Safe at Home?
What is one to do when soulsmithing and wordsmithing heroes Charles Spurgeon and CS Lewis seem to collide? Think a lot, and write a little.
In today's first installment of Morning and Evening, Spurgeon offers a cozy Saturday thought. His text is Deuteronomy 33:27, the reality that God is our refuge. On the way there, he relates God's grace in the refuge of our physical homes. Lewis wouldn't disagree there. He wrote in Pilgrim's Regress, after all, that God as the Landlord has knit our souls to one shire more than all the others.
Break the threshold of home beyond the general idea, and we have some degree of difference between the two paragons. Spurgeon soothes, "At home, we let our hearts loose; we are not afraid of being misunderstood, nor of our words being misconstrued." Lewis, a bachelor when he wrote The Screwtape Letters as demonic handbook and as instruction to believers in withstanding demonic intent, would not have granted that premise.
Screwtape tells his nephew less sophisticated in the ways of humans something quite different about our domesticity. In the bliss of engagement, he hisses, is when the demons can sow the seeds of later strife. In the abiding of a day in and day out relationship like marriage, spiritual opposition can make much of slowly developed and seldom examined assumptions, how ready we are to assume our spouse or our child knows what we mean and has deliberately chosen to disregard it.
When we, Screwtape says, choose to overlook such slights and believe we are managing magnanimity by keeping the Spurgeonesque domestic peace, we can make the demons' job even easier. Screwtape shares that a willingness on the part of one member of the family to spend some time out in the garden with the others can be a victory for the forces of Hell, provided it is undertaken with more self-conscious pride than genuine desire to foster a deeper relationship and put oneself second.
Once we are aware of the domestic pitfalls to which Lewis, and Jon Eldridge in Love and War point, enjoyment of those relationships is more likely rather than less likely. I suspect Spurgeon speaks from this parapet as a seasoned saint who could, at last, agree with Lewis. If I had them on a panel side-by-side, and one day this may be a reality in Heaven, I suspect that would come to one another's defense.
Their common summation might be that a home environment in which we can let ourselves loose without fear of being misconstrued is one in which we have cultivated vulnerability over time. Where we have, perhaps, said the wrong thing in the wrong tone, have repented of it much to Screwtape's irritation, and have been genuinely forgiven, there is established trust so much more freeing than the verbal parsing we find necessary when operating out in the world.
In today's first installment of Morning and Evening, Spurgeon offers a cozy Saturday thought. His text is Deuteronomy 33:27, the reality that God is our refuge. On the way there, he relates God's grace in the refuge of our physical homes. Lewis wouldn't disagree there. He wrote in Pilgrim's Regress, after all, that God as the Landlord has knit our souls to one shire more than all the others.
Break the threshold of home beyond the general idea, and we have some degree of difference between the two paragons. Spurgeon soothes, "At home, we let our hearts loose; we are not afraid of being misunderstood, nor of our words being misconstrued." Lewis, a bachelor when he wrote The Screwtape Letters as demonic handbook and as instruction to believers in withstanding demonic intent, would not have granted that premise.
Screwtape tells his nephew less sophisticated in the ways of humans something quite different about our domesticity. In the bliss of engagement, he hisses, is when the demons can sow the seeds of later strife. In the abiding of a day in and day out relationship like marriage, spiritual opposition can make much of slowly developed and seldom examined assumptions, how ready we are to assume our spouse or our child knows what we mean and has deliberately chosen to disregard it.
When we, Screwtape says, choose to overlook such slights and believe we are managing magnanimity by keeping the Spurgeonesque domestic peace, we can make the demons' job even easier. Screwtape shares that a willingness on the part of one member of the family to spend some time out in the garden with the others can be a victory for the forces of Hell, provided it is undertaken with more self-conscious pride than genuine desire to foster a deeper relationship and put oneself second.
Once we are aware of the domestic pitfalls to which Lewis, and Jon Eldridge in Love and War point, enjoyment of those relationships is more likely rather than less likely. I suspect Spurgeon speaks from this parapet as a seasoned saint who could, at last, agree with Lewis. If I had them on a panel side-by-side, and one day this may be a reality in Heaven, I suspect that would come to one another's defense.
Their common summation might be that a home environment in which we can let ourselves loose without fear of being misconstrued is one in which we have cultivated vulnerability over time. Where we have, perhaps, said the wrong thing in the wrong tone, have repented of it much to Screwtape's irritation, and have been genuinely forgiven, there is established trust so much more freeing than the verbal parsing we find necessary when operating out in the world.
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