Get Into "The Mind of the Maker" This Week

The next book study starts this week--Thursday, August 2nd @ 7pm in the Cafe at New Life Lakeview. The book we are diving into is Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker.

Dead Theologians Society wrestles with works by, you guessed it, dead theologians. While we will typically deal with classic, well-known writers like C.S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (our last two studies), I think it's worthwhile to occasionally throw in an author we're less familiar with, someone who will stretch our discussion a bit and someone whose perspective we may not already know by osmosis through living in Christian community.

The following is a summary from the back cover of the 1987 version published by Harper San Francisco (this is the cheaper of the current paperback versions, by the way, at roughly $11):

This classic, with a new introduction by Madeleine L'Engle, is by turns an entrancing meditation on language; a piercing commentary on the nature of art and why so much of what we read, hear, and see falls short; and a brilliant examination of the fundamental tenets of Christianity. The Mind of the Maker will be relished by those already in love with Dorothy L. Sayers and those who have not yet met her.

A mystery writer, a witty and perceptive theologian, culture critic, and playwright, Dorothy Sayers sheds new, unexpected light on a specific set of statements made in the Christian creeds. She examines anew such ideas as the image of God, the Trinity, free will, and evil, and in these pages a wholly revitalized understanding of them emerges. The author finds the key in the parallels between the creation of God and the human creative process. She continually refers to each in a way that illuminates both.

Ch. 9: A Slip of the Tongue

This final chapter of this book, and a long-overdue post, is about Lewis' struggle to live out his faith. In it, he begins with a prayer that he prayed. "I had meant to pray that I might so pass through things temporal that I finally lost not the things eternal; I found I had prayed so to pass through things eternal that I finally lost not the things temporal." He adds shortly thereafter, "I thought that what I had inadvertently said very nearly expressed something I had really wished."

On some level, if we are Believers (Christians, the Saved, however you want to put it), we truly want to live lives completely sold-out to God. We want to not even blink an eye when He calls us to do something outside of our comfort zone but to jump up and do it. We want long, intimated conversations with Him where we draw close to Him and allow Him to strip away the things that hinder our walk or make us to attached to this world.

And yet, we are attached to this world, and we do resist getting too close to Him. "I come into the presence of God with a great fear lest anything should happen to me within that presence which will prove too intolerably inconvenient when I have come out again into my 'ordinary' life," writes Lewis.

"Our temptation"--one that we've been looking at during New Life's "Revolutionary" series about the Sermon on the Mount--"is to to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted." If I go to church every Sunday, that should be enough, right? If I am charitable to the fellow at the Irving Park exit from Lake Shore Drive, I don't need to be charitable to my neighbor. If I see a woman stranded in a parking lot with a flat tire and it's really hot out, it's sufficient for me to offer up an earnest prayer for someone to help her.

The kicker, though, is that doing the minimum is not enough but neither is doing the maximum. "For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves. For each of us the Baptist's worlds are true: 'He must increase and I decrease.'"

Lewis goes to address those living "good" lives without God. "He cannot bless us unless He has us...If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead...Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well?"

In closing, he acknowledges the struggle that this Christian life presents but exhorts us. "We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy (the French who cooperated with the Nazis) government. And this, so far I can yet see, must be begun again every day. Our morning prayer should be that in the Imitation: Da hodie perfecte incipere--grant me to make and unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet."

*******************************************

Thanks to everyone who joined us for these past 9+ weeks. It's been a true pleasure both growing as an individual through our study and growing as a little family together. I look forward to diving into this next study with you.