Today's Reading
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS: On fortitude and trust in God in the face of war; and on ecumenical differences.
29 April 1938
I
have been in considerable trouble /over the present danger of war. Twice
in one life—and then to find how little I have grown /in fortitude
/despite my conversion.
It has done me a lot of good /by making me realise
how much of my happiness secretly depended on the tacit assumption of
at least tolerable conditions for the body:
and I see more clearly, I
think, the necessity (if one may so put it) which God is under of
allowing us to be afflicted—so few of us will really rest /all on Him /if He leaves us any other support.
* Tacit definition is - expressed or carried on without words or speech.
About
our differences: I feel that whenever two members of different
communions succeed in sharing the spiritual life /so far as they can now
share it, and are thus forced to regard each other as Christians, they
are really helping /on reunion /by producing the conditions //without which
official reunion would be quite barren.
I feel sure that this is the
layman’s chief contribution to the task,
and some of us here are being
enabled to perform it.
You, who are a priest and a theologian, are a
different story:
and on the purely natural and temperamental level there
is,
and always has been,
a sort of tension between us two which
prevents our doing much mutual good.
We shall both be nicer, please God,
in a better place.
Meanwhile you have my daily prayer and good wishes.
From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II
Compiled in Yours, Jack