C.S. Lewis Daily Reflection

From A Year With C.S. Lewis - Daily Readings From His Classic Works, edited by Patricia Klein (HarperCollins 2003)

JUNE 25th - from Mere Christianity

"What do we do next? What difference does all this theology make? It can start making a difference tonight. If your are interested enough to have read thus far you are probably interested enough to make a shot at saying your prayers: and, whatever else you say, you will probably say the Lord's Prayer.

Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment you realize what those words mean, you realize that you are not a son of God. You are not a being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it.

Why? What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretense is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, in which the pretense leads up to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were."

My People #2 - Jordan

I met Jordan in 2000, when I was a freshman. He was friends with my then-friend Lyndsay, whose name should totally be pronounced "LIN-zee" but she made us call her "lin-ZAY". Boy was she embarrassed when her mom came to visit and accidentally called her by her real name, thus unveiling the deception. But anyway.

Lyndsay and I had made lunch plans and at the last minute she dragged along her friend Jordan, who she met through a guy named Max who was totally in love with her. Now that I look back on it, it's possible that all her comments about "You HAVE to meet my friend Jordan, you're totally going to LOVE HIM" may have indicated that she was trying to fix us up. That literally just occurred to me like a week ago and I've known him for 8 years. Anyway, we wandered around downtown Walla Walla and hit up some thrift shops, where Jordan won me over forever by purchasing a giant pair of 1970's ski goggles and wearing them the rest of the day. That was when the magic began. Other college memories include: endless lunches in the student union building where we would just sit there with Lyndsay and jointly make fun of her; a period of about a year and a half where we greeted each other with unbelievably filthy pick-up lines every time we saw each other; a 1:oo a.m. wedding of our sunglasses, where my sparkly white rhinestone cat-eye sunglasses married his black tinted sunglasses, and the salt and pepper shakers were the best man and maid of honor; getting drunk at lots of theater parties; and oh yeah, the part where he fell in love with and eventually married my best friend.

There's too much to say about Erin to fit here, so she gets a post of her own. But she's brilliant, and beautiful, and generous, and would give you the shirt off her back, and is one of the world's few genuinely good people. So naturally no guy on the planet is good enough for her, in my opinion. Except Jordan.

An interesting fact: so, Erin is my best friend, Jordan is her husband, and Matt is her husband's best friend. But in fact I met them in the reverse order. I was friends with Matt first, because he was dating a friend of mine from high school. Then a few months later I met Jordan, through Lyndsay. I actually met Erin last, because she's a year younger than me. The fact that we're all friends with each other means the four of us spend a lot of time together and have nominally formed a posse. Well, except that Erin and Jordan live in Indiana, and Matt and I live here. (Not together.)

When Jordan and Erin started dating, I had a good feeling about it right from the beginning. It's funny how you can love two people separately and not even realize until you start to see them in the same frame, how alike they are in so many ways. I was friends with Jordan, and I was friends with Erin, and until they met it never occurred to me how much they're two halves of the same person. That didn't stop me from noisily taking credit for introducing them, though.

In college my relationship with Jordan was primarily based on the following factors:

1) An increasing annoyance with Lyndsay's growing pretentiousness and stoner habits
2) A really inappropriate sense of humor
3) A love of really gay fruity cocktails and junk food
4) Sarcasm
5) Erin

After they got married and we were all living in Portland, and spending lots and lots of time together, it became less of a situational college friendship and more of a real relationship.

Then Jordan's dad killed himself. And everything changed.

Jordan's dad Merle had pretty much every health problem you can get by refusing to take care of yourself - heart problems, lung problems, diabetes, etc. He was also virtually bankrupt, and sporadically in trouble with the law. Jordan was the glue that held his family together, the oldest kid and the Man of the House. When he was in college at Boise State, his grandfather died, and his dad, who had been running the family business (a golf pro shop) shut down from the world. That was the beginning of the end, Jordan always said. From that point on it was just a matter of time. Merle called Jordan at school and told him he had to come home and run the family business. Jordan might have been like 19, no older than that. He didn't know how to run a business, and no one with their head on straight would have expected him to, but Merle demanded it, so Jordan did. And of course everything went all to hell, and for the rest of his life Jordan will carry the weight of having disappointed his father and ruined the family business, while his dad did nothing except slowly kill himself through like eight different means of self-destruction. It's all so Arthur Miller.

As long as I've known Jordan, he's had an almost flippant attitude towards the inevitable phone call that his dad's dropped dead of a heart attack, that he was driving drunk and crashed into a tree, that he went into a diabetic coma from OD'ing on crappy food. But when the call came that Merle had shot himself, no one was ready for that. Least of all Jordan and Erin, who were in the process of packing up their lives to move to Indiana and had to take four days they couldn't spare out of the packing week in order to fly home to Boise for the funeral.

