“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. To be steady on all fronts besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
- Martin Luther
[...] there's always something that has to be left behind if you're going to embrace God's vocation for you. One rather portentous but nonetheless very profound way of expressing this is to say the Christian life according to the New Testament is to be lived according to the baptismal pattern, which means that experiences of renunciation even to death (or what feels like death) constantly precede experiences of resurrection in which you're made rich again. But the resurrection doesn't come until after the death. And it's round the circle of that pattern for each of us over and over again: death followed by resurrection is the recurring sequence. This is part of the Lord's discipline for our personal living, just as it's part of the pattern of the Lord's work in the church and in the world.
- p.170, Never Beyond Hope by J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom
The author, Tim Challies, is a popular Christian blogger. He is gifted in writing, and his theology is well-informed and reformed. He tackles the topic of spiritual discernment systematically, and I found it helpful. It also shows that his wide reading, which helps the content of the book interesting and engaging.The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don't we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this. I have lost the fruition I once had of H. And I am far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some time have of God. But by praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing.
- p. 62-63 A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But not there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.
- p. 47 A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me to glory.
- Psalm 73:23-24
"I must think more about H. and less about myself.
Yes, that sounds very well. But there's a snag. I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts - real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on facts, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan't). But won't the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me."
- p. 18 C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed
"Images of the Holy easily become holy images - sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are 'offended' by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not. But the same thing happens in our private prayers.
All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead. [...] Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour."
- p 66-67 C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. I want H., not something that is like her.
- p 65 C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed
"I'm not against big words per se or fancy or obscure words, obviously I love them, but I'm opposed to using them for their own sake," [Mr. Shae] says.
"If words are to form a communication, you use them as a tool to communicate to people and it's pointless to intentionally use a word that no-one else knows."
I was hearing some alarm bells ringing when I first started reading the book, A Grief Observed. The foreword and introduction to this short book sounded as if C. S. Lewis gave up his belief in God through his time of grief. Even as I was reading the first chapter of the four, I was feeling uneasy when Lewis seemed to give up his hope of heaven, and makes much out of death. But I believe Lewis was simply being honest, honest about how he felt. As the book progressed, this seemingly un-Christian confession was elaborated and in the last chapter of the book, his faith and hope in God was restored, or rather, more at the front of his confession, since I do not think Lewis had lost his faith at any point in the earlier chapters.And, we must refuse to speak in sanitized clinical euphemisms like calling adulteries “affairs,” fornication “dating,” and perverts “partners” because God uses frank words for deplorable sin so we will feel its sickness without anesthesia.
