EVANGELICALS

'I recall an abiding sense of religious responsibility, a self-sacrificing energy and works of mercy, an Evangelistic zeal, an aloofness from the world, and a level of saintliness in daily life as I do not expect again to see realised on earth. Everything down to the minutest detail of action and speech were considered with reference to eternity.'

GWE Russell quoted in William Hague, William Wilberforce, p.93.

JOY

'My grand objection to the religious system still held by many who declare them orthodox Churchmen ... is, that it tends to render Xtianity so much a system of prohibitions rather than privilege and hopes, and thus the injunction to rejoice so strongly enforced in the New Testament is practically neglected, and Religion is made to wear a forbidding and gloomy air and not one of peace and hope and joy.'

William Wilberforce quoted in William Hague, William Wilberforce, p. 100.

JESUS

'"Aslan," said Lucy, "you're bigger."
"That is because you are older, little one," answered he.
"Not because you are?"
"I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger."'
CS Lewis, Prince Caspian, p.124.

HUMANKIND

'Lucy shuddered and nodded. When they had sat down she said: "Such a horrible idea has come into my head, Su."

"What's that?"

"Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you'd never know which were which?"'

CS Lewis, Prince Caspian, p.107.

GRIEF

'Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We antcipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind or narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.'

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p.188.

ANXIETY

'Suppose someone you love were to say to you, "I don't trust you. I don't believe you love me and will care for me." What an affront that would be to you! Yet that is what we are saying to God by our anxiety.'

Jerry Bridges, Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate, p. 64.

HEAVEN

‘Then Aslan turned to them and said: “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”
Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.”
“No fear of that,” said Asan. “Have you not guessed?”
Their hearts leapt and a wild hope rose within them.
“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning"
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 for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.’

CS Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 524 (in The Complete Chronicles of Narnia)

HEAVEN

'...you've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years...'

CS Lewis, The Last Battle, p.523 (in The Complete Chronicles of Narnia).

HOLINESS

'Holiness is nothing but the implanting, writing and realising of the gospel in our souls.'

John Owen in Edward T. Welch, Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave, p. 155.

IDOLATRY

'...here are some questions that can reveal the heart:

• What do you truly want?
• What is your purpose in life?
• What or whom do you really love?
• When do you get most sad or depressed?
• When do you get hopeless?
• What do you get most excited about?
• What brings you the most pleasure?
• What is your dream?
• How would you like to be remembered?
• What do you especially want to avoid?'

Edward T. Welch, Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave, p.130.