Barbara's Random Thoughts

I've been meaning to write more about this book, but I have several other more pressing and/or important things I should be writing instead. So in case I never get back to that post I'd like to write, here are some quotes that I would say more about had I the time, quotes that have been intersecting with my life in many ways lately. I hope they make some sense and carry some measure of meaning to you, even without the context.

The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the Master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything. You are so sure you know what the promise promised! And the danger is that when what He means by ‘wind’ appears you will ignore it because it is not what you thought it would be—as He Himself was rejected because He was not like the Messiah the Jews had in mind.
--C.S. Lewis, quoted in A Severe Mercy, p. 191

It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing.
-Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken, p. 86

...though I wouldn't have admitted it, even to myself, I didn't want God aboard. He was too heavy. I wanted Him approving from a considerable distance. I didn't want to be thinking of Him. I wanted to be free--like Gypsy. I wanted life itself, the color and fire and loveliness of life. And Christ now and then, like a loved poem I could read when I wanted to. I didn't want us to be swallowed up in God. I wanted holidays from the school of Christ.
-Severe Mercy, p. 136

...we talked of the 'Island in the West' in Pilgrim's Regress--that something we long for, whether it be an island in the west or the other side of a mountain or perhaps a schooner yacht, long for it in the belief that it will mean joy, which it never fully does: because what we are really longing for is God.
-Severe Mercy, p. 110

Labels: quotes