[sunday meditations]

the porch at Winton Ridge, birthplace of quiet contemplations

Because the Young Adult Group is “on hold” through the holidays (which sucks, because I genuinely like it), the leader sent out an email with a quote from C.S. Lewis to be used as a “devotional” (or, as I like to put it, a “meditation”—that’s what monks would call it). It’s so on-par with much that has been consuming my thoughts and prayers, so I feel compelled to share it:

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“The New Testament talks about Christians ‘being born again’; it talks about them ‘putting on Christ’; about Christ ‘being formed in us’; about our coming to ‘have the mind of Christ.’ Put right out of your head that these are only fancy ways of saying that Christians are to read what Christ said and try to carry it out—as a man may read what Plato or Marx said and try to carry it out. They mean something much more than that. They mean that a real Person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing this to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self: killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares in His power, joy, knowledge, and eternity.”

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The call of faith isn’t about supplementing our life with Jesus, tacking him on in such a way that we can go about our own business with a little bit of “good faith” to keep us on the right side of things. C.S. Lewis cuts to the heart of the matter, capturing Christ’s call to each and every one of us: “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.” The call of Christ isn’t about being an honest taxpayer and hoping to eat your cake, too; it’s about being totally remade, the Death of Self. “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 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 aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good.’ We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centered on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is precisely what Christ warned us you cannot do.”

Christ calls for us to die, and then to become new. Death to Self is a strange thing, in that by dying to ourselves, we find ourselves in the process. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Lewis accurately translated “taking up your cross” to being beaten to death in a concentration camp; ‘taking up your cross’ isn’t a trite little saying with religious undertones, it’s a stark and shocking call to truly and honestly die. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. These aren’t clever little sayings: they’re speaking to reality. Death to Self in submission and obedience to Christ invariably leads to being made a “new creation”—a new heart, a new spirit, new desires, new habits and new aims, new motivations and new inclinations, a new character; in short, a new personality (and not in the Meier-Briggs sense of the term).

That is what I’m after. That is what I crave. I’ve been told I’m hard on myself, but that’s not the case at all: I’m simply honest about what’s going on in my heart and in my spirit. I pay attention to the rhythms of my motivations and inclinations; I don’t shy away from acknowledging my own sinfulness. I’m in desperate need of a divine surgical strike into the depths of my heart, and the closer I draw to God, the more I submit myself to Christ, the more I’m filled with the Spirit, the more I see my need for grace and mercy, the more I comprehend my own fallenness, the more I’m aware of how truly wretched I am. And yet in that there is joy, for I’m like a field being sown over. “If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and resown.” I’m trying to exercise patience: the kingdom of God starts small, like a mustard seed, and grows into a vibrant tree where animals dwell. Meditating on these things, I’ve been constantly given an image, that of an orchard filled with withered trees and rotted limbs; and then there’s a tree in the midst, growing green, budding with spring, sprouting leaves and stretching to the sky. Change takes time, even change from the hand of God; as it is with the kingdom of God in our world, so it is with our own little selves. It takes time. The tree won’t sprout overnight; patience and persistence are required.