neighbors in the weight of glory

How does it work, how does it look to think "you never talk to a mere mortal"? What kind of conversation happens?

"Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
He [Jesus] said to him [the lawyer], "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?"
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."
"You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live."
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
And Jesus replied, telling the story of the good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite, and the traveler who was robbed and left for dead.
v. 36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers? He [the lawyer] said, "The one who showed him mercy." And Jesus said to him, "You go, and do likewise."

The lawyer was probably thinking to Jesus' concise answer, "Just a minute! You're going too fast here, Jesus. We haven't defined our terms yet. And you know what happens if we don't define things properly. What if I rush out and love somebody, only to find that he isn't my neighbor? The parable and command, are as if Jesus were saying, "Stop theorizing, please; stop your discussions; just go and obey. Whoever is in need is your neighbor, and to meet his need as best you can is to love him."

"In the case of the man who was born blind (see Mark 8:22-26), Jesus healed him by touching him twice. The first time the man saw people like trees walking around, and the second time he saw clearly. Most of us are like that. To see people as Jesus sees them, we need a second touch. We've had one touch from God and we see people like trees. Trees are good for shade, for wood, for fruit; they are useful to us. But it's not until we are touched a second time that "tree" people (who may be useful to us) become people for whom we can be of some use.

"Of course, that begs a question; Jesus isn't here in the flesh anymore. We can't run to Him literally and say, 'Put spit upon my eyes and help me see.' How do we get the second touch?

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.... There are not ordinary people. You have never talked with a mere mortal.... But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.... Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

" " taken from The Weight of Glory, Loving God With All You've Got, and Luke 10.

The Prodigal God

"In his book The Four Loves, Lewis wrote a striking meditation on his [friend Charles Williams'] death in an essay entitled 'Friendship.'
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles [Williams] is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's [Tolkien's] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him "to myself" now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald . . . In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah 6:3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall have.

"Lewis is saying that it took a community to know an individual. How much more would this be true of Jesus Christ? Christians commonly say they want a relationship with Jesus, that they want to 'get to know Jesus better.' You will never be able to do that by yourself. You must be deeply involved in the church, in the Christian community, with strong relationships of love and accountability. Only if you are part of a community of believers seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus will you ever get to know him and grow into his likeness." (Tim Keller, The Prodigal God, pp. 126-127)

In good books.

The writer says to his readers, "Do you know why you listen to me? Why you read my books and say, 'Astounding'? It is because I am like you. You can identify with me. You can read these written words and say, 'Oh! I have felt that. It makes sense! People - silly, smart, foolish, self-absorbed people do that. That very thing! ...these things you write about. I see it."

"And do you know reader why we read good books? One very obvious reason is to learn. But have you ever asked yourself, 'What exactly am I learning?' Can you summarize it in the three points? Some very gifted people can. But I think very often we are absorbing so many thoughts and implications that it may be a challenge to say succinctly what."

This is how I feel when I read the Bible and this is how I think many people do or do not understand God's person. The Bible contains some of the richest description of relationship I have ever read. Because the Bible's Author is the consummation of story through time in history and epithets - God's names. We are in relationship and he wants us to know him. Why is he good? How does he work? What kind of people are we? Can we know him? How? How is it possible to understand?

The longer I am a Christian, the more I am conscious of my sin and what I know is truth. It's a weighty place, an unsettling place, a pivoting plain...as wide as your eyes can see. I am a wide-eyed child...still learning how to talk...coherently.

"When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understand his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right."
-C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity

This is what I read in my Bible this morning.

Isaiah 54:4-8
You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood. For your Maker is your Husband - the Lord Almighty is his name - the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth. The Lord will call you back as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit - a wife who married young, only to be rejected," says your God. For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back. In a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you," says the Lord your Redeemer.

55:6-9
Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Clive Staples. pg. 38, 39 in my book

It's worth your inquiring mind.

"Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power--it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realised that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and

I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God. It is an old story and if you want to go into it you will no doubt consult people who have more authority to talk about it than I have. All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts--to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer. And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

My dear Wormwood

My dear Wormwood,
So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying
away,” have you? I always thought the Training College had one to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?
Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual changed, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with e periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which you patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it. To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make off it, and then do the opposite. Now, it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession off a w soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We are empty and would be filled; His full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below ha s drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. Buut you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but thhe faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to ear the cake and have it; he creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with, the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away his Hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I shall give you some hints on how to exploit them.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape