lewsian letters

I’ve been posting quotes from Yours, Jack, a collection of personal letters that C. S. Lewis wrote during his lifetime pertaining to spiritual formation. If you haven’t scrounged up the change to buy the book yet (I’ve borrowed my copy from the library), but would like to do some more reading, Laurence Krieg has posted all the letters that he and Lewis wrote back and forth beginning in 1955 when he was 9 . I’d suggest skimming the letters he and his mother wrote, and reading Lewis’ responses. Below are a couple of my favorite. For an Oxford scholar, the man was a wealth of practical spiritual wisdom.

One is sorry the Sunday Schools should be so dull. Yet I wonder. In this all important subject, as in every other, the youngsters must meet, if not exactly the dull, at any rate the hard and the dry, sooner or later. The modern attempt is to keep it as late as possible; but does that do any good? They’ve got to cut their teeth. Aren’t many parts of the Bible itself, read at home, quite simple enough and interesting enough to be a counterpoise to the dull teaching? Anyway, there is no use trying to keep the first thrill. It will come to life again and again only on one condition: that we turn our backs on it and get to work and go through all the dullness.

~

Yes, people do find it hard to keep on feeling as if you believed in the next life: but then it is just as hard to keep on feeling as if you believed you were going to be nothing after death. I know this because in the old days before I was a Christian I used to try. From Correspondence between C. S. Lewis and Mrs. William L. (Philinda) Krieg and her son, Laurence