It was Jordan's sister that found him. She lives at home with her baby, and had just come back from a walk and gone into the garage. She has to live with what she's seen, which is a burden that no 22-year-old should ever have to live with. And Jordan's mom, despite years of exhaustion and suffering from having to bail Merle out of scrape after scrape, was haunted by memories of the man he used to be and imagined that she felt ghosts in the house. But Jordan's the one I know. Jordan's the only one whose change I could see. You can't go through something like that and not be changed. You can't lose a parent in that violent, sudden, selfish way and not start to think, what makes a person do that? Is that in me? Is it hereditary? Is it part of human nature? How do you go from being the merry, loving, blustery dad of someone's childhood home videos to being someone who can carefully and meticulously assemble a device to shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun?

Erin called me to tell me the news. I was on the bus and she was cutting in and out. Her voice was calm by that point, having delivered the news so many times.


ERIN: Jordan [something something] killed himself.

CLAIRE: WHAT?!?!?!

ERIN: He shot himself. This morning. Sarah found him.

CLAIRE: I didn't know Sarah was in town.

ERIN: What?

CLAIRE: He shot himself?

ERIN: Yeah.

CLAIRE: Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Are you okay?

ERIN: Oh yeah. I'm fine.

CLAIRE: I can't believe it. I can't believe it. Seriously? He killed himself?

ERIN: Yeah. (This goes back and forth for about five minutes with us totally not on the same page and talking about two different things, in a way that would be funny if it was anything else we were talking about)

CLAIRE: Is he . . . there? With you? (Meaning, in my mind, is she standing in the same room as her husband's dead body and calmly talking to me on the phone)

ERIN: Yeah, he's right here, you want to talk to him? (Sudden horrible visual image, which I can still conjure up at a moment's notice, of Erin, basically numb from shock, holding her cell phone down to the mouth of a dead body, blank and numb like a crazy person)

CLAIRE: Erin! Erin, is Jordan - is he - are you sure he's dead?

ERIN: Wait, what? No, Jordan's DAD.

CLAIRE: What?

ERIN: Jordan's DAD killed himself. Jordan's fine.

CLAIRE: Oh, thank God. I mean, not - you know - obviously not "thank God" but -

ERIN: No, no, I know what you meant.

CLAIRE: Sorry.

ERIN: No, you're fine. In fact, actually, thank you, for reminding me of the only thing that could possibly have been worse.

JORDAN (in the background): What did she say?

ERIN (to Jordan): She thought I said YOU killed yourself, and she freaked out. (Muffled conversation, laughter. To me) Jordan says to tell you, thank you. That was the first he's laughed all day.



To this day, I have nightmares about that conversation . . . I remember the sick feeling in my stomach when I thought that Jordan's frustration and depression about moving, work, family stress, etc. had pushed him over the edge and how could we not have seen it and I should have called him more and what's Erin going to do now, she can't possibly move to Indiana by herself, and on and on and on, and the feeling of relief I found when I realized that I was wrong was like beyond anything I could have imagined. That was when I realized how much Jordan meant to me, that he wasn't just my best friend's husband or my friend that I swapped racist jokes with. He was my rock. And without him I would be a mess.

After that, things changed in our relationship. My mom was terminally ill, and his dad was dead, and we were the only two people we knew who had (or were going to) lose parents at our age. It's a shitty club, as we're both fond of saying, but it's good not to be the only one in it. Jordan's the only person I can cry in front of, the only person outside my family who I can talk to who Gets It, and underneath the bearded, Doritos-eating, wrestling-obsessed exterior is an extraordinarily sensitive person who watched me carefully at every moment when we went to my family's beach house for the first time after my mom died, observing my every move to make sure that I was okay. Jordan SEES me. People who haven't been through this, they don't ask. They don't want to know. They say, "Hey, how ya doing?" and tilt their heads sympathetically, and what they really want you to do is nod bravely and say, "I'm okay," and then immediately move on to a more comfortable topic. As a dedicated observer of social conventions, I usually do this. But it's restful not to have to all the time. Even with my best friends, I frequently give the expected answer. Wtih my family, I just plain don't want to talk about it - they're dealing with their own crap too. As Jordan would have said during our obnoxious pick-up line phase, "Well, here I am! What were your other two wishes?" Love that guy.

My People #1 - Teddy Freddy

This is the first installment of what I hope, if I can get my act together, will be a regularly recurring segment where I describe the people in my life.

