Dripping wet

O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Luke 24:25

But he was pierced for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed.  Isaiah 53:5

One of the pleasures of working through Frederic’s conversion is pulling down the old dusty ideas from the back shelves, unfolding them, shaking them loose a bit, and examining them anew in a fresh bright light.  

Why do you call it Good Friday?

What about this piercing and crushing and chastisement and wounding is “good”?

Lewis tries to wrap his words around it.  

...in Christianity God is not a static thing- not even a person- but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama.  Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance... And now, what does it all matter?  It matters more than anything else in the world.  The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance.  There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.  If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water.  If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.  They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.  They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.  If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry.  Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?  Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?  

Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ.  If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist.  Christ is the Son of God.  If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God.  We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will rise in us.  He came to this world and became a man i  order to spread to other men the kind of life He has.  Every Christian is to become a little Christ.  The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.  

For some reason, the image of the big leap into the still quite cold pool next door seems to me the most precise picture of being totally wet.  There is no shadow of a doubt that one is indeed all the way in.  One feels it to the very bone.  Alive.  In the dance of life.  

Thus this offer has been made.  The way made clear.  The peace and healing has begun. 

Ah. Yes.  Good. 

He is risen. 

He is risen indeed.