Readings for each day of the week
Alcoholics Anonymous, pages 86 to 88; Step Eleven, morning
Friday
On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives.
Saturday
In thinking about our day we may face indecision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don’t struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while. What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind. Being still inexperienced and having just made conscious contact with God, it is not probable that we are going to be inspired at all times. We might pay for this presumption in all sorts of absurd actions and ideas. Nevertheless, we find that our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of inspiration. We come to rely upon it.
Sunday
We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems. We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only. We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped. We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends. Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn’t work. You can easily see why.
Monday
If circumstances warrant, we ask our wives or friends to join us in morning meditation. If we belong to a religious denomination which requires a definite morning devotion, we attend to that also. If not members of religious bodies, we sometimes select and memorize a few set prayers which emphasize the principles we have been discussing.
Tuesday
There are many helpful books also. Suggestions about these may be obtained from one’s priest, minister, or rabbi. Be quick to see where religious people are right. Make use of what they offer.
Wednesday
As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action. We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show, humbly saying to ourselves many times each day “Thy will be done.” We are then in much less danger of excitement, fear, anger, worry, self-pity, or foolish decisions.
Thursday
We become much more efficient. We do not tire so easily, for we are not burning up energy foolishly as we did when we were trying to arrange life to suit ourselves.
It works—it really does.
We alcoholics are undisciplined. So we let God discipline us in the simple way we have just outlined.
Calendar readings
01 April 2025
A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.
Proverbs 15:13
02 April 2025
“Well, I do think someone might have arranged about our meals,” said Digory. “I’m sure Aslan would have, if you’d asked him,” said Fledge. “Wouldn’t he know without being asked?” said Polly. “I’ve no doubt he would,” said the Horse (still with his mouth full). “But I’ve a sort of idea he likes to be asked.”
C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
03 April 2025
The habit of constant recollection is a grace but one which can be developed by the soul’s cooperation. God, after all, is present everywhere, and to remind oneself of this fact can bring about a more or less continued state of prayer.
Dom Hubert van Zeller, And So To God
04 April 2025
Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realised that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before: one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
05 April 2025
Don’t tolerate any insane thoughts, any thoughts of unkindness, let alone acts of unkindness. Just don’t tolerate it. Say this is no longer okay, and mean it. Wake up every morning and that’s your purpose, to remember that it’s not okay to have an unkind thought about anyone, to blame anyone or anything, no matter what it is, for your anxiety, for your depression, for your fear, for your anger.
Kenneth Wapnick, On Death and Dying: Ending, Continuing, or Awakening?
06 April 2025
And he began to see that there might be some sense in that last line about getting your heart’s desire and getting despair along with it. For the Witch looked stronger and prouder than ever, and even, in a way, triumphant; but her face was deadly white, white as salt.
C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
07 April 2025
Inevitably, there are occupations and interviews during the day which demand concentration, but even here the mind can be brought back to the thought of God when the particular pressure is released. Possibly even at intervals while the occupation or interview is going on. Brother Lawrence of the Trinity in his short classic on the spiritual life, The Practice of the Presence of God, tells how after a time he was able to live consciously in God’s presence whatever he was doing, so that the time spent “in the exterior works which I was given to do differed little in the kind of prayer I was practising from the set times given to actual contemplation.”
Dom Hubert van Zeller, And So To God
08 April 2025
... nature has so made us, that we all love to be flattered and to please ourselves with our own notions: the old crow loves his young, and the ape her cubs. ...
Thomas More, Utopia
09 April 2025
It is told of Diogenes that, on one occasion, when he noticed how his audience was losing interest, he broke off his lecture and walked up to a statue of one of the gods and asked aloud for a loan of money. This woke up the students. “Master,” said one of them, “how can you expect a statue, even when representing one of the gods, to lend you money?” “I am schooling myself,” replied Diogenes, “to disappointment.” This is something all of us should be doing—getting in training for being blocked in our efforts. Not, as in the Diogenes story, to fend off the disappointment of not being listened to; but, if we are not to be crushed by the non-fulfilment of our hopes concerning larger issues, we would do well to think ahead.
Dom Hubert van Zeller
10 April 2025
“You mean we might draw a circle on the ground—and write things in queer letters in it—and stand inside—and recite charms and spells?”
