The Reading Today
• Daily Theme: God's desire for our "quality," the analogy of the wheel, and moving past a transactional faith.• Source Material: Mere Christianity
My Reflection
Today’s excerpt is one of those passages that leaves me finding the text deeply confusing and obscure. I read and re-read it several times this morning, desperately hoping for a sudden revelatory moment, but to no avail.
I do somewhat grasp the brilliant analogy of the spokes in the wheel. Lewis suggests that if every spoke is fitted perfectly into the central hub (God), they will inevitably be the correct distance from one another (our fellow creatures). It is a beautiful, practical image. But the majority of the surrounding passage feels like a prime example of Lewis’s dense, impenetrable theological logic—the kind of writing that inevitably makes me feel rather stupid.
Sometimes I think Lewis over-complicates his arguments, making them remote and inaccessible to the majority of people. This is deeply ironic, as his usual accessibility and clarity are exactly what drew me to his writings in the first place. Still, I am not deterred. I choose to see this density as a challenge. I am trusting that the struggle will offer rewards later on when that elusive ‘A-ha!’ moment finally arrives, much like Archimedes the Greek philosopher suddenly jumping out of his bath.
I do understand why people spend their entire lives studying his works in universities, but it is also precisely why I feel so frustrated when I mention his name to people and their only point of reference is his Narnia novels. When the public only knows him for magical wardrobes and talking lions, they completely miss the profound depths of his adult theology and the magnificent, cosmic scope of his science fiction like The Space Trilogy. He was such a massive public figure during the nineteen-forties and fifties, but like many greats, his most complex ideas have been quietly resigned to the ivory towers of academia. Keeping his broader catalogue alive—whether through daily blog reflections or visualising and adapting his other worlds—feels like a vital pursuit to bring him back down to earth.
Today’s reading ends with Lewis stating that God wants us to be creatures of a "certain kind or quality." Looking at my own confusion and scrambled egg logic today, I find myself genuinely wondering: am I a creature of a certain ‘quality’?
