefore perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were 'gods' and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him -- for we can prevent Him, if we choose -- He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess...The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Loving God: Response or Initiative?

"The world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us...It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being."

--C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Happiness is Giving

“There is a wonderful law of nature that the three things we crave most - happiness, freedom, and peace of mind - are always attained by giving them to someone else."

--Anonymous

I recently saw a guy on the corner of a busy intersection with a sign that said, “Hungry Need Help,” and it got me thinking about the connection between Charity and Happiness.

What is your philosophy on giving to beggars and such? My personal philosophy is simple: if I have something to give, I give it. What I decided long ago – and what I teach my children – is that it is not my business or responsibility to judge whether or not there is actually a need. What is my business is how I act when someone is professing a need and asking for help. So, I do what I can to supply the need with whatever I have at my disposal at the time: money, food, a listening ear. I feel I will be judged by God and myself for what I do and the intentions in my heart and the person asking for the help will be judged on their intentions and actions as well. If they are professing a need when they really don’t have one, or if they’re just relying on the charity of others to support their lazy, alcoholic, and/or drug-addicted lifestyle, that’s their problem.  

There have been times when I’ve had an overwhelming feeling that I should not help someone, and I heed those feelings. But for the most part, probably some of the biggest regrets of my life have come from having something to give and withholding it.

I’ll share one of my experiences of regret and one of satisfaction.

As the mother of 4 children, there are times when I just need to get away and regenerate with some “me” time. So, I arranged for someone to sit with my kids and took my self out for a few hours of peaceful solitude. I don’t carry cash very often, so on my way I stopped at the bank and withdrew $10 so I could get some lunch at a place I knew did not take debit cards. But on the way to the place I had planned to spend the bulk of my time I encountered a sign-holding beggar at a freeway exit. I knew I had that ten-dollar-bill in my purse and my first inclination was to give it to the man. But there arose in my heart a string of rationalizations that prevented me from giving the man my lunch money. If I had two fives I feel confident that I would have given him half of my money without hesitation. But to sacrifice everything I had at that moment to a man that might be supporting an addiction…I just couldn’t do it. I latched onto that rationalization along with the vision of a peaceful lunch by myself at a favorite place and did not give the money. What I regret most about this whole experience is that my babysitter called with an emergency and I rushed home and never got that lunch anyway. I kept that ten-dollar-bill in my wallet for a long time to remind myself that I had an opportunity to give someone the shirt off my back and I willfully excused myself. The regret brings this quote to mind, "I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare." --C.S. Lewis

My satisfying giving experience happened one early morning in front of Wal-Mart. I was rushing to bring home some milk so my kids could have some cereal before school when I ran into a rather clean, yet obviously homeless man. I don’t know what made me stop and listen to him; maybe it was his downcast look, maybe it was his threadbare clothes. Whatever it was, I am so glad I stopped. He talked to me for about 15 minutes while my milk sat sweating in the cart. His story was a demoralizing tale of woe. I could just feel the hopelessness dripping off him as he described to me the difficulties of breaking the cycle of homelessness. He couldn’t get a job because he had no address. He couldn’t get an address without a job. The shelters cost $40 a week and all the churches he had talked to were kind to him, but wouldn’t help him long enough to break the cycle. Now, I realize this whole sob story could have been a well rehearsed act. Don’t believe for a second that it didn’t occur to me while I was standing there listening to him. But I pushed that aside and allowed myself to love the man for a second and I knew what I had to do. First, I listened to him and willingly gave him some of my time. I looked him in the eye and treated him like a friend. Then, I told him to hang on a second while I went back into the store to get some cash (because again, I hardly ever carry any). It’s hard to describe the feelings that coursed through my body when I was buying a pack of gum to get the $40 cash I wanted to give him. It felt a little like I was nervous because I was shaking, had clammy hands, and felt short of breath. But I wasn’t nervous, I was giddy with excitement! Here was an opportunity to give that I would boldly take! I nearly skipped out of the store to hand over my money for a week’s shelter for him. I knew it wouldn’t solve all of his problems, but it felt good to know that he’d have a bed for at least a week, and maybe even a little more hope to get him through it. And even if it was a well rehearsed swindle, I know I did the right thing and no one can take the joy I felt from me.

I don’t write all of these things to regale others with my regrets and/or wonderfulness. I write them because through these experiences I learned that there is a connection between Charity and Happiness. The more we give, the more we get. Really, when I don’t give due to a judgment I have made of someone’s intentions, I deny myself a measure of Happiness. But you know what’s even better than giving for your own Happiness? Losing your “self” completely and giving for someone else’s Happiness.

“The words of Jesus, ‘Love one another as I have loved you,’ must be not only a light for us but a flame that consumes the self in us. Love, in order to survive, must be nourished by sacrifices, especially the sacrifice of self. Love, to be real, must cost—it must hurt—it must empty us of self.” --Mother Theresa

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Blurred Vision

"When you come to knowing God the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others -- not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.

"You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred -- like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Morality and Peace

"The price of peace is righteousness. Peace cannot be imposed. It must come from the lives and hearts of men. There is no other way."

--Ezra Taft Benson

"There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage, by cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual--when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on) either drift apart or interfere with one another. You can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another's way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order. As a matter of fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other. If the ships keep on having collisions they will not remain seaworthy. Or, if you like, think of humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result, you need two things. Each player's individual instrument must be in tune and also each must come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others. ...

"Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play. ...

"Almost all people at all times have agreed (in theory) that human beings ought to be honest and kind and helpful to one another. But though it is natural to begin with all that, if our thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have thought at all. Unless we go on  to the second thing--the tidying up inside each human being --we are only deceiving ourselves.

"What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that they cannot be steered at all? What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realize that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Related Posts:
Tag, You’re It 
C.S. Lewis Sunday - Fuel  
The Freedom Paradox  
C.S. Lewis Sunday – Resistance: The Measure of Strength  
Two Glasses of Water

"Now" - What Does it Mean?

I saw the following article today and it reminded me of a C.S. Lewis quote. It is a thought-provoking topic, so I thought I'd share. Enjoy!

Where is Now? The Paradox Of The Present
by ADAM FRANK, July 26, 2011 (NPR.org/blogs, Category: Science and Philosophy)

The night sky is a time machine. Look out and you look back in time. But this "time travel by eyesight" is not just the province of astronomy. It's as close as the machine on which you are reading these words. Your present exists at the mercy of many overlapping pasts. So where, then, is "now"?

As almost everyone knows, when you stare into the depths of space you are also looking back in time. Catch a glimpse of a relatively nearby star and you see it as it existed when, perhaps, Lincoln was president (if it's 150 light-years away). Stars near the edge of our own galaxy are only seen as they appeared when the last ice age was in full bloom (30,000 light-years away). And those giant pinwheel assemblies of stars called galaxies are glimpsed, as they existed millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the past.

We never see the sky as it is, but only as it was.

Stranger still, the sky we see at any moment defines not a single past but multiple overlapping pasts of different depths. The star's image from 100 years ago and the galaxy image from 100 million years ago reach us at the same time. All of those "thens" define the same "now" for us.

The multiple, foliated pasts comprising our present would be weird enough if it was just a matter of astronomy. But the simple truth is that every aspect of our personal "now" is a layered impression of a world already lost to the past.

To understand how this works, consider the simple fact, discussed in last week's post, that all we know about the world comes to us via signals: light waves, sound waves and electrical impulses running along our nerves. These signals move at a finite speed. It always takes some finite amount of time for the signal to travel from the world to your body's sensors (and on to your brain).

A distant galaxy, a distant mountain peak, the not very distant light fixture on the ceiling and even the intimacy of a loved one's face all live in the past. Those overlapping pasts are times that you — in your "now" — are no longer a part of.

Signal travel time constitutes a delay and all those overlapping delays constitute an essential separation. The inner world of your experience is, in a temporal sense, cut off from the outer world you inhabit.

Let's take a few examples. Light travels faster than any other entity in the physical universe, propagating with the tremendous velocity of c = 300,000,000 m/s. From high school physics you know that the time it takes a light signal moving at c to cross some distance D is simply t = D/c.

When you look at the mountain peak 30 kilometers away you see it not as it exists now but as it existed a 1/10,000 of a second ago. The light fixture three meters above your head is seen not as it exists now but as it was a hundred millionth of a second ago. Gazing into your partner's eyes, you see her (or him) not for who they are but for who they were 10-10 of a second in the past. Yes, these numbers are small. Their implication, however, is vast.

We live, each of us, trapped in our own now.

The simple conclusions described above derive, in their way, from relativity theory and they seem to spell the death knell for a philosophical stance called Presentism. According to Presentism only the present moment has ontological validity. In other words: only the present truly exists; only the present is real.

Presentism holds an intuitive sway for many people. It just feels right. For myself, when I try and explore the texture of my own experience, I can't help but feel a sense of the present's dominance. Buddhism, with its emphasis on contemplative introspection, has developed a sophisticated presentist stance concerning the nature of reality. "Anyone who has ever mediated for anytime" the abbot of a Zen monastery once told me "finds that the past and future are illusions."

Yes, but ...

The reality that even light travels at a finite speed forces us to confront the strange fact that, at best, the present exists at the fractured center of many overlapping pasts.

So where, then, are we in time? Where is our "now" and how does it live in the midst of a universe comprised of so many "thens"?

"Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Time-line like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call 'tomorrow' is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call 'today'. All the days are 'Now' for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not 'forsee' you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you're doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way -- because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already 'Now' for Him." 

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Source of Goodness

"A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble -- because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

"That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or -- if they think there is not -- at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside of him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof  of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Resistance: The Measure of Strength

“No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation is. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German Army after fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by walking against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after 5 minutes simply does not know what it would’ve been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They’ve always lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it. And Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation really means.”

–C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Related Posts: 

C.S. Lewis Sunday – Morality and Peace
Two Glasses of Water
The Freedom Paradox  

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Fuel

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Rules and Excuses

"Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don't matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong -- in other words, if there is no Law of Nature -- what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.

"I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money -- the one you have almost forgotten -- came when you were very hard-up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done -- well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it -- and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm.  The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much -- we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so -- that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Good Infection

"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 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

C.S. Lewis Sunday - Purpose in Pain

"Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, 'God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full -- there's nowhere for Him to put it.' Or as a friend of mine said, 'We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.' Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as he leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness?"

--C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain