I used to skip the forewords in books but now I don't. I think I am learning the patience for the process in general in life, and it includes reading the very beginning of a book. This morning, coffee in hand, and blissful silence all around me before a day in middle school, I was struck by the first sentence in the foreword of Mere Christianity.
"This is a book that begs to be seen in its historical context, as a bold act of storytelling and healing in a world gone mad."
Isn't that a lovely beginning to a book written specifically for the British living in England in 1942? I cannot help but celebrate a book too that will begin with a reminder to see something in its historical context. I marvel at the brilliance of the mind that C.S. Lewis was given, and the humility that goes alongside is a cheerful reminder of humanity even while using some its loftiest vocabulary. Kathleen Norris wrote artfully in this section of the book, and I am sharing excerpts of it here today.
.(At the beginning, after the sentence above...)
..."In 1942, just twenty-four years after the end of a brutal war that had destroyed an entire generation of its young men, Great Britain was at war again. Now it was ordinary citizens who suffered as their small island nation was bombarded with four hundred planes a night, in the infamous 'blitz' that changed the face of war, turning civilians and their cities into the front lines.
As a young man, C.S. Lewis had served in the awful trenches of World War I, and in 1940, when the bombing of Britain began, he took up duties as an air raid warden and gave talks to men in the Royal Air Force, who knew that after just thirteen bombing missions, most of them would be declared dead or missing. Their situation prompted Lewis to speak about the problems of suffering, pain, and evil, a work that resulted in his being invited by the BBC to give a series of wartime broadcasts on Christian faith. Delivered over the air from 1942 to 1944, these speeches eventually were gathered into the book we know today as Mere Christianity.
This book, then, does not consist of academic philosophical musings. Rather, it is a work of oral literature, addressed to people at war. How strange it must have seemed to turn on the radio, which was every day bringing news of death and unspeakable destruction, and hear one man talking, in an intelligent, good-humored, and probing tone, about decent humane behavior, fair play, and the importance of knowing right from wrong. Asked by the BBC to explain to his fellow Britons what Christians believe,C.S. Lewis proceeded with the task as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and also the most important."
(And at the end...)
"The Christianity Lewis espouses is humane, but not easy; it asks us to recognize that the great religious struggle is not fought on a spectacular battleground, but within the ordinary human heart, when every morning we awake and feel the pressures of the day crowding in on us, and we must decide what sort of immortals we wish to be. Perhaps it helps us, as surely as it helped the war-weary British people who first heard these talks, to remember that God plays a great joke on those who would seek after power at any cost. As Lewis reminds us, with his customary humor and wit, 'How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.'"
Yes - to knowing this, believing this, and seeking this out in this day.
Wow. Cool.
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