“Well,” said Eustace after he had thought hard for a bit. “I believe that was the sort of thing I was thinking of, though I never did it. But now that it comes to the point, I’ve an idea that all those circles and things are rather rot. I don’t think He’d like them. It would look as if we thought we could make Him do things. But really, we can only ask Him.”
C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
11 April 2025
Such habitual attention to God’s presence could not have come about in Brother Lawrence’s experience without fidelity to specified hours of prayer. His recollection outside the times of prayer depended upon his recollection inside the times of prayer. And so with us. Once the glider is launched it can sail away resting on air. A motorboat can shut off the engine and glide silently through the water. The glider is built for the sky, the boat for the water. The soul is built for God and, when with God in prayer, is in its proper element.
Dom Hubert van Zeller, And So To God
12 April 2025
All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organisation which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
13 April 2025
... et nihil invenerunt omnes viri divitiarum in manibus suis.
... and all the men of riches found nothing in their hands.
Vulgate Bible, Psalm 75:6
14 April 2025
And the meanness of the suggestion that he should leave Polly behind suddenly made all the other things the Witch had been saying to him sound false and hollow. And even in the midst of all his misery, his head suddenly cleared.
C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
15 April 2025
In addition to spiritual reading, time for silence and being quite alone are extremely important. You cannot go straight from television to half an hour’s contemplative prayer or even to half an hour’s thinking about prayer; it will take you ten minutes to shake off the impressions you have received from the screen. Again, without a measure of solitude you will find yourself taken up with other people’s affairs, with social contacts, with merely seeing people walking by and with the passing of cars. To withdraw from contact with the racket of the world is not easy to arrange but time in the day, and every day, must be found for it.
Dom Hubert van Zeller, And So To God
16 April 2025
Willy Wonka: An Oompa-what-now?
Oompa-Loompa: Allow me to refresh your memory. [plays the flute]
Willy Wonka: Oh, I don’t think I want to hear that.
Oompa-Loompa: Too late. [starting to dance]
Oompa-Loompa: I’ve started dancing now. Once we’ve started, we can’t stop.
17 April 2025
The one principle of hell is – ‘I am my own.’
George MacDonald
18 April 2025
Where some souls, while in the act of prayer and also while maintaining recollection outside the time of prayer, experience God’s presence as dwelling within themselves, others feel more drawn to look outside and beyond themselves, conscious of God being present in the air they breathe and all around them. From the theological point of view both concepts are true: the divine indwelling is a reality, and God being present everywhere is equally a reality. So the soul is free to cultivate either orientation. Or even, and at different times, both.
Dom Hubert van Zeller, And So To God
19 April 2025
The fault of being too happy, if it exists anywhere, must be a very scarce one. A far more prevalent vice is that of dwelling upon the dark shades of life, to the forgetfulness of its brighter lights. We drink our wormwood in ostentatious publicity but eat our honey behind the door. It is noteworthy that if a man’s life is prosperous, it glides away rapidly and leaves little trace upon his memory. We write sorrows in marble and mercies in the sand!
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Overflowing Cup (Sermon)
20 April 2025
It may be noticed that no mention has so far been made of how long a person may be expected to spend in prayer each day. The omission has been deliberate. In the matter of their prayer life individuals differ almost as much as the circumstances determining their outward life. But this may be said with confidence: that by giving a generous amount of time to what is, after all, the most important activity in which the human being can be engaged, a feeling for what God wants for himself out of the person’s normal day will emerge. Even when advice has been taken on this point, and scruples have been avoided, there is still a wide margin which the individual will have to fill in according to his own judgement and spiritual attraction.
Dom Hubert van Zeller, And So To God
21 April 2025
No doubt, in a given situation, [Christianity] demands the surrender of some, or of all, our merely human pursuits: it is better to be saved with one eye, than, having two, to be cast into Gehenna. But it does this, in a sense, [by accident]—because, in those special circumstances, it has ceased to be possible to practise this or that activity to the glory of God. There is no essential quarrel between the spiritual life and the human activities as such.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
22 April 2025
The publisher said of somebody, “That man will get on; he believes in himself.” ... I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Supermen. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
23 April 2025
[The publisher] said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.”
