[GCFL-discuss] FW: Old Wife Joke

[gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net]

Well said Siarlys! Awesome, very very awesome!

Lance
John 8:32 "You will know the Truth and the Truth will set you free."

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 19:03:26 -0600 gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net writes:
> A few days ago, the joke service sent out a funny story about a wife
> looking at herself in the mirror and feeling old. Her husband's 
> response
> appears to have led directly to the announcement of his memorial
> services.
> 
> I had a thought about how he should have responded. It might have 
> saved
> his life and pleased his wife, but it would not be quite suitable 
> for a
> family discussion group.
> 
> But I did run across some remarks in C.S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE 
> LETTERS
> that provide some good perspective on the wife's fears. Lewis was 
> the
> subject of the movie Shadowlands, about his marriage late in life to 
> an
> American who remarked "So we're both lapsed atheists?" Its a funny 
> and
> inspiring movie. His future wife's son was a great fan of Lewis's 
> child
> novel series, The Chronicles of Narnia. I heard that some publisher 
> is
> trying to come up with a version of the stories which has the 
> obvious
> Christian content secularized. A cartoonist pointed out that this is 
> sort
> of like Moby Dick with the whales removed.
> 
> The Screwtape Letters are written by a middle level executive in 
> the
> bureaucracy of hell, to his nephew, a junion tempter assigned to 
> some
> poor soul in England. In a backhanded way, through the words of
> Screwtape, Lewis relates Christian values to modern life, and 
> criticizes
> the superficiality of the church. On the subject of women and their
> bodies, as it relates to securing souls for "Our Father Below", 
> Screwtape
> advises his nephew:
> 
> It is the business of our great masters in every age to produce a 
> general
> misdirection of what might be called sexual taste. This they do by
> working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers,
> actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The 
> aim is
> to guide members of each sex away from those members of the other 
> with
> whom spiritually helpful, happy and fertile marriages are most 
> likely.
> 
>  age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach 
> men
> to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those 
> of
> boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, 
> we
> thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with 
> many
> excellent results). We have engineered a great increase in the 
> license
> which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not 
> the
> real nude). It is all a fake of course. As a result, we are more and 
> more
> directing th desires of men to something which does not exist -- 
> making
> the role of the eye in sexuality more important, and making its 
> demands
> more impossible. What follows you can easily guess!"
> 
> Of course a shorter way to say this might be "If the husband had 
> just
> given her a big hug instead of looking her over, he would be alive 
> today.
> But I am really impressed with the way Lewis puts it.
> 
> Siarlys