hope, He's coming

i'll probably sound like a broken record in this post. That's because i simply can't get over Lewis' discourse on Hope. it's so so very beautiful. So sorry of any repeats from last week's post.

HOPE
Synonyms:

noun.  expectation - expectancy - expectance - trust - promise

verb.  trust - expect - anticipate

 

i love the idea of Lewis that hoping is not passive. It's active, because something must be done to have hope. To have hope means to look forward to better things, to expect that this looking forward is not futile, to trust in God's promises of True Happiness. 

 

He says, "If i find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable conclusion is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only arouse it, to suggest the real thing."(Mere Christianity)

 

That doesn't necessarily devalue our mortal experiences, but gives us something to hold onto when things in our lives don't feel exactly right, when we come close to grasping a certain feeling or longing, but can't quite get there. We know that there is something more.

Lewis describes the tree ways that people deal with this grasping. The first way, the Fool's Way, is when people remained discontented for the duration of their lives. The second, the Way of the Disillusioned 'Sensible Man' is the way of the pessimist who doesn't see the point in hoping at all. Then, there's the Christian Way, the way of knowing that all of our longings will be satisfied, it's just that we are made for another world. 

Ahh! Beautiful.

all creation groans

listen to this. (best quality, ignore the fan video)

"If i find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy, i can only conclude that i was not made for here"

A very serious little girl, growing up my mom always told me that God has commanded us to hope on my more despairing days. That statement never made complete sense to me, that is until i read C.S. Lewis' discourse on Hope in Mere Christianity. 

Lewis explains, "A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not...a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do." Hope is at the core of what it means to be Christian. 

i've struggled with this idea, especially on days when i'm feeling particularly gloomy. God isn't saying that He forbids us from feeling sorrow. After all, He is the ultimate Man of Sorrow, acquainted with grief. 

Rather, our hope in Christ is our hope that someday we will experience True Reality, that our sorrow-burdened souls can be made light.

rumours of true Reality

First of all, listen to this.

When i was in middle school, my best friend moved across the world to New Zealand. Needless to say, this move drastically shaped her life, and, although in a more minor sense, shaped mine too.

i will never forget that lucky time in my life when i saw her again from out the window of a train in the small town of  Greymouth on the south island, waving her hands over her head like and S.O.S. plea. Another thing I will never forget is the car ride from the train depot through meandering and bumpy roads to her house a few hours away. We listened to Brooke Fraser, a native Kiwi and the artist who sings the song above, and i was instantaneously in love.

A few years later, she had a second album come out. My best friend and i (who was back in the states) turned it on her little CD player and sat in silence track after track. The first song on that album is titled "Shadowfeet" (lyrics found here.) and i have listened to it countless times since. It wasn't, however, until i read the Great Divorce this last week, that this song has gained all the more significance to me.

"But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly."

--George MacDonald

Throughout the book, this idea of true Reality rung out to me. While the book is described as "a dream," the thought came to me that what the main character experiences is quite real to him in the moment in which he is dreaming. Similarly, everything that we experience is our own reality.

However, there is a true Reality, one that whether we make it our reality or not, fully exists.

This Reality is God and Heaven and the Gospel. The thought came to me that no matter how we label Reality, it is there. The church, for example, exists and is fully real. However, the church is not separate from existence. The church, or the gospel, is existence. It is life, it is Reality or the way things are. The church is merely the structure that we learn of that Reality and worship Him who knows all Reality from beginning to end.


It's a reality that "whispers of a well-lit way."

"It started out as a feeling, which then turned into a hope." --Regina Spektor (from Prince Caspian)

{most of this is from a previous journal entry, written last week}

So, why C.S. Lewis? 

Besides the whimsy and the fairytale, i love C.S. Lewis for the essence of his works, for the almost-ancient feeling that i get when i read his words. This semester, i will use this little corner of the internet to record my musings, findings, and all other sorts of -ings related to Lewis while i'm enrolled in a C.S. Lewis class.

This last week, i read this in the Screwtape Letters:

"The more often [one] feels without acting, the less [one] will be able to ever act, and, in the long run, the less [one] will be able to feel." 

Apathy-

1. A lack of emotion or interest

2. A lack of sense of purpose

3. The opposite of love

For as long as i can remember, i've been afraid.  I've been afraid of a lot of things, the dark, plane crashes, the phantom of the opera, loneliness, disease, just to name a few. But nothing scares me quite like apathy.

 i believe that we were made as feeling creatures for a reason. While for some of us (i.e. myself) might sometimes feel too much, i believe that our innermost feelings, those that belong to our eternal-selves, can be compasses that direct our lives. Not every feeling should be acted on, of course, but when we feel something good, something holy, God wants us to act on it. We are not meant to be passive creatures.


To feel nothing, to feel apathy would be to not feel alive, to not feel that holy connection to heaven. There have been moments in my life when i have been on the brink of apathy, and i didn't feel very alive. So, to feel more alive each day, i want to act on my feelings, to live more intensely and purposefully.

Because, then i will feel more love which i guess is what matters most in the end.