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Home , The Screwtape Letters

NARNIA READING PROGRAM AUGUST 14 – OCTOBER 1, 2016

THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW THE MAGICIAN’S WEEK 7: 9/25-10/1 NEPHEW CHAPTERS 13-15 Introductory Paragraph Many would claim that the Achilles heel of humankind is . They’re probably right. But what is pride? Thinking better of oneself than one ought? Sure. But is that the real issue with

pride? I don’t think so. The real trouble comes when we pretend we’re more capable than we really are. We are independent individuals, able to want… to seek… to grow… to learn… to know. But how far, on our own, can we get with this handful of power? The Witch thought she could get pretty far with hers. She treated Aslan less like a master teacher and more like a colleague – she seemed to respect him, some, out of fear. But she doubts him. How could his ideas and ways be as smart as hers? She’s got this history of dominating worlds, you see! And so she took the apple. But, at the taking, it became a cursed apple. The apple that Aslan gave Digory became an Apple of Youth. How much better off we would be if we we’d empty our palms of the handfuls of pride we’ve picked up and wait for to deliver apples into our hands? I’ll let C.S. Lewis have the last word on the subject:

“If we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present, we are on the outside of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which nature is only the first sketch.” – The Weight of Glory.

No – Paul… Paul shall have the last word here:

“May the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.” – I Thessalonians 5:23-24

Enjoy your contemplations this week, With , Tricia Wagner

THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS / QUOTES / EXCERPTS SCRIPTURES WISDOM Responsibility “Our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; Psalm 63:1-8 Digory himself understood at once that the incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying others wouldn’t and couldn’t come in with out for Him who can untie things that are now him. He went forward to the gates alone. knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.” – The Four .

Obedience by technicality “Virtue is lovely, not merely obligatory; a celestial Luke 12:1-3 Could he be wrong to taste one? After all, mistress, not a categorical imperative.” – English he thought, the notice on the gate might Literature in the Sixteenth Century. not have been exactly an order, it might have been only a piece of advice – and who “Right actions done for the wrong reason do not help cares about advice? Or even if it were an to build the internal quality or character called a order, would he be disobeying it by eating “virtue,” and it is this quality or character that really an apple? He had already obeyed the part matters.” – Mere . about taking “for others.”

Gimmicky power and promises “We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is Romans 12 “Eat it, Boy, eat it; and you and I will both perpetually concerned about his own dignity and live forever and be king and queen of this advancement, where everyone has a grievance and whole world – or of your world, if we where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of decide to go back.’ (The Witch) envy, self-importance, and resentment.” – . Logical fallacies “Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be Proverbs 9;1-6 “What has the Lion ever done for you that the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can you should be his slave?” said the Witch. be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be “What could he do to you once you are back bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind in your own world? And what would your action when you are not feeling kind and when it Mother think if she knew that you could gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is have taken her pain away and given her right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply back her life and saved your father’s heart because cruelty is wrong – only because cruelty was from being broken, and that you wouldn’t – pleasant or useful to him. In other words, badness that you’d rather run messages for a wild cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in animal in a strange world that is no business which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, of yours?... Look how heartless he has made itself: badness is only spoiled goodness…. Evil is a you. That is what he does to everyone who parasite, not an original thing.” – . listens to him. Cruel, pitiless boy! You would let your own mother die rather than –”

God’s nature as testimony “To believe that God – at least this God – exists is to Deuteronomy 7:9 “I – I don’t think he is a wild animal,” said believe that you as a person now stand in the presence Digory in a dried-up sort of voice. “He is – I of God as a Person. What would, a moment before, don’t know –” have been variations in opinion, now become variations in your personal attitude to a person. You are no longer faced with an argument which demands Digory never spoke on the way back, and your assent, but with a Person who demands your the others were shy of speaking to him He confidence.” – The World’s Last Night and Other was very sad and he wasn’t even sure all the Essays. time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan’s eyes he became sure. “If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an “ideal” or a “value,” but an utterly concrete fact… We must beware, as Professor Whitehead says, of paying God ill-judged “metaphysical compliments.” We say that God is “infinite.” In the sense that His knowledge and power extend not to some things but to all, this is true. But if by using the word “infinite” we encourage ourselves to think of Him as a formless “everything” about whom nothing in particular and everything in general is true, then it would be better to drop that word altogether. Let us dare to say that God is a particular Thing. Once He was the only Thing: but He is creative, He made other things to be. He is not those other things. He is not “universal being”: if He were there would be no creatures, for a generality can make nothing. He is “absolute being” – or rather the Absolute Being – in the sense that He alone exists in His own right.” – .

A Witch’s nature as testimony “The act of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion Psalm 27 That was where the witch made her fatal of fear is, in itself, no sin.” – The Screwtape Letters. mistake. Of course Digory knew that Polly could get away by her own ring as easily as [Senior Screwtape to junior devil Wormwood:] he could get away by his. But apparently Hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone the Witch didn’t know this. And the of all the vices, is purely painful – horrible to meanness of the suggestion that he should anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; leave Polly behind suddenly made all the Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the other things the Witch had been saying to compensation by which a frightened man reimburses him sound false and hollow. himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate.” – The Screwtape Letters.

