Joy In Life - Part I

Thanks to Carrie at Mommy Brain I have found these two wonderful interviews with Douglas Gresham, the step-son to CS Lewis at Christianity Today. Here is Part One and here is Part Two.

CS Lewis is one of my favorite writers and apologetic christitans. Very early when I was coming back to my faith, I was again becoming bogged down in the legalities often presented by today's christians. The modern day "thou shalts and thou shalt nots" bugged me to no end. Why does this attract so many people I wondered? Couldn't others see some of the hypocrisy I was seeing? What was it in this religion that we put christians up on a pedastle and weigh others beliefs to our own? And my real bug-a-boo, why, if God loves us so much does it feel like I will be struck with a thousand plagues for not doing what other humans deem 'right'.

About this time I joined a daytime reading club at my church (I would call it a mommy's club, but we did have a couple of fathers). The book chosen was Mere Christianity. It opened my eyes to what faith could be and allowed me to start thinking outside the punitive, legalistic box that much of christianity is in today.

Reading the Part One Interview by Gresham on a biography of CS Lewis' life I found this quote that I really enjoyed and I thought summed up some of the frustration I feel about how Christianity is sometimes portrayed:

Americans have latched on to C. S. Lewis, and yet here's a guy who was a chain smoker, who liked his pints, who told ribald jokes, and in general, wouldn't fit what we think of as the "typical evangelical." And yet we've all wrapped our arms around him. Why is that?

Gresham: One of the reasons is that through the—if you can excuse the expression—the bulls--- that has come to be taken so seriously in American Christianity, through all of that, they can still see the essential truth that Jack represented. The problem with evangelical Christianity in America today, a large majority of you have sacrificed the essential for the sake of the trivial. You concentrate on the trivialities—not smoking, not drinking, not using bad language, not dressing inappropriately in church, and so on. Jesus doesn't give two hoots for that sort of bulls---. If you go out and DO Christianity, you can smoke if you want, you can drink if you want—though not to excess, in either case.

But I think that even past the trivialities, many evangelical Christians can see the ultimate truth to what Jack wrote. I think that's why he's so popular.

I am not a Christian because of the things that *I don't do* but because of the things that *I do*. It is not about eating the meat that was given for sacrifice in the pagan temples - but how eating that meat might affect the person you are with at the time. You eat or don't eat the meat out of love for your companion. (1 Corinthians Chapter 8) If you are with friends and companions who are of the same mind as yourself, and you chose to go out and eat the meat, because after all it is just meat, then do it.

Holidays are a "meat" area in today's Christian world. Do we chose to celebrate certain holidays and how? It is true that our major holidays celebrations are descended from mainly european pagan celebrations. These societal and religious holiday celebrations found themselves a part of the christian world because they were a part of the world of these people. The 'pagan' holidays aren't even that 'pagan' when thought about with a sense of nature. Here is a group of people that viewed nature as their 'god'. There was no knowledge of this God that was known to the people of the middle east. Unlike the middle east, these european people faced large seasonal changes in amount of daylight and weather. So they celebrated these changes in their lives - they marked them, looked forward to them and, otherwise found joy in the harsh world that they lived in.

The Germans with an evergreen tree, in the middle of winter finding the one thing that wasn't dead in the middle of winter. The Irish and their festival of lights at midwinter, when it can become so dark and depressing - lets have a party to lighten the mood around here. The new year celebration at spring time when it was finally time to plant and grow more food (or animals mating) so that they could survive another year. The mysterious nature of death and where do people go resulting in the early celebration and remeberances of ancestors on Halloween. I can see these people finding the joy and love in their world through all these things and giving thanks and prayers to the gods as they understood them.

When Christians came in to convert, they realized that one cannot remove the culture from the people and instead adopted the same holidays to the religious calendars. But, they always remained minor holidays with traditions being very localized. It was America that began the whole "Holiday Boom" as cultures meshed together. The USA, was the country that created the Easter, Halloween, and Christmas celebrations that we see today.

The mark of a christian is not whether or not you chose to celebrate the holidays and how. But how you approach the holidays. Are they a time to share joy, love, gratitude or are they truly a hugely successful mass marketing monster. Can you share in both the commercial christmas and the christian christmas?

I think it comes down to The Greatest Commandments and finding what is in your hearts. Which I talk about in Part II

Peace,

Amy