Clueless Clay

Bought this book because of the famous quote that helped me become a Christian:

“But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

C.S. Lewis has the amazing ability to put things across plainly. Many of his analogies helped my understanding of Christianity and here are some of them:

1. “..Pride is essentially competitive… We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better looking than others… As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”
2. “… our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good.” This got me thinking about love for God and our neighbour.
3. On hope: “…means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world… I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.”
4. On faith: “Now that I am a Christian I do have moods that make the whole thing looks very improbable… The first step is to realise that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life.”
5. “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good… Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…”
6. “If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already… It is like a small child going to his father and saying ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present”.
7. “Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else… We treat our dogs as if they were ‘almost human’: that is why they really become ‘almost human’ in the end.”

Highly recommended read.