The simplicity of righteousness “What is Duty?” John 13:12-17 (Digory) walked up to Aslan, handed him “Well, I suppose, work.” – : The Imaginary the apple, and said: “I’ve brought you the World of the Young C.S. Lewis. apple you wanted, sir.”

The acknowledgement of God “The sense that in this universe we are treated as Philippians 3:8 “Well done,” said Aslan in a voice that made strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet the earth shake. with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns Then Digory knew that all the Narnians had between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable heard those words and that the story of secret. And surely, from this point of view, the them would be handed down from father to promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes son in that new world for hundreds of years highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant and perhaps forever. But he was in no only good report with God, acceptance by God, danger of feeling conceited for he didn’t response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the think about it at all now that he was face to heart of things. The door on which we have been face with Aslan. knocking all our lives will open at last… Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited

with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.” – The Weight of Glory.

The relief of a clean conscience Remember what St. John says: “If our heart condemn Luke 11:34 This time he found he could look straight us, God is stronger than our heart. The feeling of into the Lion’s eyes. He had forgotten his being, or not being, forgiven and loved, is not what troubles and felt absolutely content. matters. One must come down to brass tacks. If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent and confess it. If there isn’t, tell the despondent devil not to be silly. You can’t help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ears or any other irrational nuisance. Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said “If you knew that all was well, what would you, to-day, do, or stop doing?” When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. “Details, please?” is the answer. The sense of dereliction cannot be a bad symptom for Our Lord Himself experienced it in its depth – “Why hast thou forsaken me?” – Letters to an American Lady.

“When a creature’s dread, or mine, has built A wall between, I think I feel the pains That Adam earned and do confess my guilt. For till I tame sly fox and timorous hare And lording lion in my self, no peace Can be without; but after, I shall dare Uncage the shadowy zoo and will cease’ Because the brutes within, I do not doubt Are archetypal of the brutes without. – Poems: “Eden’s Courtesy”

Reward “The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of Psalm 30 “For this fruit you have hungered and joy.” – The Weight of Glory. thirsted and wept,” (said Aslan). “No hand but yours shall sow the seed of the Tree that is to be the protection of Narnia. Throw the apple toward the river bank where the ground is soft.”

Beauty “The reason why I had asked if there were another Luke 3:9-14 Their heads were bare; but Helen had let river was this. All down one long aisle of the forest the her hair down and it made a great under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to improvement in her appearance. But it was tremble with dancing light; and on Earth I knew neither hair nor clothes that made them nothing so likely to produce this appearance as the look so different from their old selves. Their reflected lights cast upward by moving water. A few faces had a new expression, especially the moments later I realized my mistake. Some kind of King’s. All the sharpness and cunning and procession was approaching us, and the light came quarrelsomeness which he had picked up as from the persons who composed it. a London cabby seemed to have been First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who washed away, and the courage and kindness danced and scattered flowers – soundlessly falling, which he had always had were easier to see. lightly drifting flowers, though by the standards of the Perhaps it was the air of the young world ghost-world each petal would have weighed a that had done it, or talking with Aslan, or hundred-weight and their fall would have been like both. the crashing of boulders. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done. I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer’s features as a lip or an eye. But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face. “Is it…is it? I whispered to my guide. “Not at all,” said he. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.” “She seems to be … well, a person of particular importance?” “Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” “And who are those gigantic people… look! They’re like emeralds… who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?” “Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.” “And who are all those young men and women on each side?” “They are her sons and daughters.” “She must have had a very large family, Sir.” “Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.” “Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?” “No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.” “And how… but hullo! What are all those animals? A cat – two cats – dozens of cats. And all those dogs… why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.” “They are her beasts.” “Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.” “Every beat and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.” I looked at my teacher in amazement. “Yes,” he said. “It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.” – .

The gift that one can bear “God gives us what He has, not what He has not: He Matthew 11:1-6 “He thinks great folly, child,” said Aslan. gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness “…I cannot comfort him either; he has that is not. To be God – to be like God and to share his Mark 3:1-5 made himself unable to hear my voice. If I goodness in creaturely response – to be miserable – spoke to him, he would bear only growlings these are the only three alternatives. If we will not and roarings. Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly learn to eat the only food that the universe grows – you defend yourselves against all that might the only food that any possible universe ever can grow do you good! But I will give him the only – then we must starve.” – . gift he is still able to receive.” He bowed his great head rather sadly, and breathed into the Magician’s terrified face. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep and be separated for some few hours from all the torments you have devised for yourself.”

All get what they want “Christianity asserts that every individual human John 3:16-21 “Things always work according to their being is going to live for ever, and this must be either nature,” (said Aslan). “(The Witch) has won true or false. Now there are a good many things which her heart’s desire’ she has unwearying would not be worth bothering about if I were going to strength and endless days like a goddess. But live only seventy years, but which I had better bother length of days with an evil heart is only about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. length of misery and already she begins to Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually know it. All get what they want; they do getting worse – so gradually that the increase in not always like it.” seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.” – Mere Christianity.

Death as a gift “The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in Psalm 23 And Digory could say nothing, for tears the matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic choked him and he gave up all hopes of Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to saving his Mother’s life’ but at the same heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in time he knew that there might be things begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed – more terrible even than losing someone you might grow tired of his vile sport – might have a love by death. temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t. – .

Life as a gift “If we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we Revelation 21:3-7 “That is what would have happened, child, believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star with a stolen apple. It is not what will and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then happen now. What I give you now will we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the bring joy. It will not, in your world, give modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near endless life, but it will heal. Go. Pluck her the truth as prophecy. At present, we are on the an apple form the Tree.” outside of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which nature is only the first sketch.” – The Weight of Glory.

More than words “Pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our Psalm 28:6-9 “Please,” he said, “may we go home now?” sensibility… (Digory) had forgotten to say “Thank you,” But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly, but he meant it, and Aslan understood. there are. But in calling them “bad pleasures” I can take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean “pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.” It is the stealing of the applet that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory. That does not palliate the stealing. It makes it worse. There is sacrilege in the theft. We have abused a holy thing. I have tried, since that moment, to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different. How shall I put it? We can’t – or I can’t – hear the song of a bird simply as a sound. Its meaning or message (“That’s a bird”) comes with it inevitably… This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore. Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give me this.” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of the Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun… I don’t always achieve it. One obstacle is inattention. Another is the wrong kind of attention. One could, if one practiced, hear simply a roar and not the roaring- of-the-wind. In the same way, only far too easily, one can concentrate on the pleasure as an event in one’s own nervous system – subjectify it – and ignore the smell of Deity that hangs about it. A third obstacle is greed. Instead of saying “This also is Thou,” one may say the fatal word Encore. There is also conceit: the dangerous reflection that not everyone can find God in a plain slice of bread and butter, or that others would condemn as simply “grey” the sky in which I am delightedly observing such delicacies of pearl and dove and silver. You notice that I am drawing no distinction between sensuous and aesthetic pleasures. But why should I? The line is almost impossible to draw and what use would it be if one succeeded in drawing it? If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labour: for in so far as it succeeds, almost every day furnishes us with, so to speak, “bearings” on the Bright Blur. It becomes brighter but less blurry.” – , Chiefly on Prayer.

God’s goodness “God has no human needs. Human love, as Plato Exodus 33:18-23 Both the children were looking up into the teaches us, is the child of Poverty – of want or lack; it Lion’s face as he spoke these worlds. And all is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved at once (they never knew exactly how it which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far happened) the face seemed to be a sea of from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all tossing gold in which they were floating, the goodness which the object has, loving it first into and such a sweetness and power rolled existence and then into real, though derivative, about them and over them and entered lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but them that they felt they had never really cannot need or get it. In that sense all his love is, as it been happy or wise or good, or even alive were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has and awake, before. And the memory of that everything to give and nothing to receive.” – The moment stayed with them always, so that as Problem of Pain. long as they both lived, if ever they were sad or afraid or angry, the thought of all that golden goodness, and the feeling that it was still there, quite close, just round some corner or just behind some door, would come back and made them sure, deep down inside, that all was well.

The “God is basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other I Chronicles 29:10-15 There were of course all sorts of colored facthood. At all costs therefore He must not be things in the bedroom; the colored thought of as a featureless generality. If He exists at counterpane on the bed, the wallpaper, the all, he is the most concrete thing there is, the most sunlight from the window, and Mother’s individual, “organized and minutely articulated.” He is pretty, pale blue dressing jacket. But the unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too moment Digory took the Apple out of his definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language.” – pocket, all those things seemed to have Miracles. scarcely any color at all. Every one of them, even the sunlight, looked faded and dingy. The brightness of the apple threw strange lights on the ceiling. Nothing else was worth looking at: you couldn’t look at anything else. And the smell of the Apple of Youth was as if there was a window in the room that opened on .

Hope “But we are tethered to Hope that will promise Hebrews 10:19-23 He peeled it and cut it up and gave it to her anything without blushing, piece by piece. And no sooner had she And the flowing water of foreknowledge is far finished it than she smiled and her head away beyond our reach. sank back on the pillow and she was asleep: Therefore neither ashore nor in the hollow ships a real, natural, gentle sleep, without any of those nasty drugs, which was, as Digory will any praise knew, the thing in the whole world that she Be given to an act on which the doer does not wanted most. And he was sure now that her stake his life.” – Poems. face looked a little different. He bent down and kissed her very softly and stole out of the room with a beating heart, taking the core of the apple with him. For the rest of that day, whenever he looked at the things about him and saw how ordinary and unmagical they were, he hardly dared to hope; but when he remembered the face of Aslan he did hope.