Helmut Thielicke (via Alan Jacobs):

You will never learn who Jesus Christ is by reflecting upon whether there is such a thing as sonship or virgin birth or miracle. Who Jesus Christ is you learn from your imprisoned, hungry, distressed brothers. For it is in them that he meets us. He is always in the depths. And we shall draw near to these brethren only if we open our eyes to see the misery around us. And we can open our eyes only when we love. But we cannot go and do and love, if we stop and ask first, “Who is my neighbor?” The devil has been waiting for us to ask this question; and he will always whisper into our ears only the most convenient answers. We human beings always fall for the easiest answers. No, we can love only if we have the mind of Jesus and turn the lawyer’s question around. Then we shall ask not “Who is my neighbor?” but “To whom am I a neighbor? Who is laid at my door? Who is expecting help from me and who looks upon me as his neighbor?” This reversal of the question is precisely the point of the parable.

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God’s tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God’s help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path.

Thielicke’s words on the parable of ‘The Good Samaritan’ bring two things to mind.

1. Some time ago, I wrote on Ivan Illich’s interpretation of this same parable here. Illich makes the point that hospitality is not owed out of obligation, particular to ethnic constraints but is, rather, “A free creation between two people.” The sense of “a free creation” seems to suggest that hospitality is gift, an aspect of the given life. In this way, I find a great connection between how Thielicke talks of “This reversal of the question,” into “To whom am I a neighbor” and Illich’s “free creation”.

2. The second thing might be joined to the first by tracing a theme of improvisation (more on this later). “God’s tasks,” says Thielicke, “Always have about them something surprising and unexpected.” In this way God calls us to improvise. Often we take the opportunity for improvisation as an inturruption to the planned form we fantasize our days to hold. Some time ago, I posted some quotations about ‘time managment’ here. one of those quotes came from CS Lewis who had a lot to say about how the present moment is the place where we make contact with eterninty and encounter the grace sufficient for the time. About work ‘interruptions’ he says this:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Love’s as Warm as Tears
C.S. Lewis

Love’s as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.

Love’s as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts–Infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.

Love’s as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering “Dare! Dare!”
To sap, to blood,
Telling “Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.”

Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (what all that is)
Our cross, and His.

C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed:

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.

From Wendell Berry’s essay “Christianity and The Survival of Creation” (Via A. Jacob’s Article):

Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.

AND

Oliver Burkeman:

In the end, though, it comes down to seeing that many of us carry around a fantasy of “the uninterrupted life” that does nothing but make real life harder than it needs to be. In any case, the fantasy is usually an impossible one: my finitude means I definitely can’t spend as much time on my work and with my family as I’d like – due to maths – and this wouldn’t change were I magically to acquire the power to dictate how every hour of my day unfolded. C. S. Lewis, writing of course from a Christian perspective, summed things up lucidly:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

I first heard these bits of C.S. Lewis brought together in a talk by the poet Rev Malcolm Guite. I've often since thought that they help explain the prayer from Psalm 86:11:

Teach me Your way, O Lord, that I will walk in Your truth; bind my heart to fear Your name.

From Surprised by Joy:¹

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-sided sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

Reason²
BY C.S. LEWIS³

Set on the soul's acropolis the reason stands
A virgin, arm'd, commercing with celestial light,
And he who sins against her has defiled his own
Virginity: no cleansing makes his garment white;
So clear is reason. But how dark, imagining,
Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night:
Dark is her brow, the beauty of her eyes with sleep
Is loaded and her pains are long, and her delight.
Tempt not Athene. Wound not in her fertile pains
Demeter, nor rebel against her mother-right.
Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?
Who make imagination's dim exploring touch
Ever report the same as intellectual sight?
Then could I truly say, and not deceive,
Then wholly say, that I B E L I E V E.