10.21.2005

Author, Producer, and Audience

"Now the moment of prayer is for me -- or involves for me as its condition -- the awareness, the re-awakened awareness, that this "real world" and "real self" are very far from being rock-bottom realities. I cannot, in the flesh, leave the stage, either to go behind the scenes or to take my seat in the pit; but I can remember that these regions exist. And I also remember that my apparent self -- this clown or hero or super -- under his grease-paint is a real person with an off-stage life. The dramatic person could not tread the stage unless he concealed a real person: unless the real and unknown I existed, I would not even make mistakes about the imagined me. And in prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once, from his real being, and to address, for once, not the other actors, but - what shall I call Him? The Author, for He invented us all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches, and will judge, the performance?

- C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Rachel. I just saw on your site what book you're reading: "Between Heaven and Earth," we had a speaker here in the Adirondack program who reocmmended that book. Is it a good read? You are living alone now? That probably does require some adjustment! :S Well, God bless you and guide you until, my prayer is with you in Christ!