Episode Details

As I'm still on the road in Moscow, Idaho, today's podcast was originally recorded exactly one year ago. It's sort of a part two with the most recent weekend podcast about the Letters of C.S. Lewis. Today we look at four of these letters more closely, especially in regards praying for suffering and persecuted Christians.

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Today I’m going to look closer at four of the ten letters, each dealing primarily with prayer, from last weekend’s podcast on the China letters of C.S. Lewis: https://chinacall.substack.com/p/the-cs-lewis-china-letters

(Also see this related content: C.S. Lewis, Burnt Marshwiggle, and the Brainwashing of Richard Wurmbrand)

Here are the specific letters we cover in today's Prison Pulpit podcast:

1940- To his brother Warnie, on the burden of sympathy in a world of “instant” news:

Barfield…is very much depressed, having a greater faculty than you or I for feeling the miseries of the world in general, which led to a good deal of argument, how far, as a man and a Christian, one ought to be vividly and continuously aware of, say, what it's like on the [front]line at this moment.

I took the line that the present rapidity of communication, etc, imposed a burden on sympathy for which sympathy was never made: that the natural thing was to be distressed about what was happening to the poor Jones's in your own village and that the modern situation, in which journalism brings the Chinese, Russians, Finns, Poles and Turks to your notice each morning really could not be [faced] in the same way. 

1946- To Dom Bede Griffiths, on a future Christian China and carrying all the world’s burdens:

No, I don't think I feel like you, ‘disillusioned’. I think that though I am emotionally a fairly cheerful person my actual judgement of the world has always been what yours now is and so I have not been disappointed…When you say that nothing… has a value in itself, that everything has a value in relation to God, I couldn't agree with you more. And I often, like you, think that all the valuable future may lie with the Christened Chinaman.

But one mustn't assume burdens that God does not lay upon us. It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know).

1953- To Father Manna, on the Chinese “disaster” and Western culpability in the matter:

[Dearest Father Manna, regarding] your article on [the] Chinese disaster…I used [to entertain many hopes for China myself], since missionaries have served there for many year