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
24 April 2025
All the sharpness and cunning and quarrelsomeness which he had picked up as a London cabby seemed to have been washed away, and the courage and kindness which he had always had were easier to see. Perhaps it was the air of the young world that had done it, or talking with Aslan, or both.
C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
25 April 2025
Our mind tenaciously retains the remembrance of its sorrow, but human nature is so constitutionally ungrateful as to forget its mercies without an effort. How much of the staple of our conversation consists in complaint! It is so cold for the season, it is so intolerably hot—there is too much drought, or the rain is perfectly awful. Business is shocking. The young wheat is turning yellow for want of dry weather, or the turnips are just good for nothing for lack of rain.
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Overflowing Cup (Sermon)
26 April 2025
Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.
C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
27 April 2025
Here lies Dame Mary Page, relict [survivor] of Sir Gregory Page Bart. She departed this life March 4, 1728 in the 56th year of her age. In 67 months she was tapp’d 60 times, had taken away 240 gallons of water, without ever repining at her case or ever fearing the operation.
Tombstone of Dame Mary Page, buried in 1728 in Bunhill Fields, London
28 April 2025
... the omnipresence of obedience to God in a Christian’s life is, in a way, analogous to the omnipresence of God in space. God does not fill space as a body fills it, in the sense that parts of Him are in different parts of space, excluding other objects from them. Yet He is everywhere—totally present at every point of space—according to good theologians.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
29 April 2025
[...] by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other.
Dr Johnson, quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson
30 April
En beten scheef hett Gott leef.
God likes things a little bit wonky.
Saying in Plautdietsch (Low German)
01 May 2025
We are great experts in discovering reasons for murmuring—like ill-humoured curs, we bark at everything or nothing. And I suppose if we should fail to discover any reasons for discontent, we should think it quite sufficient cause for utter weariness of this mortal life. More or less we are all bitten with this madness. It comes so natural to us to detail our grievances and hardships, and only by mere accident, or as a conscientious duty, do we relate the story of the Lord’s goodness towards us.
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Overflowing Cup (Sermon)
02 May 2025
The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.
“Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill.
“I make no promise,” said the Lion.
Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.
“Do you eat girls?” she said.
“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
“I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.
“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.
“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.
C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
03 May 2025
How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
04 May 2025
The ego hates and is never silent. What the process of forgiveness is, is to be able to really hear the ego’s voice and not judge it. In one place Jesus says, don’t call it sin, don’t feel guilty, and above all, don’t be afraid of it. Those three things are what he says. What you do when you become aware of the ego’s raucous shrieks: don’t call it sinful; don’t feel guilty about it; and above all, don’t be afraid of it. If you can do that, then the voice disappears, because what establishes the ego’s voice as real, not to mention powerful, is our belief in it.
Kenneth Wapnick, The Tyranny of Needs
05 May 2025
The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly “as to the Lord”. This does not, of course, mean that it is for anyone a mere toss-up whether he should sweep rooms or compose symphonies. A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
06 May 2025
It is no mastery to watch and fast till thy head ache; nor to run to Rome or Jerusalem on pilgrimage upon thy bare feet; nor for to stir about and preach, as if thou wouldst turn all men by thy preaching. Nor is it any mastery to build churches or chapels, or to feed poor men and build hospitals. But it is a mastery for a man to love his neighbour in charity, and wisely hate his sin, and love the man.
Walter Hilton (14th century mystic)
07 May 2025
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o’er me;
Give the face of earth around
And the road before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
And the road below me.
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Vagabond
08 May 2025
A short time ago Mrs Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs Besant, this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. ... And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. ... If souls are separate, love is possible. If souls are united, love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. But upon Mrs Besant’s principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
09 May 2025
They terrify lest they should fear.
Tacitus
10 May 2025
“Please, what task, Sir?” said Jill.
“The task for which I called you and him here out of your own world.”
This puzzled Jill very much. “It’s mistaking me for someone else,” she thought. ...
“Speak your thought, Human Child,” said the Lion.
“I was wondering—I mean—could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. Scrubb said we were to call to—to Somebody—it was a name I wouldn’t know—and perhaps the Somebody would let us in. And we did, and then we found the door open.”
