Nature and its laws testify of God.  Muir was right.  Open your mind and feel what Nature offers you.

I just finished my first readings in Miracles and for quite a while I was a little bit upset at Lewis's assertions that God as a supernatural being was so outside of nature.  Nature and God go hand in hand for me.  I feel as the early conservationist John Muir did that Nature inspires and lifts us to nobler aspirations.  It is the very testimony that God lives.

Clearly this is not what Lewis was getting at though.  His argument was that people use nature as a means of discrediting God.  They believe that we are here by a chance that is so improbable the odds are simply astronomical.  They believe that some billions of years ago, a great explosion took place and randomly formed the precise elements in the precise combination at the precise distance from a sun of the precise age and size to form our lovely little planet that was hospitable to life.  Then they believe that evolution took its course and we are simply the by-products of a great deal of astronomical, physical, chemical, and biological chance.  Life and reason therefore is also a by-product and there is no real meaning.  And therefore that there is nothing outside of Nature.  Nature is the accumulation of all that chance throughout the entire universe.

I feel badly for those people.  I can't imagine going about my life thinking that my life is cosmologically insignificant.

Lewis does discuss that God made all the natural laws - that science and reason testify of Him.  It did take him some time to make the argument though.  The point of Miracles is that God does intervene in our lives. Lewis is trying to logically explain the Nature of Miracles and that they do exist. God's actions do obey His own Natural Laws.  What we have to realize is that they are His laws.  He is their creator and the only true master of them.  I love when Lewis talks about the subtler nature of poetic laws.  It is a perfect illustration of how to the lesser mind (which is all of humanity when compared to deity) a seeming violation of law is simply a misunderstanding of the subtler complexities of the very law we do not yet fully understand.

The more I understand about Nature the more I understand about God.  Nature is His canvas and His laboratory.  Any belief that depreciates the magnificence of Nature is simply ingratitude.

A consistent theme to Lewis's works is the idea of becoming like Christ rather than just doing Christian things.  The devils in The Screwtape Letters work to make sure any virtuous action is done for the wrong reasons.  If the right things are done for the wrong reasons, they are of little help to us.  Those who return to Hell in The Great Divorce do so because they refuse to become like God - that there is something about being themselves they won't give up.  The irony here is that by giving up those parts of ourselves that hold us back and choosing therefore to become more like God we become even more ourselves.  We are each divinely unique and when we focus on becoming like God we truly find who we are.

Lewis most clearly elaborates this concept of becoming in Mere Christianity.  He goes on to tell of various sins discussing why each one is important.  And then he gets to Pride - what he calls the worst of all the sins.  He describes Pride as the only Spiritual sin.  All our other sins come through some perversion or distortion of natural impulses and drives.  But Pride - that is the idea that we are better than others.  We get no satisfaction out of actually being smart, or good looking but in thinking smugly that we are better at those things than others.  This distinction is what makes Pride so dangerous.  It literally rips all our relationships to shreds.  We cannot feel Godlike love because we are too busy judging or disdaining others.  Once we let go of ourselves and focus on others and becoming like God, He takes the helm in our lives and the real journey really begins.

We are not the sum of our actions.  Certainly each choice is going to leave a mark.  But it is how we choose to look at each choice - whether we choose to grow, forgive and learn - that defines us in the end.  Christ invites us to come unto Him and become as He is.  That is the only thing that matters.

Reading through The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, I find Lewis's ideas of time and eternity absolutely fascinating.  While I'm not sure if this is exactly how God works eternity out, Lewis's ideas ring true to me.

He asserts that The Present is really the only thing that we truly experience and that it is the closest we will ever come to experiencing eternity while we are bound by time in this life.  It makes sense.  Our ideas of Past and Future are really just that.  We obviously have experienced the Past, but our experiencing of it occurred in the what-was-then-Present just as our reminiscing of it occurs in the current Present.  Likewise, we will experience the Future, but it will then be our then-Present and any of the worries, hopes, or dreams of the Future that we entertain now are being experienced now.  Any energy wasted in anxiety of a Future that in a large degree is quite unpredictable is lost Present.

The most interesting application of this is that there is no such thing as a small decision.  Because Eternity is the ever-present Present, every choice that we make is the choice.  Which means that any failure on our part to do the right at any given moment is changing our course for Eternity.  We're all going to make honest mistakes.  It's part of our growth and just a part of life on Earth.  But we all know that not every mistake is unintentional.  Each of us have our own foibles, challenges, weaknesses, and guilty pleasures.  If we look at each choice as the important one it is, it can help us to choose correctly.  Viewing the Present as Eternity helps us to see that there really isn't any repenting to be done later.  The time for that is now.  Hopefully we'll have grown and changed by the time the future comes, but there really isn't any undoing what we've done now.  Of course we could delay our repentance and that repentance is always available.  We have that agency and that gift.  But any delay is going to retard the growing and changing we were looking forward to.

Now is the time to act.  Now is the time to choose.  Now is the time to declare whose side you are on.  Any dwelling on the past or delaying or worrying about the future is lost Present.  Just live life, choose wisely, and be happy.  It's meant to be that way.

I'm taking a C.S. Lewis literature course this semester and I am LOVING it.  I will admit that, being a Biology major, I was a little intimidated about the quantity of reading required every day, but once I dove into it, I've loved it.  The pages seem to fly by as Lewis fills my minds with different worlds and profound truths.

This week we've read The Problem with X, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce.   If you haven't read them, check them out.  As I've read these beautifully written works I have been impressed with the importance of clearly seeing ourselves and others in God's Light.

I love the way these three works teach this.  The very complaining that we all relate to at the beginning of The Problem with X can very well be on of those vices Screwtape advises Wormwood to use against his patient.  That very focus on the sins of others can be the thing that keeps us from entering Heaven.  Just as the employer in The Great Divorce refused to go on to Heaven because his inferior, murderer employee and found his peace there.

But the other side of the coin is equally enlightening.  When we see ourselves clearly - with both our faults and our own divine potential - we can see others that way.  We begin to change and become one of Screwtapes enemies.  We can see the spark within each soul no matter how clouded it may be.  We can become one of those solid spirits in The Great Divorce while here on earth.  As we grow more like Christ, we can see others with that clarity of spirit that He sees them with.  We truly can become saviors on Mount Zion.

The choice is ours.  Our focus can become critical, offended, and increasingly inwardly imprisoning.  Or we can change, grow, and find ourselves liberated, uplifted, and ready to lift others.  Every road has its forks, and every fork its choice.