MUSINGS: Happy Birthday, C.S. Lewis!

Timely quotes from a great man... and what God is really like

I’m a huge fan of C.S. Lewis, not least because his book, Mere Christianity, helped me as well as my son to find our footing in the Christian faith. And then there’s the fiction, like his Chronicles of Narnia series and The Great Divorce, which I recently read and recommend to all believers because it shows so clearly how one could enter heaven or hell.

Here are some memorable—and incredibly timely—quotes from C.S. Lewis:

Jesus Christ did not say, “Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.”

It’s a perfect rebuttal of the misguided “believers” who are convinced that Jesus’s role in the world is to affirm our every self-centered whim and dysfunctional behavior.

Not so.

“If it feels good, do it” is actually the devil’s tagline. Warlock Aleister Crowley, who proudly called himself “the Beast 666,” coined the phrase that all witches, sorcerers, and Satanists live by: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

You’re not a free spirit; you’re not liberated; you’re not an independent woman. Trapped in the snares of the devil and deceived into choosing yourself over God is what you are. You’ve been tricked into inflating your ego at the price of your soul.

I know. I was there.

This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again… God is the only comfort. He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.

I remember the moment when I, a decades-long New Ager and pre-Catholic, finally realized that they had lied to me.

The trigger was an iconic speech by since-canceled priest, Fr. James Altman (watch the clip here).

It felt like the bottom was falling out from under me.

Unlike what I’d believed for so many years, God was not an amorphous, sentient, loving energy that was content with creating stuff but didn’t care about exerting any control over its creation.

I’d always taken the term “personal God” to mean the degree of closeness with Him that we were able to achieve. But suddenly I realized it meant that He was an actual person, someone with very clear demands and desires… and I was supposed to (gulp) obey Him.

In one monumental flash of insight, I understood everything. I was not a powerful co-creator as I’d always thought. I was the lowly creature. He had made me for Himself. He literally made me (and all of mankind) out of dirt.

As the priest intones on Ash Wednesday, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” I’d never taken that literally until that moment.

Now I saw: God was my Master, and it was only because of His boundless love and mercy that He didn’t regard me as His slave or plaything but as His beloved child. He very much paid attention to what I did and said and thought, and He wanted me to be holy, to stop sinning (aka, stop doing things that displeased Him).

This sudden shift of worldviews was downright dizzying… and scary. New Agers and Law of Attraction disciples view God (also called “The Universe” with a capital U) as something like a big Amazon in the sky—learn the right techniques and “manifest” what you desire; mind over matter. But I knew instinctively that this new God person was not to be trifled with. He was more loving than the Amazon God, but He was also a lot more demanding.

What do people mean when they say, “I am not afraid of God because I know He is good?” Have they never even been to a dentist?

God is good. He is loving, kind, patient, and “slow to anger,” as the Psalms say. That doesn't mean He never gets angry. It’s too bad that in our uber-scientific era, nobody gives even a fleeting thought to the possibility that God is showing His displeasure through the elements, through His creation.

In biblical times, people knew that earthquakes, fierce lightning storms, floods, etc. meant the Lord was angry. Today, nothing will convince them…

…even when a horizontal lightning bolt strikes a brick wall and eradicates a mural of “American idol” George Floyd with a crown on his head (which actually happened)…

…or when two months’ worth of rain falls within 48 hours in Germany, creating never-before-seen flooding (which actually happened)…

…or when a female comedian blasphemes Jesus on stage and immediately passes out as if felled by an axe, cracking her skull in the process (which actually happened).

If we would remove our blindfolds for just a second, we couldn’t miss all those signs that VatiGod is sending us: TURN AROUND. REPENT. BE SAVED. But He is speaking mostly to deaf ears, and one day we’ll be sorry we didn’t listen.

This C.S. Lewis quote gives me the goosebumps:

Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.

Take it or leave it… or, as I used to say in my pre-piety days: Sh** or get off the pot. Nothing more and nothing less is being asked of us. And the time is now.

Is time running out? Is Jesus coming soon? I don’t know more than anyone else, but after reading Christine Watkins’s book, The Warning, which provided the slap-in-the-face wakeup call that led to my conversion, I can’t help but feel that this “Mini Judgment” or “Illumination of Conscience” may be right around the corner. (More on this in future posts.)

In the meantime, I’ll end with this C.S. Lewis quote:

Human history is the long, terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.