C. S. Lewis on Charity

After reading the quotes from Walther and Luther yesterday, last night I read this, and it seemed a fine follow-up to yesterday's post. While neither quotation, of course, has anything to do with electronic communication (email, Facebook, blogs, etc.), seeing as how such things didn't exist when these words were written, I find it enlightening to consider both quotations in those terms. How much more we might gain in the long run if we more highly valued kindness, charity, and fraternal harmony. From C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 9, on "Charity":

First, as to the meaning of the word. 'Charity' now means simply what used to be called 'alms'--that is, giving to the poor. Originally it had a much wider meaning. . . . Charity means 'Love, in the Christian sense'. But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

I pointed out in the chapter on Forgiveness that our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good. In the same way Christian Love (or Charity) for our neighbors is quite a different thing from liking or affection. We 'like' or are 'fond of' some people, and not others. It is important to understand that this natural 'liking' is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes and dislikes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact. But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous.

Natural liking or affection for people makes it easier to be 'charitable' towards them. It is, therefore, normally a duty to encourage our affections--to 'like' people as much as we can (just as it is often our duty to encourage our liking for exercise or wholesome food)--not because this liking is itself the virtue of charity, but because it is a help to it. . . .

The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. . . .

Consequently, though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or 'likings' and the Christian has only 'charity'. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on--including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

Hope, Part 2

A few days ago I wrote about hope (and my feeling that--especially as the word is used these days--it has been drained of meaning). Then coincidentally today my children and I read this passage from Screwtape (C. S. Lewis) that touches on the same topic:

"The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. . . . either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

"Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human . . . to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past. . . . It is far better to make them live in the Future. . . .

"He [God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity . . . washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future--haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth--ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other--dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. . . .

"It follows then, in general, and other things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn't much matter which) . . . than for him to be living in the present."

In Search of Spirituality

The quest for "spirituality" has become something of a pop culture phenomenon, with contemporary gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak "Magical Thinking" Chopra constantly hawking their sure-fire plans for achieving it. The common definition of spirituality these days seems to hearken back to the Transcendentals of the 19th century, signifying the seeking of a higher plane of existence, a rising above the day-to-day "grind." The phrases "power of positive thinking" and "mind over matter" come to mind. I think it's indicative of the emptiness felt by many today that the pursuit of spirituality has become such a huge and profitable industry. People are looking for meaning, and it would appear that a lot of them think they can find it by watching Oprah.

I can relate to the search for meaning. When I was in high school I had my own flirtation with the "Frogpondians" (as Edgar Allan Poe pejoratively termed them), copying long passages from Emerson and Thoreau in spiral-bound notebooks and reading them over and over again. I perused the books and publications of Unity Ministries, which were a presence in our house for a while. (Here's their statement of belief, a "path for spiritual living" that asserts, among other things, that Jesus is the great example of the "Christ" that is within us all, that the "essential nature" of human beings is good, and that the more we awaken to that nature the more we will be able to live out our "divine potential" in our daily lives.)

That sort of thinking appealed to me when I was young and dumb (this is not a slap at you, my dear children; you are much smarter than I was at your age). But the older I get the more clearly I see the idiocy of it. Because the older I get, the more I am able to look back on my life and see the sin that stains it. Each year that passes just results in adding new items to the stack of stupid things I have done. Each year that passes drives home with greater clarity the decay of the flesh, as I realize now at 44 that I have crested the hill and am on the way down. I have looked as good as I am ever going to look, had the best eyesight that I'm ever going to have, played the piano as well as I'm ever going to play it, and enjoyed the highest level of mental and physical ability that I will ever enjoy. And Oprah and her buddies want me to get "better"? The very thought makes me tired.

So I guess that's why I am finding so much to embrace in a book that I am reading right now entitled Grace Upon Grace--Spirituality for Today, by John W. Kleinig, a Lutheran pastor and theologian. Rev. Kleinig's definition of spirituality is different from today's popular usage that spirituality is something we need to work and progress at. Instead, Rev. Kleinig suggests the opposite: Christian spirituality has to do not with seeking, but with receiving. He calls it "receptive spirituality" and describes it as "the ordinary life of faith in which we receive Baptism, attend the Divine Service, participate in the Holy Supper, read the Scriptures, pray for ourselves and others, resist temptation, and work with Jesus in our given location here on earth." And although we like to imagine that life of faith as something we grow and progress in, Rev. Kleinig suggests a different view (emphasis mine):

"We all, quite understandably, long for some evidence of spiritual development and improvement, for some clear proof that we are on the right track as disciples of Christ. . . . Yet this progressive understanding of the spiritual life is not backed up by my experience and by the teaching of the New Testament. There is progress in the spiritual life, but it is a kind of reverse or paradoxical progress, our baptismal progress out of our old selves and into Christ. . . . " (p. 32)

Reverse progress? Now there's a concept I can relate to. Rev. Kleinig continues:

"God deals with us in a strange way as we travel on our course here on earth. Little by little he strips us down until we are left with nothing except our bare, fragile human soul, a soul that relies on Him utterly for its existence. Then He strips us of our soul in death. He takes away everything that we have in order to give us everything that he has in store for us. His purpose in this gradual demolition of us is to give Himself ever more fully to us and to bless us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3). He brings us through the darkness of dying and death with Jesus to usher us completely into the light of His radiant face" (35).