“You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion.
C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
11 May 2025
We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation. A man’s upbringing, his talents, his circumstances, are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
12 May 2025
But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
13 May 2025
All your former confidences were as deceitful brooks which fly before the hot breath of summer. The wells of pleasure were empty and you were in a parched land where hope smiled not. Your former delights proved to be but a mirage, fair to look upon, but unsubstantial as a dream.
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Overflowing Cup (sermon)
14 May 2025
Ach, hüte sich doch ein Mensch; wenn seine erfüllten Wünsche auf ihn herabregnen, und er so über alle Maße fröhlich ist!
Ah, let a man beware, when his wishes, fulfilled, rain down upon him, and his happiness is unbounded.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué, Der Zauberring
15 May 2025
But words are vain; reject them all—
They utter but a feeble part:
Hear thou the depths from which they call,
The voiceless longing of my heart.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
16 May 2025
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
17 May 2025
... the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God’s sake. An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain. We can therefore pursue knowledge as such, and beauty, as such, in the sure confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping others to do so.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
18 May 2025
He oft finds med’cine, who his grief imparts;
But double griefs afflict concealing hearts,
As raging flames who striveth to suppress.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen
19 May 2025
Afterwards I learned that the best way to manage some kinds of pain-filled thoughts is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
20 May 2025
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later and then you still have to decide what to do.
C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
21 May 2025
“Anodos, you never saw such a little creature before, did you?”
“No,” said I; “and indeed I hardly believe I do now.”
“Ah! that is always the way with you men; you believe nothing the first time; and it is foolish enough to let mere repetition convince you of what you consider in itself unbelievable. I am not going to argue with you, however, but to grant you a wish.”
George MacDonald, Phantastes
22 May 2025
Humility, no less than the appetite, encourages us to concentrate simply on the knowledge or the beauty [we pursue], not too much concerning ourselves with their ultimate relevance to the vision of God. That relevance may not be intended for us but for our betters—for men who come after and find the spiritual significance of what we dug out in blind and humble obedience to our vocation.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
23 May 2025
A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
24 May 2025
“How can such a very little creature as you grant or refuse anything?”
“Is that all the philosophy you have gained in one-and-twenty years?” said she. “Form is much, but size is nothing. It is a mere matter of relation. I suppose your six-foot lordship does not feel altogether insignificant, though to others you do look small beside your old Uncle Ralph, who rises above you a great half-foot at least. But size is of so little consequence with old me, that I may as well accommodate myself to your foolish prejudices.”
George MacDonald, Phantastes
25 May 2025
Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.
[thews = muscles; cumber = weigh down; pallets = beds]
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
26 May 2025
The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
27 May 2025
The true Saint George was wandered far away,
Still flying from his thoughts and jealous fear;
Will was his guide, and grief led him astray.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen
28 May 2025
The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. Of course it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure and disinterested. That is the great difficulty. As the author of the Theologia Germanica says, we may come to love knowledge—our knowing—more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar’s life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
29 May 2025
To accept everything is an exercise; to understand everything a strain.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
30 May 2025
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
31 May 2025
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
01 June 2025
Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, “I am what I am, nothing more.”
George MacDonald, Phantastes
02 June 2025
They are all disagreeable selfish creatures [...] but this one has a hole in his heart that nobody knows of but one or two; and he is always trying to fill it up, but he cannot. That must be what he wanted you for.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
03 June 2025
Än vandrar gudar över denna jord.
En av dem sitter kanske vid ditt bord.
Tro ej att någonsin en gud kan dö.
Han går förbi dig, men din blick är slö.
Han bär ej lyra eller purpurskrud.
Blott av hans verkan känner man en gud.
Den regeln har ej blivit överträdd:
är Gud på jorden, vandrar han förklädd.
Gods still roam over this earth.
One of them perhaps sits at your table.
Do not believe that a god can ever die.
He walks past you, but your sight is dim.
He does not bear a lyre or purple garb.
Only from his effect can you recognise a god.
This rule has never been broken:
if God is on earth, he roams in disguise.
