Some C. S. Lewis for Valentines Sunday

A CHRIST-LIKE MARRIAGE

....a mortal man is not even the Sky-Father, and cannot really wear his crown. Only a copy of it, done in tinselled paper.

As nature crowns man in that brief action, so the Christian law has crowned him in the permanent relationship of marriage, bestowing---or should I say inflicting?---a certain 'headship' on him. This is a very different coronation. And as we could easily take the natural mystery too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery not seriously enough. Christian writers....have sometimes spoken of the husband's headship with a complacency to make the blood run cold. We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ love the Church---read on---and give his life for her (Eph.) This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion, whose wife receives most and gives least. is most unworthy of him, is---in her own mere nature---least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and the sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth the Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears....The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the crown offered to it either in the Pagan or the Christian mystery. For the one is of paper and the other of thorns.

----The Four Loves


THE UNMAN

UP TILL THAT MOMENT, whenever he had thought of Hell, he had pictured the lost souls as being still human, now, as the frightful abyss which parts ghosthood from manhood yawned before him, pity was almost swallowed up in horror---in the unconquerable revulsion of the life within him from positive and self-consuming death. If the remains of Weston were, at such moments, speaking through his lips of the Un-man, then Weston was not now a man at all. The forces which had begun, perhaps years ago, to eat away his humanity had now completed their work. The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces. Only a ghost was left---an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odour of decay.

---Perelandra


THE WISE MAN, THE WICKED MAN

"Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.

Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you;
rebuke a wise man and he will love you.

Proverbs 9:7-8