Showing posts with label CS Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CS Lewis. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Abandoned by God

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to Him then with praise, you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting an double bolting from the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.

CS Lewis
A Grief Observed

Thursday, April 8, 2010

A Delighted Pre-Occupation

There may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and then gone on at a later stage to “fall in love with her”. But I doubt if this is at all common. Very often what comes first (with true love) is simply a delighted pre-occupation with her in totality. A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself.

CS Lewis
The Four Loves

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Bawdy Humor

The truth is humans are pretty clearly divided on (the matter of indecent or bawdy humour) into two classes. There are some to whom "no passion is as serious as lust' and for whom an indecent story ceases to produce lasciviousness precisely in so far as it becomes funny: there are others in whom laughter and lust are excited at the same moment and by the same things. The first sort joke about sex because it gives rise to many incongruities: the second cultivate incongruities because they afford a pretext for talking about sex. If your man is of the first type, bawdy humour will not help you — I shall never forget the hours which I wasted (hours to me of unbearable tedium) with one with one of my early patients in bars and smoking-rooms before I learned this rule.

A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke.

CS Lewis
Screwtape Letters