March 20: Lewis on Praising

You've probably guessed I love CSLewis. I'm somewhat convinced that staying in a CSLewis book on a regular basis should be a spiritual discipline. Maybe I'll write out an apologetic on why I think this, but for now, I'll just pass on some quotes from his essay "A Word on Praising" from his book 'Reflections on the Psalms'. After you read it, journal a response.

'The most obvious fact about praise - whether of God or anything - strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise - lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game-praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars.

'I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. ... I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: "Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?"

HERE IT IS:

'I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.

'It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.

'If it were possible for a created soul fully (I mean, up to the full measure conceivable in a finite being) to "appreciate," that is to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme beautitude.'

I rest my case.

26 February: Prayer as Visioneering

OK, I’ll agree with my spell-check and dictionary.com that “visioneering” is not a word. Marketing and business books use it regardless of this fact. When these books bring up the topic, they try to convey a combination of pioneering with vision; some hopeful anticipation of the future that takes one into uncharted territory. The most successful innovators, it seems, are those who can see potential previously undiscovered or unappreciated and chase that down like no predecessor ever did.

I would like to suggest that, when it comes to prayer for others, we should be doing the same thing. Often prayers rightly deal with present concerns and pressing occasions for praise, but it’s something else altogether when we pray and love someone with hope. Something quite subtle can happen when we reach this point of asking God to do something: we make modest requests. We don’t mean to insult God or be unloving to the person, it’s just that, sometimes, we forget Who we’re talking to and what He’s capable of doing in this person’s life. If our view for God’s grandeur is fuzzy or absent, we forget to come to Him with hope He brings and end up just asking for what might naturally happen anyway. We lose a vision of God and, thus, lose our vision for anyone else.

When it comes to prayer, what we can see provides the occasion for us to approach what we can’t. So, even though it seems unlikely that our relative whom we’ve always known to be angry would ever have a gentle spirit or that AIDS in Africa will ever be curbed, we still approach Our Father with eyes gleaming with hope, unperturbed by whether or not our requests seem likely. Prayer starts by looking downward (on what is before us), but must look forward and upward to be Christian prayer. Prayer is not about the hope which is found in what is seen, but in what heaven could move the present to become.

A quote from CS Lewis’ most famous talk (“The Weight of Glory”) bears repeating:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. . . . It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. . . . Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Visionaries see what others overlook or undervalue and confidently advance to make their hopes embodied. Go and pray likewise.

Assignment: Go and pray likewise.