Faith
An excerpt from The Joyful Christian – Readings from C. S. Lewis
So perhaps we need to get to the point of Surrender.
An excerpt from The Joyful Christian – Readings from C. S. Lewis
So perhaps we need to get to the point of Surrender.
Have you ever noticed how many songs there are about home?:
Homeward Bound (Simon & Garfunkel)
I wish I was, Homeward bound,
Home where my thought’s escaping,
Home where my music’s playing,
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.
Take Me Home, Country Roads
I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away
And driving down the road I get a feeling
That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday
Can’t Find my Way Home (Steve Windwood)
You are the reason I’ve been waiting so long
Somebody holds the key
Well, I’m near the end and I just aint got the time
And I’m wasted and I cant find my way home
Green, Green Grass of Home (Tom Jones)
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.
Yes, they’ll all come to meet me,
arms reaching, smiling sweetly.
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.
Home (Chris Daughtry)
I’m going home,
Back to the place where I belong,
And where your love has always been enough for me.
I’m not running from.
No, I think you got me all wrong.
I don’t regret this life I chose for me.
But these places and these faces are getting old.
So I’m going home.I’m going home
I know there’s many, many more songs about home. But, really — what is this mysteriously place we call home? I don’t really buy that old expression “Home is where the heart is” unless the Holy Spirit has taken up residence within that heart. And even then, there is a longing for this seemingly unattainable peace, this distant memory just beyond my reach where I am safe from harm.
In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.
This is not our home. As my Aunt Phyliss might say, “Sugar, our home is Way Over Yonder
For the record, I’m the younger sister, not the one holding the cat. That cat hated me. This might have something to do with the fact that I dressed him in Baby Tender Love dresses and forced him into my toy baby stroller. I suppose I’ll never know for sure…
Atheism:
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too — for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. 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 and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
I don’t care who you are, that’s some good stuff, there. And I’m pretty sure Lewis has his hand on his head in the above picture because his brain is hurting. Have an awesome Sunday; you’re in my prayers.