Trust the images

"Everything began with images," [C S Lewis] wrote: "a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.  At first there wasn't even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord."  There was not, he says over and over again, an evangelistic plan in the making of Narnia, no apologetic scheme: "Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child-psychology and decided what age-group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out "allegories" to embody them. This is pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all."

Or perhaps he could have, but knows that it would have been a dreadful mistake, a giving over of his imaginative life to the "expository demon." What he has to do instead is trust the images that come into his mind - or, more accurately, trust that he is being formed as a Christian in such a way that the images that come to his mind are authentic ones, ones that lie at, or at least near, the centre of his soul. He can do this only if he rejects not only the market-driven questions of modern authors and publishers ("What do children want?") but even the more morally sound question of the Christian apologist ("What do children need?"): "It is better not to ask the questions at all.  Let the pictures tell you their own moral.  For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life."

This is a terrifying, or liberating, word: liberating in that one need not expose oneself to the sanctimonious drudgery of drawing up lists of Christian truths and hammering out allegories that will meet the desires or needs of children. But terrifying because as those images rise from your mind you discover what you are really made of: you discover whether you are one whose moral and aesthetic responses have been shaped by the Christian narrative or whether you remain a person "without a chest," lacking in true spiritual formation.  Trusting the images, you find out who you are.

From The Narnian, by Alan Jacobs, pages 243-4

Doing theology in the everyday

Each of us has a theological work to do. We may think we haven’t but we can’t help it, because every time we make a decision, or refuse to make one, we are showing whether we are with Jesus or against hi. We are saying something about what we think Christianity is. There never has been a time when even the most passive could really allow a Church to make all their moral decisions for them, because the decision to obey is itself a moral decision and can have as many varied motives, from cowardice to true humility, as any other decision. Nor are the most emancipated present-day believers making their moral decisions in a vacuum. The cloud of witnesses from all ages and places surrounds them. They choose with the Church, or against it, in some sense of other, and there are many senses. So also our decisions form part of the tradition, and create the material from which others draw in making their decisions, and all these decisions depend on the kind of notions we have about what God is doing, to us and around us.

Our practical decisions display theological premises, whether we like it or not. To say ‘I’m not interested in theology,’ is to display an ignorance as gross as that betrayed by people who smugly disclaim interest in politics, not knowing that every day is crammed with political acts, from greeting certain people and not others in the street, to posting letters, or buying a newspaper. Each of these acts springs from a given political doctrine, however unperceived it may be. A person may not even know the meaning of the word theology, but there is scarcely a conscious act which does not express a theological position of some kind, and even unconscious motivations often grow from the theological views of our forbears.



Rosemary Haughton, in The Knife Edge of Experience, pages 31-2.
Quoted on pages 241-2 of The Lion Christian Meditation Collection