Due to a Rush of Life

In my last post, I spoke a bit about the idea of living in holiness, that in fact holiness is all around (and within) us and we are meant to draw it out.  I just finished reading C. S. Lewis' "Perelandra," the second book of his very Christian "space trilogy," and was brought back to what is actually happening when I think of walking in holiness.

I will leave all spoilers aside and focus on one chat.  A Human, named Ransom, is explaining what it means to obey God [whom the Lady to whom Ransom is talking calls "Maleldil"], and the Lady responds thus:  "Oh how well I see it! We cannot walk out of Maleldil's [God's] will: but He has given us a way to walk out of our will."  This way of holiness to which my mind gravitates, this path of wisdom by which I see all Creation ordered (and all new life in the Kingdom brought forth), is to walk out of my will—rather, to walk my will into God's.

And to do this, I must choose to do it every day.  That way of life only actually brings life, in fact has life of its own, in so far as I have habitualized it.  This week I have begun reading some excerpts of G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy as a devotional, and this morning I ran across this: "The variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death."  Without a death of some kind, without an ending or stoppage, humans will habitually continue along the path on which they have been walking; therefore, for a new habit to have life in me, something in me must die.

Creating habits is what humans do; it is not derived from a lack of authentic vitality, but rather an overabundance.  "It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising.  His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life... Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony," much like a child seems to be, whereas human grown-ups are not.

To live in the habits which draw out holiness is to live a kind of magical life.  It is to be in harmony with the sun which always rejoices in rising each day, with the God who so loves even these little things that God says, "Do it again!"  Chesterton confesses, "In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician."

Today, I hope to live out a day that God would see and say, "Do it again!"  Today, I hope to live in the magic inherent in what God is doing all the time, a magic which I do not see to be much different from holiness.