From today's Ransomed Heart Daily Reading--
In this desperate hour we have a crucial role to play. Of all the Eternal Truths we don’t believe, this is the one we doubt most of all. Our days are not extraordinary. They are filled with the mundane, with hassles mostly. And we? We are . . . a dime a dozen. Nothing special really. Probably a disappointment to God.
But as C. S. Lewis wrote, “The value of...myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity'.”
You are not what you think you are. There is a glory to your life that your Enemy fears, and he is hell-bent on destroying that glory before you act on it. This part of the answer will sound unbelievable at first; perhaps it will sound too good to be true; certainly, you will wonder if it is true for you. But once you begin to see with those eyes, once you have begun to know it is true from the bottom of your heart, it will change everything.
The story of your life is the story of the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it.
That Lewis quote intrigues me, so I thought I would look up the context. Turns out he was writing to Tolkien about his
Lord of the Rings. Here's a longer passage:
"The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity. The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it in any other way.”
THAT is mythic reality.
