Seth Lewis's Blog, page 4

C.S. Lewis On The Danger Of Getting Too Much News

I recently came across this excerpt from a letter C.S. Lewis wrote to a friend. He wrote it in 1946, before the internet was invented, before the dawn of push notifications and instant news updates without pause every moment of every day, and yet the wisdom in these few sentences only grows more important the more our technologies and access to information increases. We’ve reached the stage now where we can hear of every new battle, every devastating famine, every natural disaster and celebrity scandal on the other side of the globe more quickly and easily than we can hear what is happening with our own neighbours in our own community. Here’s what C.S. Lewis said about it:

“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.)

A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds’ song, and the frosty sunrise.

About the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there’s usually light enough for the next step or so. Pray for me always.”

— C.S. Lewis in “Letter to Bede Griffiths” dated 20 December 1946.

Have you found anything that helps you stay grounded in our world of non-stop newsfeeds? Anything that helps you stay focused on the good you can do where you are? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

A City Whose Builder And Architect Is God

Have you ever noticed that illustrations of heaven tend to lean heavily on Greek architecture? The pillars and spires might be brighter, and the streets paved with gold, but the forms and styles still look familiar. It makes sense—the ancient Greek temples and forums were gorgeous, a true high point of human ingenuity and creativity. But these styles are human conceptions, whereas Hebrews 11:10 tells us that heaven is a city “whose architect and builder is God.”

Have you ever stopped to consider what it looks like when God himself designs and builds a city? 

I was in Dublin recently, walking by the quays where the Celtic Tiger money settled down and grew into rows of shining glass offices and apartments. It all looked very fancy, very expensive, and very unnatural. It all made me want to find a field, or a forest, or any kind of land that wasn’t growing concrete in every direction. I guess I’m not built for city life. But there is one city I know I’m built for, a city I already call my home, even though I haven’t laid eyes on it yet. It’s a city designed by the same architect who planned the fields and forests of nature, and built by the same builder who set the mountains in place and lit up the stars. It’s heaven. 

God gave Moses his own specific plans to build the tabernacle, and he gave Noah his design for the ark. In both cases, the architecture was God’s, but the designs still had to be accommodated to the abilities and resources of human builders. So how does God design a building, or a whole city, when he knows that he will build it himself—with the same unlimited power he used to spin the galaxies and the wisdom he used to join the atoms into molecules into beating hearts?

Can you imagine a house designed by the inventor of physics? Can you think of the spires thrown up by the God who dreamed up mountain peaks, or the public squares laid out by the One who came up with the idea of meadows? We see in nature the many homes God has provided his creatures—the cool caverns for his bears, the ornate shells for his hermit crabs, and the colourful coral reefs for a host of his underwater creations. We have seen his boundless creativity, his attention to detail, and his perfect engineering blending seamlessly with the abundant generosity of his artistry. We may not have seen him design a human city yet, but based on everything we know about heaven’s architect and builder, I believe that our Greek-inspired illustrations fall laughably short of the home God is establishing for his people. As the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:9, “no human mind has conceived the things God has prepared for those who love him”. I know that’s true and I can’t conceive it, but I still can’t stop imagining God’s city. I can’t help it. It’s my home. 

Winter Walk (a poem)

I put my hands inside my sleeves
And stuff them in my pockets
My collar up against the wind
Is not enough to block it
But as my nose and ears complain
Of slowly freezing
In my brain
My thoughts are getting warmer
And more active with each step
This wind has fanned the flame—
Yes even frozen wind—and swept
My thoughts into a blaze
And I’m aware that if I kept
My body locked
Behind the glaze
In perfect comfort
All my days
That there my mind
Would rest in ease—
And in that warmth
Would slowly
Freeze

God Doesn’t Work For Me

“I’m glad you found something that works for you.”

He said it kindly, genuinely happy for me to have found meaning and purpose in my beliefs about God. I said, “Whether or not my beliefs work for me is not the point. I just want to believe what’s true, and live accordingly. I want to know what God is really like—not what I want him to be. My opinion about you doesn’t determine who you really are, and my opinion about God certainly doesn’t change who he is.” God is himself. He is not obligated to work for me—as if my own little self were the centre of all things—he is the centre, and the reason I work at all is because of him. So I’d much rather live in the light of reality, even if it makes me squint, than live in the shadows of my own comfortable delusions.

We all know how much of a problem fake news is in politics, national and social issues—but how much more serious is it to invent or believe misinformation about God himself, the foundation of truth and reality? If we misunderstand the Creator, how can we ever understand or properly relate to any part of his creation—including ourselves? We’ll misapply everything, like trying to play a piano concerto on a drum kit. Which is probably why our world is so loud and chaotic. It’s only when we recognise the Conductor of creation that we can begin to understand the music he planted in our souls. God doesn’t work for me. I’m not his boss, I don’t set his agenda. He sets mine.

“I’m glad you found something that works for you.”

