Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Spiritual’

On Faith

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on April 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

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
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

Read Full Post »

On Pride

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 7, 2014| Leave a Comment »

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

 

From Mere Christianity

Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

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
 
Indeed, we have come to the center of Christian morals. And it certainly is how the devil became the devil (the nothing, absence, no thing or the not). 
 
Father, forgive me of my pride, heal me of my self-conceit and lift me out of my anti-God state into the light seen only from the kneeling eyes of one humbled into perfect God-state. Amen,
 
i am,
Z gardener

Read Full Post »

On Equality

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on April 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »

“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”
 
“Ah, equality?” said the Director. “We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”
 
“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”
 
“You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes—that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”
 
That Hideous Strength. Copyright © 1945 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All right reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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.
 
And yes, we also have equal access to God’s love, Eden and eternal life. Whether we act in a way to claim them and live in them is up to us. If we choose to follow God’s will an walk in God’s way, even our inequality of sin and repentance will not keep us from God’s love, Eden or eternal life. 
 
Equally loved,
Z gardener

 

Read Full Post »

On Fundamental Deception

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. 
 
Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-à-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. 
 
Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
 
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
 
Our time, as ourselves, does not belong exclusively to us. We are here by the grace of God to commune with and share our time, talents and treasures. To think or do otherwise is to take from God that which has been God’s all along. he just loans it to us for his good purpose.
 
Sharing time,
Z gardener

Read Full Post »

On Depression

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

 
 
My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think that we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his “faith in human nature” who is really sad.
 
The Problem of Pain. Copyright © 1940, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 by 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.
 
It is very difficult for someone in the midst of great loss or pain to hear that we are to “rejoice in all things.” However, the degree of difficulty in it’s hearing does not diminish its truth. The challenge therefore, is to continue believing, expecting and searching for the blessing hidden in the pain. If we can cling to that truth, and search for it, we will almost always find it, and it will be the best path through our present difficulty.
 
Seeking the joy,
Z gardener

Read Full Post »

Screwtape Reveals The Nothing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 26, 2014| 1 Comment »

 
The Christians describe the Enemy (Screwtape’s term for God) as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
 
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
 
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.
 
The “Nothing” referred by Screwtape as “strong” is better said as “no thing”. That is what evil is. It the the “no thing”, the lack of light, the absence of  communion, the void, the not. God, on the other hand is light and constitutes “every thing that is”, and without which nothing that is would even exist. 
 
Sin is the absence something. It is a state of being in which we attempt to exist without God in our lives. Sin is a lie, the false illusion of separation from God, and it is truly nothing. It is the absence of something, just as the dark is no thing, but is only the absence of something, light. Treat sin as such and find true peace, joy and love that is in every thing.
 
Loving every thing,
Z gardener

Read Full Post »

On Demons

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 18, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
I believe (in the existence of the devil) not in the sense that it is part of my creed, but in the sense that it is one of my opinions. My religion would not be in ruins if this opinion were shown to be false. Till that happens—and proofs of a negative are hard to come by—I shall retain it. It seems to me to explain a good many facts. It agrees with the plain sense of Scripture, the tradition of Christendom, and the beliefs of most men at most times. And it conflicts with nothing that any of the sciences has shown to be true.
 
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.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.
 
It has been my experience that there is a malevolent, intelligent and designing entity that afflicts mankind now, as it has throughout our common history. It tried to separate itself from God (which is impossible) and fell from grace (existing in the illusion of separation from God) as did mankind. This negative spirit enters our physical world in the tempter’s voice that urges us to do that which we know or feel is wrong. Just as God’s, who enters the physical world through the voice of our conscience (the Holy Spirit), urges us to do that which is is right.
 
We can be wrong in our opinions about that which is right or wrong, but we should never second guess our conscience. That too is the tempter trying to separate us from God. You see, the tempter’s pride, as did Man’s, caused its fall. Rather than repent and return to God, the tempter refused to accept being wrong and creates it’s own hell, futilely attempting to confound or confuse God’s children, attempting to bring us into this its self-imposed hell (this illusion of separation from God). Misery loves company, as does the wrong and unrepentant.
 
When choosing the right, I have experienced firsthand this tempter. Most every time I chose to turn away from the wrong and toward the right, the tempter’s voice and many obstacles appeared to turn me away. It was usually uphill, hard, frustrating, alienating and often frightening, And when I attempted to turn away from the good, that same voice was there, talking over my conscience, providing sensory stimulation, easing my descent and turning my path down toward the wrong. I attest as surely as anything I know, that everyone would do well to heed the Bible’s wisdom and Man’s common experience on this subject.
 
As a rationalist by nature, I find this no harder to believe than the strange reality of Quantum Physics or the Big Bang Theory or the Intelligent Design Theory. I personally ascribe to each and find them all in perfect harmony with each other; unified and indivisible in this wonderful creation. 
 
