Prepared for Easter

I have been reading “Preparing for Easter” through Lent. It’s a compilation of fifty extracts from the writings of C S Lewis, put together as fifty readings to take one through Lent. It is a fascinating and mixed selection, some I really enjoyed, though I found less in others to speak to me, and some, certainly, is of Lewis’s time. But it was a good way of having a reading discipline through Lent. Here’s just a few brief extracts. “How should we know what He means us to be like?” “We must all pin our hopes on the mercy of God and the work of Christ, not on our own goodness.” “Jesus asks those at the well who are sinless to cast the first stone. Paul says we have all fallen short and missed the mark. Let’s not gloss over our corruption but rather recognize it and confess it. Remember that he is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” “Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man (sic) who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.” “Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived.” “When Christ stills the storm He does what God has often done before. God made Nature such that there would be both storms and calms: in that way all storms (except those that are still going on at this moment) have been stilled by God.” “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men (sic) that you and I were intended to be.” “And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”