Reading this I am reminded of another passage, this one in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, which I have been reading out loud with my children. In case you're not familiar with the book, the speaker, Screwtape, is a senior demon giving advice to a junior one on how to win a soul for their boss, the Devil:

"My dear Wormwood,

The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of 'grace' for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation. This is very bad.

"I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble', and almost immediately pride--pride at his own humility--will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt--and so on, through as many stages as you please."

Last month saw the release of the motion picture The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald story of the same name. I have not seen the movie nor read the story, but I would like to do both. The movie is receiving quite positive reviews, and the premise sounds fascinating: when he is born, Benjamin Button is inexplicably an old man. As his life progresses, he "ages" in reverse, dying when he finally reaches infancy.

There is a saying that as people age they tend to become either more hellish or more heavenly. I am sorry to say that for the past few years I have felt that I am falling into the first category much more than the second. It is a feeling that doesn't bode well for my chances in the spiritual growth department. On the other hand, as I daily get closer to the end of my earthly life, whenever that may be, perhaps something good can come of the sense that I am regressing rather than progressing. If it can serve to continue reminding me of my utter and infant-like dependence upon the Father and my hopelessness and helplessness without a Saviour, then it is a good thing. If spiritual growth is a matter not of getting stronger but instead of fading away, of allowing myself to decrease--kind of like Alice's Cheshire Cat--so that Christ can increase, then maybe this weakening mind and body are blessing me more than I will ever know.

Disney Drops Narnia

Disney has dropped the Narnia series, citing logistical and budgetary concerns. Seems Prince Caspian, the second installment of the seven that were planned, did not do as well at the box office as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Never mind that it still turned over a $200 million profit. Apparently that's not good enough to move forward with the project.

Walden Media will shop around for a replacement for Disney. I hope they are successful. Our family enjoyed the first two films immensely and was looking forward to the third--Voyage of the Dawn Treader--with great anticipation.

I have nothing concrete on which to base this and I don't have time to go looking, but I can't help wondering if the Narnia series is being held to a different standard by those in power in Hollywood. It doesn't promote politically correct ideology, bash America, or preach tolerance for immorality, but instead is overflowing with family values and Christian symbolism. My gut tells me that a different standard would apply if Narnia were more in line with Hollywood's values.

The Troughs

"Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this: To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself--creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.

And that is where the troughs come in. . . . It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot 'tempt' to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."

Screwtape, Chapter 8

Quote of the Month

This has got to be one of the most profound things I have read all year.

From C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 10:

"All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."

More Screwtape Quotes

These are just so good! I have to share them. (Remember that the words are those of Screwtape, an experienced devil giving advice to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. The "patient" is a soul, and the "Enemy" is the one true God.)

On prayer:
"The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently reconverted to the Enemy's party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. . . . Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling . . . ." (The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 4)

On hatred:
"Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train." (Chapter 6)

New Readaloud

One of the things we have always done in our homeschool is read out loud together. Even when other things fall by the wayside, if we have prayed and read together I feel like the day has not been a loss.

This past year, though, it has been harder to maintain a regular readaloud schedule. My two oldest children are branching out from the home more and more, pursuing individual interests, activities, and studies, and that makes it difficult to find time to read together. With our trip to Grenada and various other schedule demands, we went several months without doing so at all.

But I am not ready to give up on readalouds. Not yet, anyway. The time is simply too wonderful and too well spent. So yesterday we started a new book. Often our readaloud relates to whatever historical period we are studying at the time. Sometimes it's chosen just because it's a great story. But this time I decided to have us read something a little different: The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis. Have you ever read it? It has been about 10-15 years since I did. Wow--already in the first few chapters, I am reminded of why the book made such an impression on me back then. If you have never read it, add it to your to-do list now.

In the book, a demon named Screwtape writes a series of letters to his nephew, another demon named Wormwood, giving advice on how to win souls for the Devil. Here are a few excerpts from the opening chapters:

"Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or 'practical', 'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church." (Chapter 1)

"One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity . . . . [but] the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. . . . When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like 'the body of Christ' and the actual faces in the next pew." (Chapter 2)

"Keep out of his mind the question 'If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?' You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! . . . At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's [God's] ledge by allowing himself to be converted . . . ." (Chapter 2)

"Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of his own mind . . . . Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts aobut hiself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office."

Good stuff, huh? In just a few paragraphs, Lewis takes on postmodernism, slams works righteousness and decision theology, and highlights the doctrine of vocation, the sinner's need for repentance, the eternal nature of the Church, and the Lord's free grace. My children, ages 13 & 16, were begging for just "one more chapter." Don't worry, dears, we have 28 more to look forward to!

Quote of the Day

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. "

- C.S. Lewis, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"