Moving On

So we had a good meeting last Sunday: spent some more time with two Charles Wesley hymns, Come, O Thou Traveller Unknown, and And Can It Be that I Should Gain; and learned a bit about John Wesley's heart being strangely warmed and his coming to a living faith unlike anything he had experienced until then.

We are now moving on to the 20th century and C.S. Lewis. There is such a wide variety of writings by this man and his influence is both so varied and wide-ranging that I have selected one thread to follow over the next two meetings.

One thread, two short phrases:

1) Further up and further in, a phrase the man himself coined somewhere in his writings, and
2) Much more, a phrase that Paul uses again and again in his letters to the churches.

It seems to me that just about anything I read by C.S. Lewis urges me on in both those ways, to realize how great, how vast, how wide and how deep is God and the reach of his redeeming love. He seems to be able to help us escape what so easily become flat and two dimensional, religious and spiritual words and ideas and doctrines, and understand them in their fulness, three-dimensional as it were.

And finally, once again revisiting the Benedictine model and the Wesleyan revival, two more passages I came across this week:

"Hospitality is one form of worship," the rabbis wrote. Benedictine spirituality takes this tendency seriously. The welcome at the door is not only loving - a telephone operator at a jail can do that. It is total, as well. Both the community and the abbot receive the guest. The message to the stranger is clear. Come right in and disturb our perfect lives. You are the Christ for us today....Benedict wants us to let down the barriers of our souls so that the God of the unexpected can come in.

pp. 140-141, The Rule of Benedict, Insight for the Ages, Joan Chittister

Francis Asbury, born to a poor family near Birmingham, England, and eventually the first bishop of the Methodist Church in America, had this to say, at the age of thirteen, after attending his first Methodist service:

This was not the Church but it was better. The people were so devout, men and women kneeling down, saying 'Amen.' Now, behold! They were singing hymns, sweet sound! Why, strange to tell! The preacher had no prayer book, and yet he prayed wonderfully! What was yet more extraordinary, the man took his text and had no sermon book: thought I, this is wonderful indeed! It is certainly a strange way, but the best way.

p 440, The One Year Christian History, E. Michael and Sharon Rusten