I am starting small because I'm new at this.

Teddy Freddy is a stuffed blue bear. I have no idea what brand he is, as a hasty Google image search leads me to believe that I am the only person left in America with this specific bear. His tag says only "MADE EXPRESSLY FOR MERVYN'S. MADE IN KOREA" on one side, and "ALL NEW MATERIALS. SYNTHETIC FIBERS" on the other. He has a blue sweater with a row of black hearts on it. He's pretty much two-dimensional at this point, from 20 years of me sleeping with my head on him.

I got Teddy Freddy for my sixth birthday from my best friend Billy, who is still my best friend, and rest assured there will be a post on him later. But for right now, we're discussing the bear. When I was little I had hordes of stuffed animals, and over them all Teddy Freddy reigned supreme, the king of his domain in the giant furry pile of creatures that lived on my bed, heaped on top of piles of embroidered pillows made by my mother and grandmother. Lesser stuffed beings lived on the shelves, guarding my books. But Teddy Freddy had pride of place, his garish blue fur clashing hideously with my pink-and-green-and-white decor. I loved that bear. I slept with him every night, in the exact same way - on my left side, with my left arm bent at the elbow on top of the pillow, Teddy Freddy lying flat on top of my arm, and my head on top of Teddy Freddy.

When I was a kid, I slept with Teddy Freddy for comfort and reassurance. He was good with stuff like Fear of the Dark, Street Noises, and Possibility of a Spider. I took him with me to sleepovers and on vacations to share my hotel room bed. If I forgot him, I couldn't sleep. Then, as I got older, I needed the reassurance less, but it was still comforting and sentimental to have the bear my best friend gave me curled up under my head as I slept.

Here's the problem. I'm 26. I have spent two decades sleeping in exactly the same position. Now I can't possibly get rid of the bear. For one, no combination of pillows (I have tried them all) can exactly recreate the precise layering of mattress/pillow/arm/bear/head that is so conducive to sleep. If I rest my head directly on my arm, the skin gets sweaty and my forehead is too hard to lean on my arm in comfort. If I remove the bear and replace it with a pillow, it's way too soft and my head sinks into the pillow and then I feel smothered, and start to worry that maybe someone is trying to kill me in my sleep. If I try to swap out the bear for like a smaller, firmer, perhaps decorative or ornamental pillow, they're either too hard or too soft and I wake up with weird fabric patterns imprinted into my cheek.

So, you see the dilemma. In my own home, there's just me. Well, and my sister, but she doesn't care. So when I'm at home, the bear's a non-issue. But I do occasionally have to leave my house. At some point it becomes bizarre for a woman who is, let's just say closer to 30 than 20, to bring a smushed, ratty blue teddy bear with her on like a business trip. (I have never done this. But I have a sneaking suspicion it's why I can never sleep in hotel beds, no matter how comfortable.)

So, here are my options:

1) Hope that I naturally and quietly grow out of the bear.
2) Get married. Have the bear confiscated.
3) Get rid of the bear, then never be able to sleep properly again.
4) Continue sleeping with the bear because what the hell, it's no one else's damn business.
5) Try to slowly wean myself from the bear like I should have done when I was like nine.
6) Ignore the problem and hope it goes away (always a favorite).

Let me just say this, in favor of bear retention - this bear has been with me through some crazy shit. Teddy Freddy has lived on three continents and in four U.S. states. He is perfectly smooshed to the shape of my head in a way that I'm sure is a metaphor for something. He has stuck with me through thick and thin, ever since the day twenty years ago when he was given to me by another person who has stuck with me through thick and thin for twenty years. In all the intervening years of birthday parties, of all the thoughtful and wonderful gifts I've received from Billy (and the not-so-wonderful, since he definitely went through a phase where all he gave me were sweatshirts), nothing has ever topped the bear.

I feel I need to say, too, that Teddy Freddy is not like a subtle and soothing, baby-boy-clothing-colored blue. He's like Crayola blue. It is a color blue that matches nothing that I own. And speaking as a person who pays pretty close attention to things like color-coordinating my comforter with my decorative pillows, I think it puzzles people to have this glaring blue eyesore in the middle of a bed otherwise decorated in tasteful neutral tones. (Okay, leopard.) He's completely incongruous and slightly (though it kills me to say it) tacky. But I like to think that Teddy Freddy knows this and embraces it. "Hi, everyone!" his crazy-ass bright blue fur and matching sweater seem to say. "I am a color of blue not found anywhere in nature and I match nothing you own! You will always be able to locate me in a pile of toys or laundry and I am the only one of my kind!" I like to think he embraces his out-there-ness. Kind of like Billy, even back when he was six. He never cared that much what other people thought. It would never occur to him, like it constantly does to me, that people might possibly care that I still sleep with a bear, that the bear doesn't match my bedspread, that the color is loud, that it says something about my fear of change that I can't even like move the bear to a shelf, that I have to have this thing with me, right up against my skin and bearing the weight of my entire head or I cannot possibly fall asleep. Billy would shrug and say, "Who cares?" Which is probably what Teddy Freddy would say too. He is a highly unselfconscious bear and knows what he is about.

This Is My Catholicism #3

Steve Angrisano - "Sweet Redeemer"

Louis Armstrong - "What a Wonderful World"

Fred Astaire - "I Concentrate On You"

The Barenaked Ladies - "Falling For the First Time"

The Beach Boys - "God Only Knows"

The Beatles - "The Long and Winding Road"

Belle & Sebastian - "Judy and the Dream of Horses"

Blues Traveler - "Great Big World"

Tom Booth - "The Shade of Your Hand"

Bon Jovi - "Livin' On a Prayer"

David Bowie - "Under Pressure"

Bowling For Soup - "Trucker Hat"

Jason Robert Brown - "Shiksa Goddess" from The Last Five Years

Leonard Cohen - "Sisters of Mercy", "Hallelujah," "Suzanne"

Ceili Rain - "If God Was Chocolate"

Bobby Darin - "I'm Beginning To See the Light"

Ani diFranco - "Both Hands"

William Finn - "Heart and Music" from A New Brain

Green Day - "Minority"

Sarah Hart - "The Breastplate of Saint Patrick", "His Name Is Joseph"

The Indigo Girls - "Galileo"

Jars of Clay - "Sunny Days"

Billy Joel - "Travelin' Prayer"

Mark Knopfler - Local Hero film score

Alison Krauss (arr.) - "Down In the River to Pray" (traditional)

kd lang - "Season of Hollow Soul"

Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time"

Annie Lennox - "Love Song for a Vampire"

Mollie Lewis - "Walla Walla"

Sinead Lohan - "No Mermaid"

Lyle Lovett - "Bears"

Matt Maher - "Leave a Light On"

Rich Mullins - "Hard to Get", "If I Stand"

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - "Alright For Now"

Prince of Egypt Soundtrack - "Deliver Us"

Collin Raye - "I Think About You"

Paddy Reilly - "The Fields of Athenry"

Poison - "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"

Relient K - "High of 75"

REM - "Nightswimming"

Roxette - "Church of Your Heart"

Rusted Root - "Send Me On My Way"

Silly Wizard - "Golden, Golden"

Paul Simon - "The Myth of Fingerprints"

Steeleye Span - "Lady Diamond"

Stephen Sondheim - "No One Is Alone" from Into the Woods, "Something Just Broke" from Assassins

Regina Spektor - "Samson"

Bruce Springsteen - The Rising, "Atlantic City"

Sting - "Shape of Your Heart", "If I Ever Lose My Faith In You"

Switchfoot - "Gone"

Talking Heads - "And She Was"

Chris Tomlin - "Come Home Running"

Train - "Meet Virginia"

U2 - "Angel of Harlem", "Walk On"

The Verve - "Bittersweet Symphony"

Violent Femmes - "American Music"

Andrew Lloyd Weber - "Could We Start Again, Please?" from Jesus Christ Superstar

Joss Whedon - "Under Your Spell" from Once More, With Feeling

Gene Wilder - "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Dar Williams - "Alleluia"

This Is My Catholicism #2

Cupid and Diana: A Novel - Christina Bartolomeo

The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy - Robert Bly

A Man For All Seasons - Robert Bolt

How the Irish Saved Civilization - Thomas Cahill

Hurt: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers - Chap Clark

The Alchemist ; By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept ; The Zahir ; The Devil and Miss Prym - Paulo Coelho

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs - Leonard Cohen

Americans' Favorite Poems - Maggie Dietz & Robert Pinsky

The Monk Downstairs - Tim Farrington

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search For Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia - Elizabeth Gilbert

The Laramie Project - Moises Kaufman

The Solace of Leaving Early ; Something Rising (Light and Swift) - Haven Kimmel

Angels In America - Tony Kushner

Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life - Anne Lamott

Feast: Food to Celebrate Life - Nigella Lawson

Mere Christianity ; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. Lewis

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me - Frank McGuinness

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality - Donald Miller

Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris

My Kind of Place: Travel Stories From a Woman Who's Been Everywhere - Susan Orlean

