The Father of our spirits is not content that we should know Him as we now know each other. There is a better, closer, nearer than any human way of knowing, and to that He is guiding us across all the swamps of our unteachableness, the seas of our faithlessness, the desert of our ignorance.…
“My Lord, I find that nothing else will do, But follow where thou goest, sit at thy feet, And where I have thee not, still run to meet. Roses are scentless, hopeless are the morns, Rest is but weakness, laughter crackling thorns, If thou, the Truth, do not make them the true: Thou art my…
— I wonder how you can have arrived at such ideas.” “There is nothing wonderful in it, my lady,” returned Malcolm. “Why should not a youth, a boy, a child, for as a child I thought about what the kingdom of heaven could mean, desire with all his might that his heart and mind should…
“One thing is plain—that we must love the strife-maker; another is nearly as plain—that, if we do not love him, we must leave him alone; for without love there can be no peace-making, and words will but occasion more strife. To be kind neither hurts nor compromises. Kindness has many phases, and the fitting form…
“Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone May determine the course of a river. He was that stone at this horrible moment which had become the center of the whole universe. The eldila of…
— GK Chesterton, Collected Works, XXXV, p. 500 Excellent essay, esp. for his points on the specifically human things (compare to Lewis’s list of things we can only get as a result of free will), and his commentary on the modern mind, and criticism & creativity. Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is…
Have you not seen in our daysOf any whose story, song or artDelights us, our sincerest praiseMeans, when all’s said, ‘You break my heart’? — CS Lewis, Poems, p. 133
Courage! for life is hasting
To endless life away;
The inner fire, unwasting,
Transfigures our dull clay
See the stars melting, sinking,
In life wine, golden bright
We, of the splendour drinking,
Shall grow to stars of light.
When I look all around in this world There seems so much darkness and pain; Deep heartbreak and sorrow abound Hearts fight, and they lose once again Such strange “truths” we hear everywhere That mind begins to grow faint, At the strength and the waves of these forces And the ever returning complaint But You…
“It is not the fetters that gall, but the fetters that soothe, which eat into the soul. When the fetters of gold are gone, on which the man delighted to gaze, though they held him fast to his dungeon- wall, buried from air and sunshine, then first will he feel them in the soreness of…
