CS Lewis quotes on INFECTED WITH ZOE

He is the origin and centre and

life of all the new men. He came into the created universe, of His own will,

bringing with Him the Zoe, the new life. (I mean new to us, of course: in

its own place Zoe has existed for ever and ever.) And He transmits it not by

heredity but by what I have called "good infection." Everyone who gets it

gets it by personal contact with Him. Other men become "new" by being "in

Him." CSL

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. CSL

The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into

the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to "inject"

His kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin

soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part

that is still tin. –CSL

My goodness! The “Let’s Pretend” section of Mere Xnity seems amazing at glance.

For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying
to catch the good infection from a Person. It is more like painting a
portrait than like obeying a set of rules. And the odd thing is that while
in one way it is much harder than keeping rules, in another way it is far easier. –CSL