“I was like a stone lying in the deep mire; and He that is mighty came and in His mercy lifted me, and raised me up, and placed me on the top of the wall.”
“For beyond any doubt on that day we shall rise again in the brightness of the sun, that is, in the glory of Christ Jesus our Redeemer, as children of the living God and co-heirs of Christ, made in his image; for we shall reign through him and for him and in him.”
For a fictional treatment of Patrick’s life and work, I recommend Stephen Lawhead’s novel, Patrick, Son of Ireland.
Yes, I’m including fiction, too, in this series of posts about recommended reading for Lenten learning and devotions. I learn a lot from fiction.
Because I have been so steeped in our own 20th/21st century cultural milieu and, of course, in stories with Hollywood endings, I truly thought that this novel of a medieval Norwegian teenage girl who “follows her heart” and marries the man who sweeps her off her feet (and also seduces her) would end in a happily ever after for the couple. Even though I know that’s not usually the ending in real life for that sort of beginning, I also have seen enough movies and read enough books in which following one’s emotions in disregard of parents, church, and community is rewarded.
Undset is more realistic than all of those Hollywood-influenced writers. Not that Kristin lives a completely horrid and pain-filled life after her youthful fall into sin and indiscretion; she doesn’t. She simply reaps what she has sown. Kristin chooses to marry an irresponsible but charming man, and as the two have a family and grow old together, her husband remains untrustworthy and quite attractive at the same time. Kristin remains both willful and desirous of spiritual riches. This combination makes for a life and marriage filled with joy at times, but also plagued by disaster and the consequences of poor choices.
I’m afraid that I’m not making this book sound good enough to induce you to pick it up and read it. The book is three volumes long, over a thousand pages, and it takes commitment to even begin such a hefty narrative. However, I believe you will be rewarded both intellectually and spiritually if you decide to read Kristin Lavransdatter. And I’m not the only one:
Mindy Withrow: “The internal seasons of Kristin’s soul change with the frozen winters and golden summers of Jorundgaard. Here Nunnally’s translation abilities stand out—clearly Undset gave her unparalleled material in the original Norwegian—with gorgeous word choices in soaring descriptions of natural beauty, descriptions that are never extraneous but always reflective of Kristin’s heart.”
Superfast Reader: “Despite the alienness of 13th Century feudal Norway, Undset’s books feel fresh, immediate, and alive, thanks to her depiction of Kristin, an exceptionally complex character.”
Word Lily: “One of my favorite aspects of this trilogy is how it is set so long ago and yet so many of the characters’ lessons are applicable to life today. The portrait the story paints of life in the Middle Ages both confirms and challenges my perception.”
Shelflove: “Kristin and her family step living from the pages, imperfect, stubborn, loving, exhausted, praying, scolding, laughing.”
Carrie at Mommy Brain: “While reading Kristin’s story, I learned so much about the religious customs of the day, about the way government and legal matters were handled, about the day to day life of a woman on an estate, about how children were raised, about how the plague devastated complete towns.”
Carol Magistramater: “I first heard of Kristin Lavransdatter reading a book list; I took note when Elisabeth Elliot named it her favorite novel.”
And I’ve also written about this book before. So, if you haven’t read it, what are you waiting for? (I am told by very reliable sources that the Tina Nunnally translation is more complete, more literary, and more readable than the older translation by Charles Archer. Either way, it’s a great and valuable story.)
I watched this introduction to Lewis’s classic explanation of the Christian faith just a few days ago, and I think it’s quite good. The speaker is Professor Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University:
C.S. Lewis really is the finest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, and Mere Christianity should be required reading for anyone who is considering the truth claims of Christianity.
I could quote from Mere Christianity all day and not even begin to exhaust the wonderful aphorisms, images and exposition that Professor Lewis brings to bear on the questions of whether Christianity is true and what is its essential teaching. Lewis is not necessarily the “Protestant saint” that some make him out to be, but as a writer and interpreter of basic Christian theology, he excels.
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”
“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…”
“Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
“Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside of the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.”
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
“Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.”
