When God Has Vanished Like a Fart in the Wind- C.S. Lewis

Here is a double tap from C.S. Lewis which may speak to you if you feel like God has up and vanished like a fart in the wind (to quote the Warden from the Shawshank Redemption). If you feel this way you are not alone. Try spending a season reading and praying through the Psalms.

1. From the Screwtape letters: a demon giving advice to his underling demon. Of course God is the enemy mentioned here.

"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.

2. From "Religion: Reality or Substitute?" in Christian Reflections

"Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seems obvious that this material world is the only reality; disbelieve in Him and you must face hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all."

Forgiving Others at Years End- C.S. Lewis

The below excerpts are taken from "On Forgiveness" which can be found toward the end of a great book entitled "The Weight of Glory." As this year closes forgive all who have sinned against you--and you may have to keep forgiving the same sin over again and again. As Lewis says elsewhere forgiving 70 X 7 may not mean 490 different sins but the same one solo offense against you by another that keeps rising up in your heart as resentment and unforgiveness--and the enemy will do all in his power to keep you in this state of unforgiveness.

"We believe that God forgives us our sins; but also that He will not do so unless we forgive other people their sins against us. There is no doubt about the second part of this statement. It is in the Lord's Prayer; it was emphatically stated by our Lord. If you don't forgive you will not be forgiven. No part of His teaching is clearer, and there are no exceptions to it. He doesn't say that we are to forgive other people's sins provided they are not too frightful, or provided there are extenuating circumstances, or anything of that sort. We are to forgive them all, however spiteful, however mean, however often they are repeated. If we don't, we shall be forgiven none of our own."

"Forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or bullying. But it that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. They keep on replying, 'But I tell you the man broke a most solemn promise.' Exactly: that is precisely what you have to forgive. (This doesn't mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart--every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.)"

This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life--to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son--how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.' We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God's mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says."

The Best C.S. Lewis-- Putting Your Neighbor on Your Back for Splendour or Horror

The below comes from a sermon Lewis preached in 1941 to one of the largest congregations to ever gather at St. Virgin the Mary in modern times.   It comes from The Weight of Glory.  Walter Hooper, friend and personal secretary to Lewis during his last days, said that he puts this sermon and writing on par with some of the Church Fathers.  I am no adequate judge of such things but the below really struck me.  In my estimation, few write with such depth and humor as Lewis . . . too bad there is little of this type stuff coming out today.  Alas . . .

From the Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis

"Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning.  A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside.  The following Him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one.


It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hearafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.


The load, or weight, or burden on my neighbours glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. 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 can 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 as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.  All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.  It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.  There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal.  Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations--these are mortal and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.  But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.


This does not mean that we are to perpetually solemn.  We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.  And our charity must be a real and costly love . . .  next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses."

Prayer is Irksome: Lewis Letters to Malcolm

The below is from chapter 21 of Letters to Malcolm by C.S. Lewis, being an excerpt. At the end is my short conclusion.  It is not that we are all in the place Lewis describes all the time . . . at any rate the writings of Lewis are so good because they come from a man who never pretended to be a deep theologian--just a layman who had his share of struggles and was wide open honest about them. Though at times the man is hard to understand (because he was so dadgum intelligent), he was real. Not always right, not always agreed with . . . but willing to risk his words on paper. Hopefully you will be encouraged by the below.  Keep praying and doing all the other things that discipleship under Jesus entails.

Well, let's now at any rate come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us.

The odd thing is that this reluctance to pray is not confined to periods of dryness. When yesterday's prayers were full of comfort and exaltation, today's will still be felt as, in some degree, a burden.

Now the disquieting thing is not simply that we skimp and begrudge the duty of prayer. The really disquieting thing is it should have to be numbered among duties at all. . . What can be done for--- or what should be done with--a rose-tree that dislikes producing roses? Surely it ought to want to?

Much of our backwardness in prayer is no doubt due to our sins, as every teacher will tell us; to our avoidable immersion in the things of this world, to our neglect of mental discipline.  And also to the very worst kind of "fear of God."  We shrink from too naked a contact, because we are afraid of the divine demands upon us which it might make too audible.  As some old writer says, many a Christian prays faintly "lest God might really hear him, which he, poor man, never intended."

If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight.  Some day, please God, it will be.  The same is true of many other behaviours which now appear as duties.  . .  here is the paradox of Christianity.  As practical imperatives for here and now the two great commandments have to be translated "Behave as if you loved God and man."  For no man can love because he is told to. . . if a man really loved God and man, once again this would hardly be obedience; for if he did, he would be unable to help it.

I am therefore not really deeply worried by the fact that prayer is at present a duty, and even an irksome one. This is humiliating.  It is frustrating.  It is terribly time-wasting--the worse one is praying, the longer one's prayers take.  But we are still only at school. . . I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best.  Those I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling . . . these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling. . . God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us,  as it were, off our guard.

