Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Back to English only - briefly

I came across a little book by C. S. Lewis. I think I am going to disagree with him at some point - for I have both deeply agreed and deeply disagreed with him in my life. But what a scholar! What a writer! What a scope in this first short essay on Miracles. Both his literary and scientific backgrounds show through. The Book is God in the Dock. Just a few essays. Here is a quote from the end of the first essay.

Divine reality is like a fugue. All His acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another. It is this that makes Christianity so difficult to talk about. Fix your mind on any one story or any one doctrine and it becomes at once a magnet to which truth and glory come rushing from all levels of being. Our featureless pantheistic unities and glib rationalistic distinctions are alike defeated by the seamless, yet ever varying, texture of reality, the liveness, the elusiveness, the intertwined harmonies of the multi-dimensional fertility of God.
The day may come when I capitalize pronouns - or write 'Christianity' without thinking of the dismal and destructive aspects of Christendom, but I don't know how to assume the good when I see the evil also. But this little book, and this little essay, and this little quote serve to remind me in the early morning that there is a multi-dimensional fullness which is invisible without our response of faith. Weak as my experience is, poor and incomplete as is my scholarship, I have no better words than what I am given by the frame of the history of the canonical texts from the people of Israel with which to find in the interstices that both expressible and inexpressible reality.

1 comment:

ElShaddai Edwards said...

Brilliant quote - thank you for sharing that!