No, I found something far better. I found Someone that finally makes sense of me, that overwhelms and terrifies me and comforts and loves me with a love that is larger than the unaccountable galaxies spinning beyond imagining and sharper than the iron nails on a wooden cross and stronger than the grave. I found the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I found Reality himself. And nothing can ever be the same.

Doodles On A Masterpiece

As I pulled the car into a spot at the edge of the parking garage I saw the sky shine bright blue between the rough block wall and the concrete deck above me. Further down the wall on the right I noticed a tree branch leaning in—green leaves detailed against the grey expanse. Moments before I had been driving under the open sky with living things growing all around, the hills in front and the sea behind me. Now, I was enclosed in a concrete case of re-formed rock, where every earthly material was repurposed beyond recognition. Those materials must have come from nature originally—they had to—but the ways we work with nature are often a stark contrast to the ways nature itself works. 

The car park was built to serve one utilitarian purpose: to hold cars, which is good. But then look at the way nature holds things: grapes with their seeds, clouds carrying rain, and the ocean contained in coastline cliffs and beaches. Each aspect of nature serves a purpose, or many purposes, and yet somehow they make the bare, utilitarian minimalism of the parking garage seem entirely out of place. Each aspect of nature is intricately designed—down to the last microscopic detail—and the world bursts around us with unnecessarily abundant colours and scents, with autumn trees, wild blackberries, and the striped bumblebees that lift themselves on transparent wings. If God had wanted to make a functional world, he could have done it in the style of the parking garage: bare, dim, and adequate. He did not, because he is not only an architect but an artist as well, and this world is his masterpiece. 

Sometimes I wonder why God lets us draw so freely on his artistry. Our simple square box-buildings and squiggly road-lines lay themselves out on his intricate background like the careless doodles of a toddler on a Rembrandt. Sometimes we achieve more—we shape his stone and carve his wood carefully, in imitation of his artistry. These are our national treasures, our protected structures, the tourist traps that command our attention and distract us from the even greater intricacies of every common wildflower, every singing sparrow and human face. God must have seen the artistry in our faces, and valued the artistry he planted in our human nature—otherwise why would he encourage us, like a Father, to keep painting with him?

An Elegy For Our Fireplace

When my father built a home for our family in the hills of Alabama he put a large wood stove in the very centre. A good fire in that stove could heat the entire house, upstairs and down, for most of the night. I grew up splitting logs and carrying them in, building fires and learning to finesse small sparks into roaring warmth. They say firewood warms you twice, and it’s true—first when you cut it, and again when you burn it. The sound of our fire sucking air through the stove vents like breath, the crackling wood, the reassuring smoke from the chimney as I headed in from the winter cold—all are essential pieces of my childhood, baked into my soul by the power of the flames.

When my wife and I moved to Ireland, we lived in a house with a fireplace in the sitting room. It was smaller than the stove in Alabama, but the fire was open so we had the advantage of being able to enjoy the mysterious, mesmerising beauty that the stove doors used to hide from me. There is nothing in the world like an open fire—wood, coal, turf, it doesn’t matter. It is pure power—light and heat and ravenous appetite, warmth and comfort and danger. Its power is the reason fire has always been found at the centre of all types of human homes throughout history, from huts and yurts and cottages to palatial manors with their chimneys by the dozen. Until now.

The house we live in now is too modern for such things. Too efficient. We still have a mantlepiece, but inside its deceiving frame is an electric heater unit with fake coal that glows an unconvincing and decidedly unmagical orange. There is no mystery in our hearth, no raw, magnetic power blazing at the centre of our home attracting our gaze and warming our souls. Oh yes, our bodies are kept warm effectively—and without the hassle of shovelling coal and clearing ashes—for just as long as the wires connect us to the power station and the power station keeps up with all the little fireless homes and offices and factories.

Do you know how God chose to appear to Moses? In a burning bush. Pure, undefinable, unadulterated power, light, heat, comfort, danger.

My life is more convenient now. Less messy. There is no soot, no coal dust or logs to bring in from the cold. This is called progress, and I should be thankful for a warm place to live. And I am.

I just miss the fire.

I’m Dated (and you are, too)

New Year’s Day, 2025. The day we all start having to pause to remember what year to write on forms and checks and such, or when we start writing it wrong and having to scribble it out and start again. What will this New Year bring? No one really knows. Looking back is easier—we know what the past is. For good or bad, it’s done. Before long, this past year that was so current, so vital and cutting-edge yesterday will start to feel stale and dated. Old. Has been. Whether we look back on it as the good old days or some kind of personal dark age doesn’t change the fact that we will look back on it. There was a New Year’s Day last year, too. Do you remember it? Or ten years ago, or twenty? Last Halloween I saw that they were selling ’90’s costumes, as if the ’90’s weren’t just last week. But they did look a bit funny.

L.P. Hartley once wrote that “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. As I look back over the past I’ve known in my own short lifetime, I can already see that he’s right. The American culture I grew up in has already changed, almost beyond recognition. The Ireland I moved to 16 years ago is not the same Ireland I live in now. Looking back beyond my own lifetime the change is even more dramatic—our ancestors may be our own flesh and blood, but their ways of living and thinking still seem strange and foreign from today’s vantage point. All this being so, have you ever paused to consider that our descendants will feel the exact same way about us and our current cultural moment? The past may feel dated to us, more and more so the further we go from it, but isn’t today also a date? So we are dated, too. Today the world feels normal, but that won’t last—those who come behind us will have a hard time understanding the way we do things and the beliefs and assumptions that we easily take for granted. If the past is any indicator, then we can be sure that the fashionable ideas of today are mostly just that—fashions. They will eventually go out of style and be replaced, just as surely as 2026 will replace 2025 on our forms and checks. 

It’s easy to look back and see how the lies of the past influenced our ancestors. It’s much harder to see how the lies of today are influencing us—but it’s very important that we try. I am dated. You are, too. We are men and women of our time, whether we want to be or not. It is impossible to live in the river of humanity without being influenced by the powerful currents of living and thinking that surround us, for good or for bad. But if we admit this, and if we are willing to identify and challenge our own assumptions, then we’ll be in a much better position to assess our own datedness more objectively and seek to live our lives from a foundation of truth that is timeless, rather than simply letting ourselves be carried along by whatever ideas happen to be popular at this particular moment. The best way I’ve found to do that is to throw my anchor down every day in God’s word—to soak my soul in his unchanging reality and revelation and pray for his help to apply it to the day I find myself in. If you aren’t in the habit of doing that, I encourage you to make it a New Year’s resolution. Another great help is to listen carefully to people who have lived in other times, as C.S. Lewis encouraged us to do: 

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it… None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” ― C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius’ “On the Incarnation”.

Today is the day we live in. We can’t stop being dated. But if we are careful and humble and thoughtful, we can bring the wisdom of the ages and the fundamental truths of God and reality to bear on this one precious, never-to-be-repeated day that we find ourselves in. The more we do that the better today will be—and every day that follows. 

The First Noel (a poem)

There was fear in the fields
When the angels came
When the heavenly beings
Appeared to men—
But then
Who wouldn’t be
Terrified
When the sky rips through
And the unseen realm
Is on top of you?
What had been one more
Silent night
Was suddenly
Ablaze with light
With gloria in excelsis Deo
The armies of heaven
Invading earth to
Tell some lonely
Shepherds few
“The King of kings has come for you!
He’s lying in a feeding trough”
And if, my friends,
That’s not enough
To make your eyes go wide
With wonder
You can look away and cling to
Cozy festive cheer to jingle
All the way—but wait! The day
A child came
To conquer death
And vanquish hell
Is glorious—
The first noel
This babe is Lord
Above all things
And heaven and nature sings
And heaven and nature sings

A Christmas Selection Box 2024

One of the standard features of Christmas in Ireland is the chocolate selection box. It’s a great tradition—who wouldn’t like a box filled with a variety of different chocolates to enjoy over the holidays? I can’t give you chocolate today, but I’ve made it a tradition to collect and share a variety of Christmas treats every December from around the internet. Enjoy!

First up, a beautiful Christmas song called Thorn and Thistle from Irish artists We Are Messengers and Keith and Kristyn Getty:Next, a brief look at some of the traditional ways people have celebrated Christmas in Ireland, including Wren Boys, Mummers, and Little Women’s Christmas:

How Christmas was celebrated in years gone by

Third, speaking of traditions, it’s common to hear that Christmas is really just a ripped-off and repurposed pagan holiday. This article explores the historicity of that claim:

Is Christmas a pagan tradition?

Fourth, here’s a quote from Saint Augustine on what it meant for Jesus Christ to become a human:

“Man’s maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.”

If you’d like to think more about what Saint Augustine said, here’s an excerpt from J.I. Packer’s excellent book “Knowing God” on why the mystery of the incarnation makes sense of the rest of Jesus’ life, his miracles, and his resurrection:

The stumbling block of the incarnation

Finally, here’s a flashback to a Christmas post I wrote a couple of years ago about why hope is greater than optimism:

Hope > Optimism

Fallow (a poem)

Today’s poem is inspired by some fields that I walk past regularly, which are lying fallow this time of year. I’ve felt that way, too.

Fallow

The harvester’s tyres
Left tracks on the ground
In the cold empty earth
Broken stalks all I found
To remember the days
When I used to walk by
When the soil was full
When the harvest was high

As I look at it now
It all seems so forlorn
So naked and useless
I’m tempted to mourn
Until I remember
The promise of spring
It’s not dead—it’s waiting
To rise up again

And I’ve felt the plough blades
On my back as well
And I’ve been left waiting
When everything fell
And I’ve seen what God
In his wisdom can grow
Out of cold empty hearts
With the seed that he sows