A year with clive

This is a dated book with a one page read for each day. Therefore, it is an odd book to review. So I have picked out a few quotes from different writings of his. Of all the Christian writers in fiction and nonfiction, he is by far, my favorite author. Every piece of fiction points to some spiritual truth and every piece of nonfiction portrays just how often this man struggled with seeking God and finding the truth. Anything in italics is his. The rest is me.

Impulses:
It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses—say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism...The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials, ‘for the sake of humanity’, and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

Happiness:
The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily untied to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

Imperfect world:
We find ourselves in a world of transporting pleasures, ravishing beauties, and tantalizing possibilities, but all constantly being destroyed, all coming to nothing.

On Pride:
When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with every one else’s pride. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

Difference in religions:
And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.Maybe this is not just the difference between Christianity and all other religions, but even within the “Christian religion” I think too often churches portray Christ as a list of rules and that is all. I certainly find that all too true at the church I attend here in Honduras. The sad thing is, those who grow up in that type of teaching and never take the opportunity to explore otherwise will always know Christ as someone or something rigid, square and routine-like. To me, the most beautiful thing about Christ is that he is so the opposite. He transforms into many things: deep discussions with all kinds of people, a jump off a waterfall, a daily routine, a dream, a time-consuming project that we lose sleep over, a journey to a foreign place, a smile, and even, to borrow Lewis’ term, a dance. Oh what a dance he is!