"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
I went back to St. Ignatius in LA this past week to give them a Lenten talk about temptation and C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.
Resisting Temptation With C.S. Lewis (Download)
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Here’s a C.S. Lewis resource it would have been nice to have back when we were going through Mere Christianity in Season 1 of the podcast:
Professor Brenton Dickieson recently gave an online presentation on “C.S. Lewis, Gender, and The Four Loves”:
A certain English podcast jumped in to share some of his thoughts…
I’m going to be giving a talk in Los Angeles about The Screwtape Letters this Lent, so I’m starting to consume all the lectures I can find on that book…
If you want to become familiar with the works of C.S. Lewis, a great place to dive into is the Wade Center YouTube channel:
“…Do you know, only a few weeks ago I realised suddenly that I at last had forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood.
C.S. Lewis to Mary Willis Shelburne (1963)
I’d been trying to do it for years: and like you, each time I thought I’d done it, I found, after a week or so it all had to be attempted over again.
But this time I feel sure it is the real thing. And (like learning to swim or to ride a bicycle) the moment it does happen it seems so easy and you wonder why on earth you didn’t do it years ago.
So the parable of the unjust judge comes true, and what has been vainly asked for years can suddenly be granted. I also get a quite new feeling about ‘If you forgive you will be forgiven.’ I don’t believe it is, as it sounds, a bargain. The forgiving and the being forgiven are really the very same thing. But one is safe as long as one keeps on trying”
In my recent appearance on The Catholic Man Show, I mentioned that C.S. Lewis went to weekly confession to an Anglican priest. I thought I’d share one of his letters today where he points out the value of confessing our sins out loud:
…there is the gain in self-knowledge: most of [us] have never really faced the facts about ourselves until we uttered them aloud in plain words, calling a spade a spade. I certainly feel I have profited enormously by the practice.
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Not only is Confession biblical, it’s also good psychology 🙂