In love, He claims all

Keeping company with CS Lewis this week, as he writes about his struggle to give himself fully in trust to God. Can you relate?

"I say my prayers, I read a book of devotion, I prepare for, or receive, the Sacrament.  But while I do these things, there is, so to speak, a voice inside me that urges caution.  It tells me to be careful, to keep my head, not to go too far, not to burn my boats.  I come into the presence of God with a great fear lest anything should happen to me within that presence which will prove too intolerably inconvenient when I have come out again into my ‘ordinary’ life.  I don’t want to be carried away into any resolution which I shall afterwards regret.  
 
For I know I shall be feeling quite different after breakfast; I don’t want anything to happen to me at the altar which will run up too big a bill to pay then.…The root principle of all these precautions is the same: to guard the things temporal.…This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.…
 
For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves.…For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls.  Let us make up our minds to it; there will be nothing ‘of our own’ left over to live on, no ‘ordinary’ life.…What cannot be admired—what must only exist as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy—is the idea of something that is ‘our own,’ some area in which we are to be ‘out of school,’ on which God has no claim.  For He claims all, because He is love and must bless.  He cannot bless us unless He has us.  When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.  Therefore, in love, He claims all.  There’s no bargaining with Him."                                  

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation