Roses and Daffodils: In Honour of Personality

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, by CS Lewis
Progress: completed

Some of my difficulty in presenting Lewis' Letters to Malcolm more coherently is due to the fact that 1) he tends to ramble (which is appropriate, since these are letters, after all) and 2) he is so dang smart. Sometimes he just loses me for a paragraph or two, and not just because I'm reading in bed. Case in point:

"The abstraction's value is almost entirely negative. It warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical expression by prosaic extrapolations." (51) - My brain is slow to digest comments such as these.

I also had to look up the word "concupiscence" today. It means "lust," but I suppose it looks better in print. I've now bookmarked the Oxford Dictionary website on my computer to keep up with such colourful words and expand my vocabulary.

The statements which I do understand are so profound that each one deserves more time than I have to give the entire book:

"There is danger in the very concept of religion. It carries the suggestion that this is one more department of life, an extra department added to the economic, the social, the intellectual, the recreational, and all the rest. But that whose claims are infinite can have no standing as a department. Either it is an illusion or else our whole life falls under it.We have no non-religious activities; only religious and irreligious." (30) - My world gets bigger every day as I work out with more clarity what this really means. I am still discovering walls that have sprung up in my life, barriers that seek to segregate and compartmentalize what was never meant to stand alone or apart from my faith. I break them down, brick by brick.

"Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ." (41) - This is a new idea to me, and I think I like it. Anxieties are not the ideal, but neither are they sins. They can become pathways which lead us to Christ - if, as Lewis writes, we allow them to do so.

"One of the purposes for which God instituted prayer may have been to bear witness that the course of events is not governed like a state but created like a work of art to which every being makes its contribution, and in which every being is both an end and a means." (56) - I love any statement that imagines God as an Artist. This image, for me, represents love, passion, foresight, attention to detail, beauty and goodness. How much more - beyond the limits of our human imaginations - must divine creativity (Lewis would say the only creativity in an ultimate sense) demonstrate these things!

"Creation seems to be delegation through and through. He will do nothing simply of Himself which can be done by creatures. I suppose this is because He is a giver. And he has nothing to give but Himself. And to give Himself is to do His deeds - in a sense, and on varying levels to be Himself - through the things He has made. In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of creation surely is that he was not content to be all. He intends to be 'all in all.'" (70) - This passage emphasizes at once the complete superfluity of creation (in and of itself) and the deep pleasure God derives from creating, and interacting with his creation in love. He needs nothing, so He gives, and that brings Him pleasure.

His humour keeps me smiling. Not-so-random tidbits of information from his vast storehouse of knowledge tickle my funny bone:

"You remember that the ancient Persians debated everything twice: once when they were drunk and once when they were sober." (45)

Here is one of my all-time favourite quotes from Lewis:

"If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell. 'One fold' doesn't mean 'one pool.' Cultivated roses and daffodils are no more alike than wild roses and daffodils." (10)

This is a message that has shone like a beacon into the stormy waters of my spiritual journey: Personality matters to God. It was created by Him and is honoured by Him. The closer I move toward Christ, reflecting Him inside and out, the more unique I will be. In my black-sheep days of rebellion I felt that the more Christian one became, the more that person would begin to look like every other Christian: Christian robots. Predictable. Homogeneous. Standardized. Uniform. Eventually all individual thought would disappear in order to make room for more quotes from Scripture. CD and book collections would shrink until all that were left were hymns and devotionals. I wasn't sure movies would even make the cut.

In more recent years, as I have endeavoured to move out of rebellion and into obedience, I have embraced these words as a life raft. These passions, these dreams, this sense of humour, and even these limitations - are part of who God made me. They may need refining, prioritizing, postponing or redeeming, but they are part of me, and God loves all of me. These things will be perfected, not deleted, as I move closer toward Christ in obedience.

I have always taken secret pleasure in the picture of C. S. Lewis that adorns that backs of my Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace & Co editions of Lewis' books: he doesn't look robotic, does he? In fact, he looks rather impish. C. S. Lewis has always served as a sort of poster boy to remind me that people much smarter than I have struggled with the demands of Christianity and found it worthy of their lives - personalities and brains included.

Lewis has plenty more to say and I have plenty more to digest, but now it is time for bed. Goodnight, and thanks for journeying with me!

Becky

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