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Dear fellow parishioners - I saw this plea from Stephanie this morning and think it is time to put this dear soul to rest after more than 2 months of her grief. Please consider a donation. I personally will reimburse you for a “tip” of 10% to GoFundMe, until the goal is met - just let me know what amount you donated. Please consider this and act quickly.
Blessings and peace
Carol Sutton![]()
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Greg's final expenses, organized by Stephanie Sterner
gofund.me
My name is Stephanie Sterner. My dear friend Gregory Snyder left this earth on March 18,2022… Stephanie Sterner needs your support for Greg's final expensesLewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:![]()
I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, ‘H. is dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’ It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’![]()
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.![]()
Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’ There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.![]()
And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air.![]()
From *[A Grief Observed](link.biblegateway.com/click/27750890.38601/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...
Compiled in *[A Year with C.S. Lewis](link.biblegateway.com/click/27750890.38601/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...![]()
*A Grief Observed*. Copyright © 1961 by N. W. Clerk, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Preface by Douglas H. Gresham copyright © 1994 by Douglas H. Gresham. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. *A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works*. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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What are the key words of modern criticism? *Creative*, with its opposite *derivative; spontaneity* with its opposite *convention*; *freedom*, contrasted with *rules*. Great authors are innovators, pioneers, explorers; bad authors bunch in schools and follow models. Or again, great authors are always “breaking fetters” and “bursting bonds.” They have personality, they “are themselves.” I do not know whether we often think out the implication of such language into a consistent philosophy; but we certainly have a general picture of bad work flowering from conformity and discipleship, and of good work bursting out from certain centres of explosive force – apparently self-originating force – which we call men of genius.![]()
Now the New Testament has nothing at all to tell us of literature. I know that there are some who like to think of Our Lord Himself as a poet and cite the parables to support their view. I admit freely that to believe in the Incarnation at all is to believe that every mode of human excellence is implicit in His historical human character; poethood, of course, included. But if all had been developed, the limitation is a single human life would have been transcended and He would not have been a man; therefore all excellences save the spiritual remained in varying degrees implicit.![]()
From *[Christian Reflections](link.biblegateway.com/click/27738365.62601/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...
Compiled in *[The Business of Heaven](link.biblegateway.com/click/27738365.62601/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...![]()
*Christian Reflections*. Copyright © 1967 by The Executors of the Estate of C. S. Lewis. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. *The Business of Heaven*. Editing of this collection and preface by Walter Hooper. Copyright © 1984 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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The Business of Heaven
link.biblegateway.com
The Business of Heaven offers the reader a collection of 365 wise, meditative readings excerpted from many of C.S. Lewis's classic books. In these daily reflections he explores a wide range of connect...What are the key words of modern criticism? *Creative*, with its opposite *derivative; spontaneity* with its opposite *convention*; *freedom*, contrasted with *rules*. Great authors are innovators, pioneers, explorers; bad authors bunch in schools and follow models. Or again, great authors are always “breaking fetters” and “bursting bonds.” They have personality, they “are themselves.” I do not know whether we often think out the implication of such language into a consistent philosophy; but we certainly have a general picture of bad work flowering from conformity and discipleship, and of good work bursting out from certain centres of explosive force – apparently self-originating force – which we call men of genius.![]()
Now the New Testament has nothing at all to tell us of literature. I know that there are some who like to think of Our Lord Himself as a poet and cite the parables to support their view. I admit freely that to believe in the Incarnation at all is to believe that every mode of human excellence is implicit in His historical human character; poethood, of course, included. But if all had been developed, the limitation is a single human life would have been transcended and He would not have been a man; therefore all excellences save the spiritual remained in varying degrees implicit.![]()
From *[Christian Reflections](link.biblegateway.com/click/27738365.62601/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...
Compiled in *[The Business of Heaven](link.biblegateway.com/click/27738365.62601/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...![]()
*Christian Reflections*. Copyright © 1967 by The Executors of the Estate of C. S. Lewis. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. *The Business of Heaven*. Editing of this collection and preface by Walter Hooper. Copyright © 1984 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:![]()
And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off—something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.![]()
From *[A Grief Observed](link.biblegateway.com/click/27720476.44601/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...
Compiled in *[A Year with C.S. Lewis](link.biblegateway.com/click/27720476.44601/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...![]()
*A Grief Observed*. Copyright © 1961 by N. W. Clerk, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Preface by Douglas H. Gresham copyright © 1994 by Douglas H. Gresham. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. *A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works*. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one’s adult enjoyment of what are called “children’s books”. I think the convention a silly one. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty – except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we out to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all. A mature palate will probably not much be for *crème de menthe*: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and honey.![]()
From *[On Stories](link.biblegateway.com/click/27698904.53608/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaWJsZWdhdGV3YXkuY2hyaXN0aWFuYm9vay5jb20vQ2...![]()
*On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature*. Copyright © 1982, 1966 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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