Greetings, all, and welcome to a new tradition at Inkling Corner! I’m excited to introduce the Quote of the Month, where every month I’ll be posting a new quote that inspired, touched, or influenced me in any way.
I’ll be doing a quote from a different genre each month, usually going between fiction, theology, and history.
I’d love it if you could share your opinions in the comments, and also offer suggestions for next month!
This month’s is from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, which is a “Christian apologetic novel” (description from online, not me) which was dedicated to Lewis’ great friend J.R.R. Tolkien and written in a satirical style.
The plot and characters are very fictional, but Lewis expertly uses them to address Christian theological issues. Lewis and Tolkien are, incidentally, two of my favourite authors and you’ll be seeing a lot of them in the near future. (The stories I posted last week are based on Tolkien’s work, actually).
But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange. He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realised what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’, but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now recovered.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 31
This quote, while spoken in the book by the demon Screwtape, is in fact quite poignant and very true (at least in my humble estimation). We have always known, somehow, that God is there, but when we finally “see Him face to face” we realise that it was Him in our lives all along. We might not choose to recognise Him, or if we do we might not see Him there, but He is. “And that is an encouraging thought”.
Thanks for joining me for this month’s edition of Quote of the Month! I hope you enjoyed my mini-essay, and if you did, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
The LORD be with you!
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Quotation #1–C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Quotation #2–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
(Didn’t I tell you you’d hear more from these astounding writers?)
Thanks for reading!