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.

4 O Taste and See

The Christian statement that only He who does the will of the Father will ever know the true doctrine is philosophically accurate. Imagination may help a little: but in the moral life, and (still more) in the devotional life we touch something concrete which will at once begin to correct the growing emptiness of our idea of God. One moment even of feeble contrition or blurred thankfulness will, at least in some degree, head us off from the abyss of abstraction. It is Reason herself which teaches us not to rely on Reason only in this matter. For Reason knows that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, ‘Go and look. This is not my job: it is a matter for the senses’. So here. The materials for correcting our abstract conception of God cannot be supplied by Reason: she will be the first to tell you to go and try experience—‘Oh, taste and see!’ For of course she will have already pointed out that your present position is absurd. As long as we remain Erudite Limpets we are forgetting that if no one had ever seen more of God than we, we should have no reason even to believe Him immaterial, immutable, impassible and all the rest of it. Even that negative knowledge which seems to us so enlightened is only a relic left over from the positive knowledge of better men—only the pattern which that heavenly wave left on the sand when it retreated.

—from Miracles

5 Enemies of Goodness

It is no use either saying that if there is a God of that sort—an impersonal absolute goodness—then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger—according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.