It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.
From Miracles
Compiled in Words to Live By
Compiled in Words to Live By
Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Copyright 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Revised 1960, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
The acceptance that the “self” is nothing in and of itself, is the beginning of spiritual wisdom. It is only through indivisible communion with God and God’s creation that our existence has any true light, being, value or real meaning.
Trapped inside the artificial self, cut off from true existence, we merely grow and reproduce without really facing the truth that, without God, we are no thing, but merely the absence of something. By facing our nothingness, we are empowered to turn our face toward the light, toward all this is and away from the dark and all that is not.
Facing the light,
Z gardener
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