About a week ago I tried explaining to my Dear Uncle why it is I love to read C.S. Lewis so much. I wish I had this quote on hand, it would have made the explanation a lot more eloquent:
"People
often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God
says, 'If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll
do the other thing.' I do not think that is the best way of looking at
it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are
turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into
something a little different from what it
was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable
choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing
either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a
creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with
itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God,
and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of
creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and
power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence,
and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the
one state of the other."
Mere Christianity
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