Solid and Whole

But you will be healed. You were meant to be solid and whole, and you will be. – JRR Tolkien

Self to Christ

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves,’ to keep personal happiness as our great …

God Suffers With His Creatures

"They killed him, you know, my lady, in a terrible way that one is afraid even to think of. But he insisted that he laid down his life; that he allowed them to take it. Now I ask whether that grandest thing, crowning his life, the yielding of it to the hand of violence, he …

Can’t You Believe It?

"You think it is all an old story--that fable. Can't you believe it? All I can say is, I can; and I expect to find that the raising of that man was simply the type of what we shall all find to be true. There seems to me nothing unreasonable or difficult about it." — …

Strange Paths

My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am. Like weary waves thought follows upon thought, But the still depth beneath is all thine own, And there thou mov'st in paths to us unknown. Out of strange strife thy peace is strangely wrought; If the …

The Freedom of the Children

"Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. He died that we might live--but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself that he might live unto God. If we do not die to ourselves, we …

Deus Absconditus, and Reading Between the Lines

"Of all Biblical passages, the one which occurs most frequently in Lewis's writings is Christ's cry from the cross: 'My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (Matt. 24:46 and Mark 15:34, a quotation of Ps. 22:1a). Not only are its appearances in Lewis's work very numerous, they are also spread across the whole …

All a Man Has to Do

“Somehow or other," said he, "notwithstanding the beauty of this country of Faerie, in which we are, there is much that is wrong in it. If there are great splendours, there are corresponding horrors; heights and depths; beautiful women and awful fiends; noble men and weaklings. All a man has to do, is to better …

The Unknown Abysses of the Soul

And so she vanished. With a sad heart, soothed by humility, and the knowledge of her peace and gladness, I bethought me what now I should do. First, I must leave the tower far behind me, lest, in some evil moment, I might be once more caged within its horrible walls. But it was ill …

Partakers of the Divine Patience

‘Of one thing I am pretty sure,’ he (Falconer) resumed, ‘that the same recipe Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: “Do the thing that lies next you.” That is all our business. Hurried results are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the divine patience. …