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Posts Tagged ‘Spiritual’

On Heaven

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 3, 2014| Leave a Comment »

No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
 
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 

Heaven and God are more wonderful than we can possibly imagine. Any attempt to quantify, or even effectively describe them in human terms, will fall short. Yet, that which we can experience of God and heaven here below are greater than anything else we can experience. And once experienced, will ever draw us toward it. When we respond to that call, then all the joy, peace, hope and love possible become available to us here and now. That is how we experience God and heaven now, and how we prepare for the unimaginable experience of being with God in heaven forever.

 
Responding to the call,
Z gardener

 

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On Real Life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »

What man, in his natural condition, does not have, is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use the same word life for both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that the ‘greatness’ of space and the ‘greatness’ of God were the same sort of greatness. In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. 
 
The Biological life is Bios which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. 
 
Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
 
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
 
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

Let us come to spiritual life each day so that our biological life will come to reflect it. That is how we experience the love, peace, joy, hope and beauty of the garden God gave us here and now. That is also how we prepare ourselves here and now for eternal spiritual life forever with God.
 
In the spirit,
Z Gardener 

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Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

On Free Will
 
 
The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave them free will: this surrendering a portion of His omnipotence (it is again a deathlike or descending movement) because He saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out (and this is the re-ascent) a deeper happiness and a fuller splendor than any world of automata would admit.
 
From Miracles
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.
 
Free will gives us the ability to choose. We can choose between red or blue, sweet or sour, happy or sad and yes, good or bad. Free will would be of no value if there were no choices to make. So, for free will to matter, we must have choices; between red and blue and yes, good and bad. This is just one answer as to why God allows bad to exist. It must be so if we are to be creatures of divine nature endowed with free will.
 
Free to choose,
Z gardener

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On learning to depend only on God

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »

For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) ‘having to depend solely on God’ is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. That trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained, we will not turn to Him as long as He leaves us anything else to turn to. 
 
I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. In the hour of death and the day of judgement, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwillingly) to begin practising it here on earth. It is good of Him to force us: but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time….
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 

 

Indeed, how hard it can be to feel that it is good. But, when we follow God’s guidance, we will be able to know it is good before we can see it is good and then feel it is good until we can see the good in it. That is God’s promise and this witness is true.
 
Depending on God,
Z gardener

 

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On The Real Us

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. 
 
He invented— as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. 
 
In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 
 
Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. 
 
It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
 
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

We are infinitely more than the sum total of all the eggs and bacon we have consumed. Yet our commonly held sensory perception of self, creates a barrier to knowing our true nature and character. It is only when we let go of the self-hood we try to claim, that we can fully express the true self who is God within us.
 
We can not create our own universe, but we can become one with the universe created by God for us by seeking and following God’s will. Then, we will see and experience the true reality and be the real and true self God created us to be. 
 
Getting real,
Z gardener

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On Forgiveness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. 
 
Forgiveness says “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology, I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it, you weren’t really to blame.”. . .
 
Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.
 
The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 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 only unforgivable sin is one for which we do not repent, for which we think no forgiveness is needed, and/or for that which we have not admitted or accepted.
 
Forgiveness must be sought by a person who has accepted their sin, turned away from it and asked to be forgiven for it. It can not be given to those who believe they do not need it.
 
Seeking forgiveness,
Z gardener

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On keeping to a regular pattern of religious life during the storms of life.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 13, 2014| 1 Comment »

I agree: the only thing one can usually change in one’s situation is oneself. And yet one can’t change that either—only ask Our Lord to do so, keeping on meanwhile with one’s sacraments, prayers, and ordinary rule of life. One mustn’t fuss too much about one’s state. 
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

The state we must be concerned with is the state of our mind, heart and will. That is best supported by keeping the pilgrim’s way each day. As within, so without.
 
In state,

Z gardener

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On Happiness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 12, 2014| Leave a Comment »

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could “be like gods”—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
 
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
 
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, 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

 

Indeed, we are Gods; not so we can live in false separation, but in unity with God and each other. Hell is the illusion of separation from God. We can not be happy apart from God because we can not be separated from God. We can only delude ourselves that we are separate. When we try to eliminate God from our lives or we fail to recognize God, we simply blind ourselves to the truth and stumble in the dark.
 
To live in joy, rise above hurt and exist in peace, we must accept and live in God. That is where we find Eden, heaven and the real us.
 
Being one,
 
Z gardener

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On Bereavement

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
 
 
I (believe that we can be) divinely supported at the time of our terrible calamity. People often are. It is afterwards, when the new and bleaker life is beginning to be a routine, that one often feels one has been left rather unaided. I am sure one is not really so. God’s presence is not the same as the feeling of God’s presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least.
 
Loneliness, I am pretty sure, is one of the ways by which we can grow spiritually. Until we are lonely we may easily think we have got further than we really have in Christian love; our (natural and innocent, but merely natural, not heavenly) pleasure in being loved—in being, as you say, an object of interest to someone—can be mistaken for progress in love itself, the outgoing active love which is concerned with giving, not receiving. It is this latter which is the beginning of sanctity.
 
But of course you know all this: alas, so much easier to know in theory than to submit to day by day in practice! Be very regular in your prayers and communions: and don’t value special ‘guidances’ any more than what comes through ordinary Christian teaching, conscience, and prudence.
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Enough said!
Z gardener

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On Spiritual Troughs

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 2, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [the Enemy’s] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of self-hood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. 
 
One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. 
 
We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
 
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
According to this week’s Lectionary  bible verse from the book of John (on this the the seventh Sunday of Easter), “Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.” And, this is exactly how it happens. Like a vacuum, the no-thing attempts take from us and to “suck out” of us while the every-thing (God) wants to give to us and fill us to overflowing.
 
So, give thanks for the highs and the lows in life knowing that even our troughs are places where God’s giving will fill us with what we need to live in our Eden.
 
Being filled,
Z gardener
 
 

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