Selected Poems - Ezra Pound

The Essential Rumi - Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

Angelica and Archangel - Sharon Shinn

The Case For Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus - Lee Strobel

Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

This Is My Catholicism #1

TWO POEMS BY LEONARD COHEN


"In the Eyes of Men"

In the eyes of men he falls, and in his own eyes too. He falls from his high place, he trips on his achievement. He falls to you, he falls to know you. It is sad, they say. See his disgrace, say the ones at his heel. But he falls radiantly toward the light to which he falls. They cannot see who lifts him as he falls, or how his falling changes, and he himself bewildered till his heart cries out to bless the one who holds him in his falling. And in his fall he hears his heart cry out, his heart explains why he is falling, why he had to fall, and he gives over to the fall. Blessed are you, clasp of the falling. He falls into the sky, he falls into the light, none can hurt him as he falls. Blessed are you, shield of the falling. Wrapped in his fall, concealed within his fall, he finds the place, he is gathered in. While his hair streams back and his clothes tear in the wind, he is held up, comforted, he enters the place of his fall. Blessed are you, embrace of the falling, foundation of the light, master of the human accident.

"When I Have Not Rage"

When I have not rage or sorrow, and you depart from me, then I am most afraid. When the belly is full, and the mind has its sayings, then I fear for my soul; I rush to you as a child at night breaks into its parents' room. Do not forget me in my satisfaction. When the heart grins at itself, the world is destroyed. And I am found alone with the husks and the shells. Then the dangerous moment comes: I am too great to ask for help. I have other hopes. I legislate from the fortress of my disappointments, with a set jaw. Overthrow this even terror with a sweet remembrance: when I was with you, when my soul delighted you, when I was what you wanted. My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terror for one who remembers the Name.

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"Hard to Get"
By Rich Mullins, from "The Jesus Record"


You who live in Heaven,
Hear the prayers of those of us who live on earth
Who are afraid of being left by those we love
And who get hardened by the hurt
Do You remember when You lived down here where we all scrape
To find the faith to ask for daily bread?
Did You forget about us after You had flown away?
Well, I've memorized every word You said
Still I'm so scared, I'm holding my breath
While You're up there,
Just playing hard to get

You who live in radiance
Hear the prayers of those of us who live in skin
We have a love that's not as patient as Yours was
Still we do love, now and then
Did You ever know loneliness? Did You ever know need?
Do You remember just how long a night can get?
You were barely holding on as Your friends fall asleep
They couldn't see the blood that's running in Your sweat
Will those who mourn be left uncomforted
While You're up there,
Just playing hard to get?

And I know You bore our sorrow
And I know You feel our pain
And I know that it would not hurt any less
Even if it could be explained
And I know that I am only lashing out
At the one who loves me most
And after I've figured this, somehow,
All I really need to know,

Is if you who live in eternity
Hear the prayers of those of us who live in time
We can't see what's ahead,
And we cannot get free from what we've left behind
I'm reeling from these voices that keep screaming in my ears
All the words of shame and doubt, blame and regret
I can't see how You're leading me, unless You let me in
To where I'm lost enough to let myself be met
And so You've been there all along, I guess
It's just Your ways, and You,
Are just plain hard to get


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When Thou commandest me to sing, it seems that my heart would burst with pride; and I look to Thy face and tears come to my eyes. All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony, and my adoration spreads like a glad bird in its flight across the sea. I know that Thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before Thy presence. I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song Thy feet which I could never aspire to reach. Drunk with the joy of singing, I forget myself and call Thee friend Who are my Lord.

--Rabindranath Tagore, "Gitanjali"

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I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve.

Then one night I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland and I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that, I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch someone love something before you can love it yourself. It's as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

--Donald Miller, from "Blue Like Jazz"

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I came to You late, O Beauty so ancient and new. I came to love You late. You were within me and I was outside where I rushed about wildly searching for You like some monster loose in Your beautiful world. You were with me, but I was not with You. You called me, You shouted to me, You wrapped me in Your splendor, You broke past my deafness, You bathed me in Your light, You sent my blindness reeling. You gave out such a delightful fragrance and I drew it in and came breathing hard after You. I tasted, and it made me hunger and thirst; You touched me, and I burned to know Your peace.

--Saint Augustine

C.S. Lewis Daily Reflection

From A Year With C.S. Lewis - Daily Readings From His Classic Works, edited by Patricia Klein (HarperCollins 2003)

JUNE 24th - from Mere Christianity

"Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to try to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes. Laziness means more work in the long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.

It is like that here. 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 all 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--centred on money or pleasure or ambition--and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And this is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. 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 re-sown."