Dear Friends and Fellow Believers,

It's still a bit busy around here as my daughter and her family (which includes my three granddaughters and my grandson) are still visiting with us, and I'm barely "over" all the pre-wedding planning and activities. But that is NOT a complaint!--rather, a statement of fact. Although we're enjoying them very much, it's not allowing much time for other things. I mention this in order to let you know that time constraints have me, once again, looking through my files to find material for the "Jerusalem's Daughters" offering this week.

One thing I found, and the thing that I have decided to send, is an e-mail that I sent to the KeepersAtHome listserver almost three years ago. It is from the Foreword to an edition of "Mere Christianity" by C. S. Lewis, and it was written by Kathleen Norris--the author of last week's offering, "The Quotidian Mysteries: Liturgy, Laundry, and "Women's Work". "Mere Christianity" was written in the early 1940s, and we discover that much that is "old is new again". Or, as we read in Ecclesiastes, "there is no new thing under the sun." (Eccl. 1:9)

I'm sending this post from September 20, 2001 as it was written at that time -- just 9 days after the terrorist attack on the two towers at the World Trade Center. Since the "madness" that Norris refers to in her Foreward to this edition of "Mere Christianity" has not abated but continues apace, may you find something in her words encouraging and strengthening to you in the face of difficulties, trials, challenges, etc.. She speaks of "the great religious struggle" being fought "within the human heart", which reminds us of Alexander Solzhenitzen's words that (paraphrased), "the line dividing good and evil lies not between races, nations, denominations, etc., but the line dividing good and evil goes right through every human heart".

May we be valiant and courageous in standing for the Truth in the days ahead,

Elaine

p.s. Please remember that the personal information given is three years old.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My son, Josh, has recently *discovered* the book, _Mere Christianity_, by C. S. Lewis. It's been so long since I read this classic that it's like a "RE-discovery" for me as Josh reads portions of it aloud to me. He has been so enthusiastic about this book that I decided to re-read it. Since Josh is as "bad" as his mama about underlining and marking up a book (notes in margins, etc.), I decided to purchase my own copy instead of borrowing his when he's finished, so today I purchased the new HarperCollins Edition just published this year. (This is the edition Josh has been reading from, so I decided to buy the same one.) I found, to my delight, that the Foreword to this edition was written by Kathleen Norris.
This edition was already on the shelves before the events of last week, but I was struck by the parallels of the "historical context" in which this book came to be and the situation before us now, as brought out by K.N.'s "Foreword". Following are excerpts from that Foreword:

"This is a book that begs to be seen in its historical context, as a bold act of storytelling and healing in a world gone mad. In 1942, just twenty-four years after the end of a brutal war that had destroyed an entire generation of its young men, Great Britain was at war again. Now it was ordinary citizens who suffered, as their small island nation was bombarded by four hundred planes a night, in the infamous "blitz" that changed the face of war, turning civilians and their cities into the front lines."

" . . . [The] situation prompted Lewis to speak about the problems of suffering, pain, and evil, work that resulted in his being invited by the BBC to give a series of wartime broadcasts on Christian faith. Delivered over the air from 1942 to 1944, these speeches eventually were gathered into the book we know today as _Mere Christianity_."

"This book, then, does not consist of academic philosophical musings. Rather, it is a work of oral literature, addressed to people at war. How strange it must have seemed to turn on the radio, which was every day bringing news of death and unspeakable destruction, and hear one man talking, in an intelligent, good-humoured, and probing tone, about decent and humane behavior, fair play, and the importance of knowing right from wrong. Asked by the BBC to explain to his fellow Britons what Christians believe, C. S. Lewis proceeded with the task as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and also the most important."

"We can only wonder about the metaphors that connected so deeply with this book's original audience; images of our world as enemy-occupied territory, invaded by powerful evils bent on destroying all that is good, still seem very relevant today. All of our notions of modernity and progress and all our advances in technological expertise have not brought an end to war. Our declaring the notion of sin to be obsolete has not diminished human suffering. And the easy answers . . . have not solved the problem. . . . "

. . . . . " . . . Like . . . his contemporary Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lewis seeks in _Mere Christianity_ to help us see the religion with fresh eyes, as a radical faith whose adherents might be likened to an underground group gathering in a war zone, a place where evil seems to have the upper hand, to hear messages of hope from the other side."

"The 'mere' Christianity of C. S. Lewis . . . is a way of life, one that challenges us always to remember, as Lewis once stated, that 'there are no ordinary people,' and that ' it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.' . . . "

" . . . The Christianity Lewis espouses is humane, but not easy: it asks us to recognize that the great religious struggle is not fought on a spectacular battleground, but within the ordinary human heart, when every morning we awake and feel the pressures of the day crowding in on us, and we must decide what sort of immortals we wish to be. Perhaps it helps us, as surely it helped the war-weary British people who first heard these talks, to remember that God plays a great joke on those who would seek power at any cost. As Lewis reminds us, with his customary humor and wit, 'How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.' "

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~