Saturday, February 14, 2009

Ginormous quote for the day

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God-though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.

George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men, 'you must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.' That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He give the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God-to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response-to be miserable-these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows-the only food that any possible universe ever can grow-then we must starve eternally.

CS Lewis in The Problem of Pain

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for that Tawny. Really...freeing words of encouragement.

mandy said...

Lewis & MacDonald - two amazing men of faith... Both knew deep deep truths, but shared them so simply.