Hjalmar Gullberg, Förklädd gud (God in Disguise)
04 June 2025
If a man is to be saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging, he must be not a patient but an impatient. He must be personally impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
05 June 2025
Tror du att fåren skulle beta i morgonglans
på gräsklädd jordisk kulle, om inte gudar fanns?
Tror du, att våren skulle binda sin blomsterkrans
på alla dödas kulle, om inte gudar fanns?
Do you believe that sheep would graze in the morning gleam
on grass-clad earthly mounds if there were no gods?
Do you believe that spring would lay its floral wreaths
On the mounds of all the dead if there were no gods?
Hjalmar Gullberg, Förklädd gud (God in Disguise)
06 June 2025
I am well aware that there may seem to be an almost comic discrepancy between the high issues we have been considering and the immediate task you may be set down to, such as Anglo-Saxon sound laws or chemical formulae. But there is a similar shock awaiting us in every vocation—a young priest finds himself involved in choir treats and a young subaltern in accounting for pots of jam. It is well that it should be so. It weeds out the vain, windy people and keeps in those who are both humble and tough.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
07 June 2025
Bjuder ett mänskoöga till stilla kärleksfest
oss, kyliga och tröga, som folk är mest,
lägger som himmelsk läkning för djupa själasår,
en vän, fri från beräkning, sin hand i vår,
synes en ljusglans sprida sig kring vår plågobädd –
då sitter vid vår sida en gud förklädd.
If a human eye invites us—tepid and inert,
as most people are—to a quiet banquet of love,
If a friend without guile places his hand in ours
like a heavenly balm for deep bruises of the soul,
a lustrous light spreads around our bed of woes,
there then sits by our side a god in disguise.
Hjalmar Gullberg, Förklädd gud (God in Disguise)
08 June 2025
But it is no use trying to account for things in Fairy Land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the very idea of doing so and takes everything as it comes; like a child, who, being in a chronic condition of wonder, is surprised at nothing.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
09 June 2025
And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that [Hell] contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
10 June 2025
By now, you’ve seen that living sober doesn’t result in perpetual ecstasy. Sometimes the world will seem like a Day-Glo disco playing all your favourite songs, but more often than not there will be dull days. And all of us will face difficulties. Getting clean doesn’t mean we’re no longer human beings. The difference now is we try not to carry our agony around, festering over mistakes or perceived slights. Today we can pause, take a breath, and clear our head; we can pray and meditate; we can reach out and connect with our friends and fellows.
NY CMA Step Guide
11 June 2025
There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
12 June 2025
The faith and sincerity of both you and your husband will be put to the test. These workouts should be regarded as part of your education, for thus you will be learning to live. You will make mistakes, but if you are in earnest they will not drag you down. Instead, you will capitalize them. A better way of life will emerge when they are overcome.
Alcoholics Anonymous
13 June 2025
Eventually he got the true tale out of Bilbo after much questioning, which for a while strained their friendship; but the wizard seemed to think the truth important.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
14 June 2025
It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
15 June 2025
The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought
And is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest, until it forth have brought
Th’ eternal brood of glory excellent.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
16 June 2025
If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether: of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say, “No time for that”, “Too late now”, and “Not for me”.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
17 June 2025
I knew now that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being loved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
18 June 2025
A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
19 June 2025
Which way I fly is Hell; my self am Hell
John Milton, Paradise Lost
20 June 2025
I knew that love gives to him that loveth power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
21 June 2025
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious […]
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
22 June 2025
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
23 June 2025
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
24 June 2025
“I have failed,” I said, “I have lost myself—would it had been my shadow.” I looked round: the shadow was nowhere to be seen. Ere long, I learned that it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
25 June 2025
Banner [who becomes the monster The Hulk when angry]:
What I’m trying to tell you is that, if I turn into the Hulk again, Banner may never come back. And we’re stranded on a planet that is designed to stress me out.
Thor: Ragnarok
26 June 2025
Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord”.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
27 June 2025
Joy’s a subtle elf. I think man’s happiest when he forgets himself.
Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), The Revenger’s Tragedy
28 June 2025
I’m upset! I’m very upset. You know what I like about being upset? Blame. Right now, that’s the mindset that I’m in.
The Grandmaster, Thor: Ragnarok
29 June 2025
It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for.
C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939)
30 June 2025
I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
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