Blessed are you, Lord God,
Father all-holy,
for your boundless love
The tree, once the source of shame
and death for humankind,
has become the cross
of our redemption and life.
When his hour had come to
return to you in glory,
the Lord Jesus,
Our King, our Priest, and our Teacher,
freely mounted the scaffold of the cross
and made it his royal throne,
his altar of sacrifice, his pulpit of truth.
On the cross,
lifted above the earth,
he triumphed over our age-old enemy.
Cloaked in his own blood,
he drew all things to himself.
On the cross,
he opened out his arms
and offered you his life;
the sacrifice of the New Law
that gives to the sacraments
their saving power.
On the cross,
he proved what he had prophesied:
the grain of wheat must die
to bring forth an abundant harvest.
Father,
we honour this cross as the sign
of our redemption.
May we reap the harvest of salvation
planted in pain by Christ Jesus.
May our sins be nailed to his cross,
the power of life released,
pride conquered,
and weakness turned to strength.
May the cross be our comfort in trouble,
our refuge in the face of danger,
our safeguard on life’s journey
until you welcome us to
our heavenly home.
O LORD, Master of my life,
grant that I may not be infected with the
spirit of slothfulness and inquisitiveness,
with the spirit of ambition and vain talking.
{Making a prostration}
Grant instead to me, your servant,
the spirit of purity and of humility,
the spirit of patience and neighborly love.
{Making a third prostration}
O Lord and King,
grant me the grace of being aware of my sins
and of not thinking evil of those of my brethren.
For you are blessed, now and ever, and forever.
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, King of Kings,
You have power over life and death.
You know what is secret and hidden,
and neither our thoughts nor our feelings
are concealed from You.
Cure me of duplicity;
I have done evil before You.
Now my life declines from day to day
and my sins increase.
O Lord, God of souls and bodies,
You know the extreme frailty of my soul and my flesh.
Grant me strength in my weakness, O Lord,
and sustain me in my misery.
Give me a grateful soul that I may
never cease to recall Your benefits,
O Lord most bountiful.
Be not mindful of my many sins,
but forgive me all my misdeeds.
O Lord, disdain not my prayer –
the prayer of a wretched sinner;
sustain me with Your grace until the end,
that it may protect me as in the past.
It is Your grace which has taught me wisdom;
blessed are they who follow her ways,
for they shall receive the crown of glory.
In spite of my unworthiness,
I praise You and I glorify You,
O Lord, for Your mercy to me is without limit.
You have been my help and my protection.
May the name of Your majesty be praised forever.
To you, our God, be glory.
Amen.
After the previously-planned interview fell through at the last minute, David sat down to record a solo episode to talk about his newborn son, Sidecar Day, blue flowers in Narnia, and also to make his tongue-in-cheek case as to why C.S. Lewis is better than J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Gray Havens are an American Christian folk pop husband and wife duo, David and Licia Radford, from Crystal Lake, Illinois. On October 8th they will be releasing their new album, Blue Flower, so David Radford came on the show to talk to Andrew and David about how C.S. Lewis inspired their recent work.
As we approach the end of Season 4, David is joined on the show by Michael “Gomer” Gormley. Among other things, they discuss Ted Lasso, tea, and the Atonement. Also, find out what Gomer would do if he ever became the Pope!
New York Times bestselling author, Patti Callahan, returns to the show to talk about her forthcoming book, “Once Upon A Wardrobe”, which will be released on October 19th.
A few months ago, John and Greta from The Tolkien Road podcast did a series of episodes on religion in Tolkien’s Legendarium. David invited him onto the show to talk about those episodes and to encourage the Pints With Jack listeners to listen to them.
Author Rod Bennett joined David to talk about a presentation on he gave at a big Christian rock festival about C.S. Lewis’ relationship to “Pulp Fiction”.
I’ve you’re reading articles about Lewis, you’ll quite often see this picture of Lewis and a number of other men sitting on a short wall:
I recently saw this article from the Sydney Morning Herald which included a cropped version of this picture, identifying the men, from left-to-right as J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis. However, this is incorrect!
The men in the above picture are Commander James Dundas-Grant, Colin Hardie, Dr. Robert E. Havard, C.S. Lewis, and Peter Havard. They are sitting on the Thames River embankment parapet wall at The Trout pub. Behind them (out of shot) is the old Chinese style wooden bridge, leading over to the island which had a stone lion statue on it.
In anticipation of Season 4, Matt sat down and shared some of his favourite quotations from the book which we will be reading this Season, The Screwtape Letters…
There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a I brief sojourn in the Enemy’s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour…
If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 2
Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 4
He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 8
…the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 9
The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 18
It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual “taste”. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 20
You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods.
You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 12
You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 9
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 12
Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 22
To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 29
You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 14
Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 16
You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.
The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel…
At several points I have thought I have lost my wallet and in those moments I’ve always thought “Wait! What was actually in my wallet? What do I have to replace?!”
Today I thought I’d leave myself a little note of everything currently in my wallet…
