Sunday, December 1, 2013

Beyond the Wardrobe

On C. S. Lewis. From Crisis:
Lewis often thought of himself, he said, as a “converted pagan living among apostate Puritans.”  What he meant by that, I think, is key to an understanding of his life and character.   That he regarded himself as someone for whom nothing less than finding the Well at the World’s End would ever truly satisfy.   Nothing less, he was sure, could possibly meet the tremendous thirst of the human spirit, the sheer irrepressible thrust of man’s longing for God.  Never mind the forces of encircling secularity, which conspire at almost every turn to deny the truth of the human heart, they mustn’t be allowed to stand in the way of deep, deep desire.   “Man’s mounting spirit,” to use that lovely line taken from “The Caged Skylark” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, while it may only be found “in his bone-house, mean house” of fallen and contingent being, was nevertheless intended from all eternity to soar far beyond the stars.  We are, each of us, destined to commune with the living God himself. (Read more.)
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