C. S. Lewis on Turning Water into Wine

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities.

 Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off’ (John 5:19). 

The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.”


C.S. Lewis, “Miracles,” God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970)

Is attendance at a place of worship or membership with a Christian community necessary to a Christian way of life?

C. S. Lewis was once asked, "Is attendance at a place of worship or membership with a Christian community necessary to a Christian way of life?"

His answer was as follows: "That's a question which I cannot answer. My own experience is that when I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn't go to the churches and Gospel Halls; and then later I found that it was the only way of flying your flag; and, of course, I found that this meant being a target. 

It is extraordinary how inconvenient to your family it becomes for you to get up early to go to Church. It doesn't matter so much if you get up early for anything else, but if you get up early to go to Church it's very selfish of you and you upset the house. If there is anything in the teaching of the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obliged to take the Sacrament, and you can't do it without going to Church. 

I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. 

I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren't fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit." 

God in the Dock, pp. 61-62.

Can An Egg Learn How To Fly?

Can An Egg Learn How To Fly?

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. 

We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. 

We must be hatched or go bad.

C.S. Lewis 

Mere Christianity

Can You Trust Your Rope?

Can you trust this rope?

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death. 

It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. 

Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

C. S. Lewis

A Grief Observed

To Love Is To Be Vulnerable

Giving our hearts even to pets makes us vulnerable

C.S. Lewis in the Four Loves wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. 

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. 

Wrap it carefully around hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless- it will change. It will be not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable. 

The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is Hell."