This truth is a partial answer to the whole Rob Bell controversy over whether there is or isn’t a hell as a place of eternal torment. Wouldn’t it be eternal torment to be an eternal being who chose in this life to live apart from, as a rebel to, the living, loving God of the Universe, the one who loves me so much that He gave his only begotten Son to die in my place, as an atonement for my sin. To know that now and fall down in gratitude and love toward Him is is a humbling experience; to learn that God was so merciful and so patient in the face of my repeated rejection and sin and that He had finally honored my rebellion with His divine wrath would be torment beyond any physical pain. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. 2 Corinthians 5:10 for He says, “AT THE ACCEPTABLE TIME I LISTENED TO YOU,
AND ON THE DAY OF SALVATION I HELPED YOU.â€
Behold, now is “THE ACCEPTABLE TIME,†behold, now is “THE DAY OF SALVATION.â€â€” 2 Corinthians 6:2
This book is not one to be read in a chunk, but rather a book of daily devotional thoughts written by Mr. Chambers, a Scots YMCA chaplain before and during World War I. Chambers died in 1917, and his wife compiled this book of daily devotional thoughts from Chambers’ writings.
However, the term “devotional thoughts” may give the wrong impression. These daily essays on how to understand and live the Christian life are not your typical little encouraging stories or aphorisms. Here’s an example, the selection for March 14th:
“His servants ye are to whom ye obey.” Romans 6:16
The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus dominated. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because at a point away back I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because I have yielded myself to Him.
Yield in childhood to selfishness, and you will find it the most enchaining tyranny on earth. There is no power in the human soul of itself to break the bondage of a disposition formed by yielding. Yield for one second to anything in the nature of lust (remember what lust is: “I must have it at once,” whether it be the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind) – once yield and though you may hate yourself for having yielded, you are a bondslave to that thing. There is no release in human power at all but only in the Redemption. You must yield yourself in utter humiliation to the only One Who can break the dominating power viz., the Lord Jesus Christ – “He hath anointed me . . . to preach deliverance to all captives.”
You find this out in the most ridiculously small ways – “Oh, I can give that habit up when I like.” You cannot, you will find that the habit absolutely dominates you because you yielded to it willingly. It is easy to sing – “He will break every fetter” and at the same time be living a life of obvious slavery to yourself. Yielding to Jesus will break every form of slavery in any human life.
President George W. Bush used to read My Utmost for His Highest each morning when he was president, probably still does. According to Newsweek (2003), “George W. Bush rises ahead of the dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant roar of F-16s patrolling the skies. Even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone. His text isn’t news summaries or the overnight intelligence dispatches. Those are for later, downstairs, in the Oval Office. It’s not recreational reading (recently, a biography of Sandy Koufax). Instead, he’s told friends, it’s a book of evangelical mini-sermons, “My Utmost for His Highest.”
It’s a hot topic (see Universalism as a Lure? The Emerging Case of Rob Bell): universalism, or to put it as a question, will everybody get to heaven in the end? Rob Bell repeats the old mantra, “If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody.”
C.S. Lewis answers this objection to divine judgement and heaven and hell as separate for the blessed and the damned in The Great Divorce.
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,†and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.†All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
“What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.â€
“Ye see it does not.â€
“I feel in a way that it ought to.â€
“That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.â€
“What?â€
“The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.â€
“I don’t know what I want, Sir.â€
“Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or you’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.”
However, these two excerpts are only the pertinent quotations in regard to universalism and the complaint that it’s unfair for anyone to go to hell. The book itself is much more, a wonderful story about an excursion bus from hell to the outskirts of heaven. I learned more about heaven and God’s mercy from reading The Great Divorce than from many a sermon listened to in my youth.
Maybe I’m a better reader than listener. Or maybe I learn better through story. A little of both I think. Also C.S. Lewis is just a great writer and thinker. You’ll come across several of his books in this series of 40 Inspirational Classics that I’m recommending for Lent. Now go out and get The Great Divorce; it’s only 125 pages long, but there’s lots of truth in that small package.
I spent a couple of days re-reading G.K. Chesterton’s spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy and decided that I should read a bit of Chesterton every few months, if only to remind me that Christianity is a merry and somewhat eccentric philosophy of life. Chesterton says that the “frame” of Christianity, its conservatism and rules, enables us to be like children playing on a cliff with a fence to keep them from falling over. We can range far and wide, “fling [ourselves] into the every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries.”
