Zoe

     What man, in his natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use the same word life for both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that the ‘greatness’ of space and the ‘greatness’ of God were the same sort of greatness. In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.

   And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

By: JMT

My Fathers Chair

That found its home in his study
In mind it's disposition remains there
As I sense his presence, dutiful, and sturdy

The grace and mercy he discovered
He now resting from his labor
You feel his love; those through Christ he recovered
So many broken lives he touched who now rest on Jordan's harbor

I treasure that chair as a golden chalice
As it now rest on my dais seeking the weary
Helping the lost; find a home in God's palace.
I can nearly touch my fathers mercy as he toiled; turning stony hearts; merry.