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Quote by C.S. Lewis

“You first taught me the great principle "Begin where you are." I had thought one had to start by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and "all the blessings of this life." You turned to the brook and once more splashed your burning face and hands in the little waterfall and said, "Why not begin with this?" And it worked. Apparently you have never guessed how much. That cushiony moss, that coldness and sound and dancing light were no doubt the very minor blessings compared with "the means of grace and the hope of glory." But then they were manifest. So far as they were concerned, sight had replaced faith. They were not the hope of glory, they were an exposition of the glory itself." Yet you were not - or so it seemed - telling me that "Nature," or "the beauties of Nature," manifest the glory. No such abstraction as "Nature" comes into it. I was learning the far more secret doctrine that pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility. As it impinges on our will or understanding, we give it different names - goodness or truth or the like. But its flash upon our senses and mood is pleasure.”

Quote by C.S. Lewis

Work

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

In this posthumously published work, the author presents a series of reflective letters addressed to a fictional friend named Malcolm. The correspondence delves into various aspects of prayer, including its purpose, difficulties, and the relationship between the individual and the divine. The letters are written in an informal, conversational style, allowing for a thoughtful and accessible examination of spiritual topics without a systematic theological framework. more

Author

C.S. Lewis

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“People are merely "amusing themselves" by asking for the patience which a famine or a persecution would call for if, in the meantime, the weather and every other inconvenience sets them grumbling. One must learn to walk before one can run. So here. We - or at least I - shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found Him so, no have "tasted and seen." Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are "patches of Godlight" in the woods of our experience.”

“To adore, one must be an inferior. But the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity are equal; none is superior, none is inferior. The Son equal in all things to the Father may love the Father; He cannot adore Him. Desiring to give to His Father a divinely conceived form of love, the Word decreed to become man. Equal to the Father, He will become inferior to Him, not as God, but as man; and thus, He will be able to adore Him. In heaven, He cannot adore; on earth He can. ... Even had Adam not sinned, the Word would still have become man. ... the motive for which the Word came upon earth was the adoration that He wished to give to His Father. The expiation of sin was but secondary in the divine plan. ... By coming upon earth, the Word loses none of His sovereign majesty. He becomes less than the Father, but He remains the Infinite. Less than the Father, He can adore Him; infinite, He can adore Him infinitely. Since the Word became man, there is on this little earth of ours one who is capable of giving to the infinite God an infinite adoration: the Word of God made flesh.”

“When people pass on we must choose how to remember them. While our loved ones sleep for eternity we must carry on with our daily toil. We can elect to harbor adoration and love in our precious memories or cling to animosity and detestation. We can kindly remember our ancestors or continue to feel embedded enmity towards people who no longer walk this earth. Regardless the human frailties of the recently departed, it seems that we should aspire to clutch the best part of our ancestors being fast to our hearts. A book encapsulating a departed person’s life has many pages; we must choose which chapters to treasure and what chapters to disregard or downplay.”

“An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing.”