The Sojourn

In Search of a Better Country

  • Half the Kingdom or a Dinner Date

    Professor Haldane himself illustrates the present state of mind very well. He thinks that if one were inventing a language for ‘sinless beings who loved their neighbors as themselves’ it would be appropriate to have no words for ‘my’, ‘I’, and ‘other personal pronouns and inflexions’. In other words he sees no difference between two opposite solutions of the problem of selfishness: between love (which is a relation between persons) and the abolition of persons. Nothing but a Thou can be loved and a Thou can exist only for an I.

    A society in which no one was conscious of himself as a person over against other persons, where non could say ‘I love you’, would, indeed, be free from selfishness, but not through love. It would be ‘unselfish’ as a bucket of water is unselfish.

    C.S. Lewis, Other Worlds (1975), 83–84.

Beauty for the Eyes

  • Half the Kingdom or a Dinner Date
  • He Makes Ministers a Flaming Fire
  • His Spirit Was Provoked

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Wisdom for the Ears

  • Wildly Inefficient

    There are some days that I just sit with a passage and get nowhere. But remember, this is a relationship, and “relational time is wildly inefficient.” If you’ve had young kids, you know what I’m talking about. About 80 percent of the conversations I have with my four-year-old are total nonsense, but I put in the effort to get to the 20 percent that are pure gold. Regardless of the proportions, all relational time—including our time with the Lord—can feel inefficient at certain moments.

    Jordan Raynor, Redeeming Your Time, loc. 717.

  • There is No Such Thing as Normal

    The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.

    If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.

    C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time”, from The Weight of Glory, p. 49

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