Growing With My Garden

 Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets, and I have many of his poems by heart, often putting myself to sleep by reciting them in my mind.  But I am sorry for his lack of faith.  I’ve taken the liberty to take his poem “Reluctance” and adjust the ending to my liking: "Out through the fields and the woods/  And over the walls I have wended/  I’ve climbed the hills of view/  And looked on the world and descended;/  I’ve come by the highway home,/  And low it is ended./  Oh, when to the heart of man/  Was it ever less than treason/  To withhold one’s heart from God/  And seek recourse in reason;/  To ignore the Gospel truth/  And refuse life’s joyous season./  God awaits the heart’s decision/  To trust Him, one' self denying/  And be shown the path of life/  Utterly on Him relying;/  To hold with faith the promises/  And gladly await one’s dying. (With apologies to Robert Frost)

Both these essays speak to each reader personally, no matter where one is in one’s relationship to God.   We each want a healthy spiritual life, yet each has a certain unease as to where we are at.  What is the way to a more fulfilling and fruitful Christian life?   The first essay underscores the centrality of personal forgiveness.  Christ emphasizes that a person is not forgiven unless that person forgives those who have sinned against him.  Forgiveness is quite a different thing from excusing; the latter seeks to understand and make allowance for; forgiveness erases the acts from one’s thinking,  as though they had never occurred.  Lewis writes: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in us.” To do this requires complete surrender to God.  Lewis concludes: "This is hard.  It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury.  But to forgive provocations of dai...

     This essay serves to clarify a wide-spread misunderstanding among nominal Christians about the nature of church membership.  It is widely felt that being a member of a Christian church means simply having one’s name on the role.  The Biblical concept is quite a different one. Being a true Christian is to leave individualism–self-concern behind–and be a loving member of a mystical body, the body of Christ.  Lewis emphasizes that by such membership Paul meant: “what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another, things differing not only in structure and function but also in dignity.” The unity of the church is a unity of people essentially different one from the other, each having a specific contribution to make to the body, and primarily being united to Christ.  He writes: We are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed sinners with si...

            Lewis here addresses one of the characteristics that is endemic to  human society, that of the tendency for small groups to form unintentionally, and a person finds oneself either within or without a group.  To find oneself within a group can become a source of satisfaction and pride; to be outside can become a source of  dissatisfaction and disappointment.  One is unable to choose, but this an unavoidable feature of life.   His object in addressing this feature of life is to warn against its subtly generating immoral attitudes of envy or ambition or pride, and his advice is simply not to concern oneself with the phenomenon.  If one applies oneself to one’s work, unconcerned as to which group one is or is not a part of, true friendships automatically arise, and in them true pleasure exists.  A person should let any secrecy be accidental, and any exclusiveness a byproduct, not concerning oneself with eith...

  This is a fascinating–albeit a very difficult–essay.  Lewis poses theology against science as the two systems that purport to offer a satisfying explanation of the nature of reality, and he builds a strong case for the superior credibility of theology.  He presents an utterly unarguable conclusion: that Christianity, as over against Scientism, is true, and the evolutionary tenet that all that is simply happened over an unimaginable length of time, is completely untenable.   He begins by seemingly putting theology down: it does a poor job of satisfying the imagination.  But that is true of the unbeliever.  For the believer, there is “a special sort of imaginative enjoyment.” He explains: It is therefore quite true that the Christians do enjoy their world picture, aesthetically, once they have accepted it as true.  Every man, I believe, enjoys the world picture which he accepts, for the gravity and finality of the actual is itself an aesthet...