Growing With My Garden

  This splendid collection of Lewis’s essays, containing some of the addresses he gave during  WWII and first published in 1949, presents many of his most provocative and insightful thoughts on Christian behavior.  Don’t neglect to read the Introduction, in which Hooper recalls many of his interactions with Lewis.      We will post considerations of the essays on the following schedule:  Please comment and interact. March 6:  The Weight of Glory 13:  Learning in War-Time 20:  Why I Am Not a Pacifist 27:  Transposition Apr 3:  Is Theology Poetry? 10: The Inner Ring 17: Membership 24: On Forgiveness and     A Slip of the Tongue

  The text for this week’s reading begins with a focus on Damaris.  Williams undertakes to show the step by step process by which she comes to spiritual maturity.  The first step is to become aware of others as individuals with needs of their own, rather than as objects that interfered with her work.  She begins to see her father, and then others, in a different light, and she goes out to look for Quentin in order to help him.  She is beginning to be motivated by love of others.   Quentin is pursued by a bestial figure, but as Damaris shields him, a lamb appears and takes the place, we are told, of the lion.  The unbridled strength that is the cause of buildings falling and Quentin overcome by fright is checked by gentle loving action.  The lamb frolics for joy.  The bestial creature, which represents Foster, who had tried along with Berringer to summon and control the archetypal strength of the universe for his own purposes, perishes. In Chapter 15 Williams gives superb and stir