The penny dreadful

Most of this post is pulled directly from The Narnian by Alan Jacobs. This is a fantastic book on C.S. Lewis. The best I have read. It is especially helpful if you have ever tried to explain salvation to a logical or brilliant mind. C.S. Lewis, a top academic and survivor of the atrocities of WWI, became a Christian in his thirties and it is fascinating to see how God got through all his logic, atheism, and questions. The truth is a mighty sword.

Anyways, the book is worth reading. The library has a copy.

But here is the bit that came to mind as I nattered on in my first post about our lives in Christ being a like an epic movie:

"Stories most greatly treasured, and treasured for the longest periods, are those that trace, in bold lines, the outlines of our deepest experiences. And if it is stories, among all the things we make and do, that mean the most to us as we face our own battles, journeys, and riddles, what does that suggest? Chesterston would only figure that out a few years later, when he wrote Orthodoxy: 'All Chrisitanity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? -that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of DANGER, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people.' Christianity, then, IS the penny dreadful--or perhaps the seed from which all penny dreadfuls grow. The story of each human life, in the account given by Christianity, is filled with the suspence and tension of a "boys book"--that is, with just the vital decisions and dramatic consequences that were banished from much modern literature. ..... 'The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.'"

G.K. Chesterton is the writer quoted by Jacobs in the above exerpt. G.K.C. was a favorite writer of Lewis.