The Poison of Subjectivism by C.S. Lewis Doodle

This essay contains the essence of Lewis’ arguments in his fascinating short book ‘The Abolition of Man' This will address many of the issues we going through as a nation in our culture and why no one listens to those who disagree with them the end result is violence and hatred. This was written in 1944.

Finding God (Finding Shakespeare) by C.S. Lewis Doodle

What Happens When You Wake Up

“It comes 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 simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The other voice is the Holy Spirit and the other point of view is the Word of God and the larger stronger quieter life is Christ in you the hope of glory. Allow the Christ life, the Holy Spirit and the Word of God to protect you from all the other voices that rush in on you in the morning and throughout the day and be at peace.

The Almost Impossible Thing

“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The Poison of Subjectivism by C.S. Lewis Doodle

The Rival Conceptions of God by C.S. Lewis Doodle (BBC Talk 6, Mere Christianity Chapter 6)

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Doodle

The Laws of Nature by C.S. Lewis Doodle

Religion and Science by C.S. Lewis Doodle

Man Or Rabbit?

"Christianity will do you good--a great deal more good than you ever wanted or expected. And the first bit of good it will do you is to hammer into your head (you won't enjoy that!) the fact that what you have hitherto called 'good'--all that about 'leading a decent life' and 'being kind'--isn't quite the magnificent and all-important affair you supposed. It will teach you that in fact you can't be 'good' (not for 24 hours) on your own moral efforts. And then it will teach you that even if you were, you still wouldn't have achieved the purpose for which you were created. Mere morality is not the end of your life. You were made for something quite different than that. . . . Confucius simply didn't know what life is about. The people who keep on asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about. . . .

"Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be re-made. All the rabbit in us is to disappear--the worried, conscientious, ethical rabbit as well as the cowardly and sensual rabbit. We shall bleed and squeal as the handfuls of fur come out; and then, surprisingly, we shall find underneath it all a thing we have never yet imagined: a real Man, an ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy."

--C. S. Lewis, "Man or Rabbit?" in God in the Dock pg. 112

You need to let this sink in. Lewis said Christianity "will teach you that in fact you can't be 'good' (not for 24 hours) on your own moral efforts." I love the phrase "All the rabbit in us will disappear" God is doing something far greater than having us lead a decent life he is changing us to be children of God made like his son.

We Are Far Too Easily Pleased

“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.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

We think just the opposite. We think our sinful desires are so strong that we can't reach for the joy God offers but that makes us like an ignorant child who is easily pleased. Instead of reaching for the joy we settle for the mud in the slum, that's why were half-hearted creatures who are content with the mud. We settle for weak desires instead of going for the higher desires to know God and to be filled with his joy.

Imagine Yourself As A Living House

"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.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity 

I love this quote from Lewis. As you get older you start feeling that most of the work has been done on your house (yourself) and you can take it easy and all of a sudden God's building a new wing and its quite upsetting. I find that I am more engaged in learning and growing in my faith more involved in other peoples lives and more involved with my grown children and their children there is no time to back off and think of myself. What a waste of time that is. I do know some people who as they have gotten older are more withdrawn, concerned only for themselves and have put up a sign "no new construction here" How sad for them.

The Real Jesus

A January 1959 letter from C. S. Lewis to Edward Lofstrom. At one point Lewis responds to something Lofstrom had asked him about by saying--

'Gentle Jesus', my elbow! The most striking thing about Our Lord is the union of great ferocity with extreme tenderness. (Remember Pascal? 'I do not admire the extreme of one virtue unless you show me at the same time the extreme of the opposite virtue. One shows one's greatness not by being at an extremity but by being simultaneously at two extremities and filling all the space between')

Add to this that He is also a supreme ironist, dialectician, and (occasionally) humorist. So go on! You are on the right track now: getting to the real Man behind all the plaster dolls that have been substituted for Him. This is the appearance in Human form of the God who made the Tiger and the Lamb, the avalanche and the rose. He'll frighten and puzzle you: but the real Christ can be loved and admired as the doll can't.

--Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 3:1011

This is the real Jesus not the religious Jesus, not the fake Jesus or the weak Jesus. I will worship the real Jesus.

The Despair of Overcoming Chronic Temptations.

C. S. Lewis, letter to Mary Neylan, January 20, 1942:
I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptations.
It is not serious provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc doesn't get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes are airing in the cupboard.
The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present to us: it is the very sign of His presence.
--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 507; emphasis original

I find this extremely encouraging. Have you noticed the dirt on you? Or do you just pretend its not there. We all have "chronic temptations" that lead us to despair but we need to take hope in the fact that "no amount of falls will really undo us" God will completely clean us up once we leave this earth "the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out and the clean clothes are airing in the cupboard" Thank you Jesus for your amazing grace.

Ultimate Meaninglessness Is Un-Discoverable

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe . . . we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
--C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, chapter 1

If you believe that life has no meaning you would have never found out it has no meaning. So the very fact that you think life has no meaning reveals that you have rejected the meaning life offers. So you know there is meaning.

C. S. Lewis, 'On Forgiveness'

C. S. Lewis, 'On Forgiveness'--
"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single person great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life--to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son--how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say our prayers each night 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.' We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse is to refuse God's mercy for ourselves."

Keep on forgiving do not allow resentment to build inside you, do not dwell on the wrongs others have done to you, do not rehash hurts, wounds, unkind words or past offences. Never forget God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

On Living in an Atomic Age

From a short essay by C.S. Lewis called 'On Living in an Atomic Age,' expressing a key theme of Lewis' engagement with Naturalism/Atheism/Evolutionism: "Really, the naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable.
For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature herself. If Nature when fully known seems to teach us (that is, if the sciences teach us) that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake; for if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms and we should have no reason for believing in them.
There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view. We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it. We are strangers here. We come from somewhere else. Nature is not the only thing that exists. There is 'another world,' and that is where we come from.
And that explains why we do not feel at home here. A fish feels at home in the water. If we 'belonged here' we should feel at home here. All that we say about 'Nature red in tooth and claw,' about death and time and mutability, all our half-amused, half-bashful attitude to our own bodies, is quite inexplicable on the theory that we are simply natural creatures. If this world is the only world, how did we come to find its laws either so dreadful or so comic?
If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?"
--C. S. Lewis, 'On Living in an Atomic Age,' in Present Concerns (London: Fount, 1986), 78-79 (italics original)

The Complete Anti-God State Of Mind

"According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil; Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind." (C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity pg 122)

Lewis tells us that all of these sins of the flesh are little fleabites, little irritants when you compare them to pride. Think of all the sins Christians get bent out of shape about, dis-fellowship people over, reject people for, reject family members for, condemn, criticize, look down on people for, but you never hear them talk about pride. Why? Because its their sin, the one they deny, the one they refuse to face. These people are willing to alienate family members, split Churches, wound others but they never own up to their Pride. Lewis says Pride is the complete anti-God state of mind. Lewis goes on to say "as long as you are proud you cannot know God" as Howlin Wolf sang "Thats evil" Look at what the Religious leaders did to Jesus, those self-righteous proud legalists wanted to kill Jesus. They are still in the church and will try and destroy you to if you preach the gospel of grace. They are really anti-God!

C. S. Lewis, 'On Forgiveness'

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single person great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life--to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son--how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say our prayers each night 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.' We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse is to refuse God's mercy for ourselves.

Understanding God's Love

C. S. Lewis in the “The Problem With Pain” says, “God has no needs. Human love as Plato teaches us is the child of Poverty— of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, caused all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, love-ability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive. Hence if God sometimes speaks as though the impassible could suffer passion and eternal fullness could be in want, and in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare existence upwards, this can mean only, if it means anything intelligible by us, that the God of mere miracle has made Himself able so to hunger and created in himself that which we can satisfy. If he requires us, the requirement is of his own choosing. If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has so subjected it, freely and in a humility that passes understanding” (pg. 50).

This is profound, let it challenge your mind as to your understanding of God's love.