Stan’s Corner, Monday, April 9, 2012

I have just read a book about C.S. Lewis who wrote two famous children’s books—The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and The Chronicles of Narnia.  But he was also a layperson who wrote religious books as well.  Here is a quote from one of them: “The more we obey our conscience, the more it seems to demand of us.  Lewis argued that the Christian way is quite different, both harder and easier.  Half measures will not do.  Christ wants us.  In Lewis’s typical no nonsense way he describes the attitude was one that says ‘ I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it’.  Christ sometimes said the way was hard, sometimes easy.  Lewis draws upon the worst wartime analogy to drive the point home.  Lewis says:

“Christ says, ‘Take up your Cross’—in other words, it’s going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp.  Next minute he says, ‘my yoke is easy and my burden light’.  He means both.”  This is one of life’s puzzlers.