Mission Report – August 23, 2018

On Monday our entire staff gathered for a day of prayer, reflection and formation. Our Head of English, Mr Joseph Magee, invited us to see our lives as heroic adventures. We must remember that, in God’s loving eyes, our lives are of infinite importance, and that we must take up the adventure of living life to the full. This week I offer the following reflection from Mr Magee.

The following passage is an extract from a letter the author C.S. Lewis wrote to his friend, Arthur Greeves, in 1931 following Lewis’ recent conversion to Christianity:

-Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call -‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a -‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The -‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are the translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am in also nearly certain that it really happened-¦-

We are all drawn towards stories, in a way that defies rational explanation.- Why might so many hundreds of thousands of people sit down of an evening to watch The Block?- The Bachelor?- The Football? On a rational analysis – the analysis in which we most often and uncritically put our trust – such things are bizarre.- Too often we forget that this is because humanity makes meaning of the world through stories, each of which shows us a fragment, an echo, a reminder, a reflection of what Lewis called the ‘true myth’ with its heroes and villains, its trials, its heroic sacrifice and its culmination in life made anew.-

Christ walked a path that we all must follow every day.- We must never cease from instilling in our boys that the world is a place of things that are both measurable and unmeasurable, seen and felt, intuited and explained, and that to be the fine men we wish them – we need them – to be,- they must accept their call to action to face their gravest fears and to walk with courage and faith in the footsteps of Christ’s example.