Chesterton himself was a merry old soul. He weighed over 300 pounds, played the part of the absent-minded professor in his daily life, and enjoyed a beer, a debate, and a nap, but not all at the same time. Nicknamed “The Prince of Paradox,” his verbal gymnastics are sometimes exhausting, usually entertaining, but at the same time full of wisdom and insight into the fallacies of pagan and modern philosophy and into the satisfying rightness of Christian orthodoxy. Here a few assertions and witticisms that grabbed me as I read through Chesterton’s philosophical defense of orthodoxy:
“I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.”
Of course, I am reminded of the song, Creed, by Rich Mullens:
“Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. . . . That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship only Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within.”
The Jones part is probably what reminded me of Jim Jones who went from rejection of the God of the Bible, to worship of himself, to the insistence that his followers should also worship him as God. They certainly would have been better off worshipping cats.
Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
If the world and its meaning begins and ends with me, I am of all creatures most tragically unhappy. I have a friend who believes that he will find any meaning that there is to be found in this world inside himself. I pity him.
“The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our Mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same Father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire but not to imitate. . . . To St. Francis, nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”
What breathtakingly beautiful freedom there is in that order of things. We are not beholden to nor dominated by Nature; we are the stewards, the caretakers. God is still over all and through all, without Nature taking over His role as Creator and Sustainer.
“A characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
“It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For Solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
In this season of Lent, and certainly as we approach the celebration the Resurrection, take time to laugh. The Story is after all a comedy, and God wins in the end.
“[Modern Philosophy’s] despair is this, that it does not really believe that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots. A man cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority.”
A world without meaning and without Christ at the center is either too terrible to explore or too boring to enjoy—or both. Hence, voodoo dolls and fetishes or Sartre’s existential hell play, No Exit.
IMMORTALL Heat, O let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it : let those fires
Which shall consume the world, first make it tame,
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,
As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant thee ; then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymnes send back thy fire again :
Our eies shall see thee, which before saw dust ;
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blinde :
Thou shalt recover all thy goods in kinde,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust :
All knees shall bow to thee ; all wits shall rise,
And praise him who did make and mend our eies.
I’ve posted poems by George Herbert, the seventeenth century Christian poet, on this blog numerous times. If one were to spend Lent and Eastertide just reading through the poems of Mr. Herbert, one a day, it would be devotional enough to last you through the season and to bring you to an awareness of poetry of faith.
It’s Lent, and as a growing Christian you want to read something that will bring you closer and deeper in your relationship with Jesus. Or you’re not a Christian, but you think that this time leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ would be a good time to explore the Christian faith and see for yourself what it’s all about.
I would suggest that first and foremost you read the Bible, but not just any old books of the Bible. If you’ve never read the Bible before I would suggest starting with one of the Gospels, the four books in the New Testament that tell about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Even if you’ve read the Bible several times from cover to cover, springtime and Lent and Easter are good times to review the story of Jesus and let God refresh you spiritually through His Word as it tells about the Greatest Love Story Ever Enacted.
Then, if you’re like me and still want some more reading to inspire and encourage you in your journey, try one or more of the recommended books in this series, 40 Inspirational Classics.
Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and philosopher. He was educated at home by his father and he grew up to be a talented scientist and mathematician. In 1654, Pascal had a mystical experience of the presence of God, a sort of “second conversion,” and he devoted himself to writing a book about the reasons for belief in God and in the Christian faith.
Pensees means “thoughts,” and these “thoughts” are really Pascal’s notes for a book of Christian apologetics that he planned to write, but never managed to finish. Pascal believed that to bring a person to faith in Christ it was necessary to make him want to believe.
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.
Make religion attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.
The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which knows God, and not the reason. This, then, is absolute faith: God felt in the heart.
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought.
…there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him.
Pascal’s Wager: “You must wager; it is not optional. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”
Brother Lawrence, born Nicolas Herman, was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris during the seventeenth century. When he entered the monastery at the age of twenty-four, he took the religious name Lawrence of the Resurrection. He spent most of his religious life working in the monastery kitchen, cooking and washing dishes. Father Joseph de Beaufort, a priest who knew Brother Lawrence, compiled a booklet of Brother Lawrence’s letters and stories and maxims and published the book after Brother Lawrence’s death in 1691.
“The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”
“We ought not to grow tired of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”
“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God; those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it.”
“In this small book, through letters and conversations, Brother Lawrence simply and beautifully explains how to continually walk with God – not from the head but from the heart.”
For a fictional treatment of Patrick’s life and work, I recommend Stephen Lawhead’s novel, Patrick, Son of Ireland.