It is no harder for an educated and enlightened person to believe this than it is to believe in new technologies, modern science or mind-boggling discoveries! And be assured brothers and sisters, it is much more important and will be much better to believe in this also. Remember, “Their wisdom will make them foolish, but our foolishness will make us wise”. 
 
Of conscience,
Z gardener 

Read Full Post »

On Acting On the Light One Has

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

TO MARY NEYLAN, who had told Lewis she was going to resume the prac- tice of her faith after years of alienation and theological struggle: 
 
On acting on the light one has; on the unreliability of religious emotion; on confession of sins to a spiritual director; and on daily spiritual and Bible reading.
 
 
Congratulations . . . on your own decision. I don’t think this decision comes either too late or too soon. One can’t go on thinking it over for ever; and one can begin to try to be a disciple before one is a professed theologian. In fact they tell us, don’t they, that in these matters to act on the light one has is almost the only way to more light. Don’t be worried about feeling that, or about feeling at all. 
 
s to what to do, I suppose the normal next step, after self-examination repentance and restitution, is to make your Communion; and then to continue as well as you can, praying as well as you can . . . and fulfilling your daily duties as well as you can. And remember always that religious emotion is only a servant. . . . This, I say, would be the obvious course. If you want anything more e.g. Confession and Absolution which our church enjoins on no-one but leaves free to all—let me know and I’ll find you a director. If you choose this way, remember it’s not the psychoanalyst over again: the confessor is the representative of Our Lord and declares His forgiveness—his advice or ‘understanding’ though of real, is of secondary importance.
 
For daily reading I suggest (in small doses) Thomas à Kempis’ ‘Imitation of Christ’ and the ‘Theologia Germanica’…and of course the Psalms and New Testament. Don’t worry if your heart won’t respond: do the best you can. You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, or you wouldn’t have come where you now are: and the love that matters is His for you—yours for Him may at present exist only in the form of obedience. He will see to the rest.
 
This has been great news for me I need hardly say. You have all my prayers (not that mine are worth much).
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II: Family Letters 1905-1931. Copyright © 2004 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.
 
Obedience is the first step of true enlightenment. In order to appreciate and accept the light, we must understand that we are in the dark. Obedience shows that we are prepared to be led. Faith is the manifestation of God’s call. Joy, peace and love are the results of God’s leadership in our lives.
 
Obedient first,
Z gardener

Read Full Post »

On the four kinds of love; on the various forms of charity; on pride as the pleasure of self-approval; and on self-forgetfulness.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 13, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
 
 
Of course taking in the poor illegitimate child is ‘charity’. Charity means love. It is called Agape in the New Testament to distinguish it from Eros (sexual love), Storgë (family affection) and Philia (friendship) [E.g., I John 4:9]. So there are 4 kinds of ‘love’, all good in their proper place, but Agape is the best because it is the kind God has for us and is good in all circumstances. (There are people I mustn’t’ feel Eros towards, and people I can’t feel Storge or Philia for; but I can practice Agape to God, Angels, Man and Beast, to the good and the bad, the old and the young, the far and the near.
 
You see Agape is all giving, not getting. Read what St. Paul says about it in First Corinthians Chap. 13. Then look at a picture of Charity (or Agape) in action in St. Luke, chap 10 v. 30–35. And then, better still, look at Matthew chap 25 v. 31–46: from which you see that Christ counts all that you do for this baby exactly as if you had done it for Him when He was a baby in the manger at Bethlehem: you are in a sense sharing in the things His mother did for Him. Giving money is only one way of showing charity: to give time and toil is far better and (for most of us) harder. And notice, though it is all giving—you needn’t expect any reward— how you do gets rewarded almost at once.
 
Yes, I know one doesn’teven want to be cured of one’s pride because it gives pleasure. But the pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch: but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither, but have everything else (God, our fellow-humans, animals, the garden and the sky) instead.
 
Yes, I do believe people are still healed by miracles by faith: but of course whether this has happened in any one particular case, is not so easy to find out.
 
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.
 
Agape is the closest human equivalent to God’s love for us. When we give unconditionally, the God in us is sovereign in our lives and all good things will be multiplied. All bad things will be diminished or turned to good.and that which is unclear will become transparent. This is life in Eden as God created us to live it.
 
Living it,
Z gardener

Read Full Post »

On Conversion

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

 
Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before, one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.
 
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.
 
When we accept God, it is our spirit that changes, not our physical circumstances. However, when we remain true to our relationship with God, our physical world begines to refelect our spiritual world until both are one and the same. Then, we do live in a different world because our perpective is correct and our understanding is true. That world is called Eden and it is the garden beautiful. As within, so without.
 
In conversion,
Z gardener

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »