...if what I just wrote sounds weird, it's probably the influence of an old english literature course I'm taking...I guess here's the "translation"...
I like C.S. Lewis because he is cunning and to the point, he writes what some christians would consider stern but they are in fact the words we need to hear. I highlighted the parts I liked.
Here goes!
The real problem of the Christian life
comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you
wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like
wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them
all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view,
letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on,
all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in
out of the wind.
We can only do it for moments at first. But from those
moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now
we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between
paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks
right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, ‘Be
perfect,’ He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It
is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder—in
fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would
be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are
like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary,
decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of
the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is
so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different,
will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented— as
an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I
were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in
Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and
try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and
upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call
‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never
started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the
desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s
thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s
sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own
highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite
to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard
as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so
much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very
easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His
Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
-Mere Christianity
On God
It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we
were alone. “Look out!” we cry, “it’s alive.” And therefore this is the very
point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and
proceed no further with Christianity. An “impersonal God”—well and good. A
subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better
still. A formless life- force surging through us, a vast power which we can
tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord,
perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is
quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been
playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There
comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“Man’s search
for God”!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it
to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us!
Do you remember when I had said some weeks (or months) ago that you would be surprised when you "knock" how quickly "it is opened to you"!