My Conclusion:  Though a bit simplistic it seems to me that we don't always feel like loving or praying or giving or doing a host of other things that are good and right to do, even required by God.  But we do them as sheer acts of the will.  If everything is left to our feelings (emotions) I am afraid that what will be left behind is a long line of shipwrecks and disasters for ourselves and others.  Our faith will probably perish if left to our emotions.  After all, it is doing the will of God that is all important and necessary according to Jesus.  He says little or perhaps nothing at all about doing what is right and just because we feel like it-- though sometimes we do.

Gethsemane and the Dark Night of the Soul

If you have not read Letters to Malcolm by C.S. Lewis chapter 8 of the book is worth whatever price you pay which won't be much as it is a very small book. Here are some excerpts which are particularly good.

"In Gethsemane a very strange and significant thing seems to have happened. . . Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope--of suspense, anxiety--were at the last moment loosed upon Him--the supposed possibility that, after all, He might, He just conceivably might, be spared the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had been spared: he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent probability. It was not quite impossible . . .

But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps He would not have been very Man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.

At the end, I know, we are told that an angel appeared "comforting" Him. But neither comforting in sixteenth-century English nor __________ in Greek means "consoling." "Strengthening" is more the word. May not the strengthening have consisted in the renewed certainty--cold comfort this--that the thing must be endured and therefore could be?

We all try to accept with some sort of submission our afflictions when they actually arrive. But the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God's will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians, not Stoics.

Does not every movement in the Passion write large some common element in the sufferings of our race? First, the prayer of anguish; not granted. Then He turns to His friends. They are asleep--as ours, or we, are so often, or busy, or away, or preoccupied. Then He faces the Church; the very Church that He brought into existence. It condemns Him. This also is characteristic. In every Church, in every institution, there is something which sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. But there seems to be another chance. There is the State; in this case, the Roman state. Its pretensions are far lower than those of the Jewish church, but for that very reason it may be free from local fanaticisms. It claims to be just on a rough, worldly level. Yes, but only so far as is consistent with political expediency and raison d'etat. One becomes a counter in a complicated game. But even now all is not lost. There is still an appeal to the People--the poor and simple whom He had blessed, whom He had healed and fed and taught, to whom He Himself belongs. But they have become over-night (it is nothing unusual) a murderous rabble shouting for His blood. There is, then, nothing left but God. And to God, God's last words are "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run; the earths all staked.

It is saints, not common people, who experience the "dark night."

C.S. Lewis: Imaginary Daydreaming isn't worth . . . squat!

The below is from 1930, a letter from C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves

"We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change which I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse and aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself--to dream that you have walked, washed, and dressed, & then to find yourself still in bed."

Commentary: I am a big dreamer as are lots of people in the kingdom of God. The problem of course is that so much gets discussed and maybe even put down on paper. The result is that lots gets solved, fixed, and done for God and others (including myself) that is nothing more than smoke, mirrors, and illusion. In short, its all mental gymnastics and happy discussion. Is it not time to go beyond all this useless day-dreaming, throw in all our chips and go do the radical Jesus living that we have all talked of for so long? It is risky, it is scary, you will meet opposition, you will be ridiculed, etc. But someone has to go all in. It has to be me and it has to be you. Let's get out of bed and take the plunge for Him. And remember what was said of Aslan in another writing of Lewis: He's not safe, but He is good.

Living Death: Who will die to Heal the Brokenness of others?

In the famous poem "Who Am I" quoted below I am reminded of one fact that is true in every person I meet.  It is a truth that gives me comfort, hope, and the absence of all fear when dealing with all people.  In spite of all the fronting and gaming and projecting that people may give us-- there is a life of brokenness (recognized or not) underneath the surface in all people that we meet. There are questions, doubts, insecurities . . . perhaps walls, fears, anxieties, regrets, real struggles and so much more.  So we hide from community lest we be discovered.  In being discovered is the fear of not being loved and perhaps rejected.  Thus we play the game of life which hopes to convince others that we are better than we really are.

And the cool thing is that this is where the gospel can come in with full force and power. The holidays are upon us now and with that is the reminder that Jesus has come not to break the bruised reed nor to put out the dimly burning candle.  After all, if I am honest that is often what I feel like-- someone on the brink of breaking, a man whose candle seems to be burning dimly and nearly extinguished.  But Jesus came for me and you and others-- to restore, to heal, to brighten our lives.  He died for this. And if we are to see this same healing and brightening in the lives of others we must face the question of Jesus: ARE YOU WILLING TO DIE FOR OTHERS like he did? What Bonhoeffer said is absolutely true: "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." It is the only forward for us, for the churches, for the people of God. Who will answer the call with a firm: "Yes, I will die for others around me so that they can be healed?" It is the only way to bring people into an encounter with the resurrected Jesus and His power.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Who Am I? (written in Tegel Prison)

Who am I? They often tell me I stepped from my cell's confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly
Like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
equally, smilingly, proudly
Like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which others tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness
Tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? a hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already acheived?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou Knowest, O God, I am Thine!