Charles Williams : The New Christian Year: T. S. Eliot

This is a reprint of 2 devotionals, "The New Christian Year" (1941) and "The Passion of Christ: Being the Gospel Narrative of the Passion with Short Passages Taken from the Saints and Doctors of the Church" (1939), both chosen by Charles Williams, an English poet, novelist, theologian, literary critic, and teacher. Charles Walter Stansby Williams was most often associated with the Inklings (a group of christian writers including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis), Williams was also cited as a major influence on W.H. Auden's conversion to christianity and he was a peer and friend of T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers and Evelyn Underhill. These devotionals collect writings from throughout the history of christian thought. His choices were novel at the time, referencing Kierkegaard just as his translations were appearing in english print (Williams helped edit the first translations in England) and drawing upon the little known sermons of the poet John Donne. For each day of the Church year (starting in Advent), quotes will be posted as they appeared in the 1941 edition of "The New Christian Year". They are categorized by the source on the left, so that readers can read more from each author. I will also add links to websites about each source. During lent the "The New Christian Year" will be supplemented by quotes from "The Passion of the Christ". This text has passages from the Gospel accounts of the passion supplemented by quotes from the "Saints and Doctors of the Church".

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Charles Williams

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You still shall tramp and tread on endless round
of thought, to justify your action to yourselves,
weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
pacing forever in the hell of make-believe
which never is belief.

T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral.

A martyrdom is not the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God.

T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral.

The impossible is still temptation.
The impossible, the undesirable,
voices under sleep, waking a dead world,
so that the mind may not be whole in the present.

T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral.

Sexagesima Saturday

What is Sexagesima?

If this is a world in which I, and the majority of my fellow-beings, live in that perpetual distraction from God which exposes us to the one great peril, that of final and complete alienation from God after death, there is some wrong that I must try to help to put right.

T. S. Eliot: The Idea of a Christian Society.

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