He picked one and broke it in two. The flesh was dryish and bread-like, something of the same kind as a banana. It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food—the delight of munching and being nourished, a “Sober certainty of waking bliss.” A man, or at least a man like Ransom, felt he ought to say grace over it; and so he present did. The gourds would have required rather an oratorio or a mystical meditation.”
The blind man on the roadside to Jericho (Luke 18:35-43) was so desperate for help from Jesus that he was willing to stand up to people who were trying to shout him down.
This website exists to help those who wish to follow Jesus find like-minded people to eat with in remembrance of Him to provoke one another to love and good deeds, thus enacting the good news that Jesus is lord.
Loving someone as yourself means relinquishing all claim to private property. It also means exercising as much effort for the good of those around you as you do for your own good.
The rub is to apply this theological definition of ownership to the things I “own” in the material world (and to the immaterial things, such as my time and energy). The way I propose to do this is to realize and act on the fact that loving someone as myself entails using what is “mine” as much for the benefit of others as I do myself. The more I contemplate the “as myself” part of Jesus' quotation of Leviticus, the more radical it seems.
and this one: “Wisdom, as your example of the woman with the alabaster jar illustrates, is emphatically not to be taken as synonymous with restraint.”
“Do you feel quite happy out it?” said I, for a sort of horror was beginning once more to creep over me.
“If you mean, Does my reason accept the view that he will (accidents apart) deliver me safe on the surface of Perelandra?—the answer is Yes,” said Ransom. “If you mean, Do my nerves and my imagination respond to this view?—I’m afraid the answer is No. One can believe in anesthetics and yet feel in a panic when they actually put the mask over your face. I think I feel as a man who believes in the future life when he is taken out to face a firing party. Perhaps it’s good practice.”
“Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”
— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra •
[edit, 1/23/26: Clearly, this sentiment predates the advent of music streaming services. In the past year I have heard the same symphony twice in one day on multiple days. And I didn’t even need to ask.]
My marginalia from Out of the Silent Planet (1938) by C.S. Lewis
…was the fact that we had only one kind of hnau: they thought this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought.
“Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood,” said the old sorn. “For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on a different blood.”
That was C.S. Lewis preaching on the virtues of diversity well before any around here was doing it.
“Be silent,” said the voice of Oyarsa. “You, thick one, have told me nothing of yourself, so I will tell it to you. In your own world you have attained great wisdom concerning bodies, and by this you have been able to make a ship that can cross the heaven; but in all other things you have the mind of an animal.”
It sometimes seems parts of our society are in the same state as Weston. And it sometimes seems I am, too. May I be fully alive in thought and morals and healthy relationships.
What is Christianity? “A Jesus-looking God raising up a Jesus-looking people to change the world in a Jesus kind of way.” At least, that’s the fetchingly simple way Greg Boyd put it in a podcast episode released back in late November.
Did you ever think the reason your life has become somewhat more pedestrian is that your prayers have become so, too? The thought occurred to me while on my prayer walk this evening, and it excited me.
Let it be true that my prayers are always answers to God’s speaking. But when I first read the quotation, which I found in a Krista Tippett interview, I read it as: “The answers we seek from God are the prayers we pray,” as if He is the one providing the food for prayer.
Live whimsically, especially from dinnertime through the kids’ bedtime. That will make it more likely that you make time for things like calling your mother-in-law.
Instead of God taking responsibility for creating, what would happen if we view God as taking responsibility for being created? That is, in Christ, God the human being fulfills humanity’s responsibility before God to present itself humbly, obedient and trusting in the face of all the vicissitudes inherent in that nature, and fulfills human nature’s calling and purpose. In this case Jesus’ death fulfills created nature, loving and trusting God within the constraints of created finitude. Christ, the God-Man, represents creation to God, takes responsibility for being creatED (not for creatING), unites creation to God, and in so doing reconciles the world to God, not God to the world.
I feel a certain reorientation in my reading life these past two days, and it has to do with love. If I am to do everything in love, then I am to:
choose what to read in love, that is, in thanksgiving that there are so many good books from which to choose,
choose what to read for love, that is, thinking of the books’ relative capacity to facilitate or express my love for God and love for others—by which I mean specific others around me, not just books that will answer questions raised by what other people on the Internet are thinking about,
read savoringly, because to do so any other way is a waste of time that benefits no one, including myself, unless I’m reading purely for information, and is therefore unloving. Reading for understanding, entertainment, or aesthetics doesn’t even happen if I don’t read savoringly.
read only at times when I can read savoringly, a constraint which will have the added benefit of making my responsiveness to the actual world around me much better and...
Our own present culture has harnessed [fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self] in ways that have yielded…freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. […] But…the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
I cannot pretend to know what’s best from a legal standpoint regarding the issues in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Nine of our brightest legal minds are working on it right now, and they’ll probably be split 5–4. I tend to favor allowing such anti-discrimination laws like what Colorado has because the I don’t see the cakebaker as endorsing any harm. But regardless, the way of Jesus is clear: Bake the cake. To understand why, read Matthew 5:38-48, especially vv. 39–41.