Does God Want Us to Love Ourselves?

... a question I'm pondering and to which C.S. Lewis has one of the best responses (not a surprise)

“Now, the self can be regarded in two ways.  On the one hand, it is God’s creature, an occasion of love and rejoicing; now, indeed, hateful in condition, but to be pitied and healed.  On the other hand, it is that one self of all others which is called I and me, and which on that ground puts forward an irrational claim to preference. This claim is to be not only hated, but simply killed; ‘never’, as George Mac Donald says, ‘to be allowed a moment’s respite from eternal death’. The Christian must wage endless war against the clamour of the ego as ego; but he loves and approves selves as such, though not their sins. 

 

The very self-love which he has to reject is to him a specimen of how he ought to feel to all selves; and he may hope that when he has truly learned (which will hardly be in this life) to love his neighbor as himself, he may then be able to love himself as his neighbor; that is, with charity instead of partiality. The other kind of self-hatred, on the contrary, hates selves as such. It begins by accepting the special value of the particular self called me; then, wounded in its pride to find that such a darling object should be so disappointing, it seeks revenge, first upon that self, then on all. Deeply egoistic, but now with an inverted egoism, it uses the revealing argument, ‘I don’t spare myself’—with the implication ‘then a fortiori I need not spare others’—and becomes like the centurion in Tacitus, ‘More relentless because he had endured.’ The wrong asceticism torments the self: the right kind kills the selfness. We must die daily: but it is better to love the self than to love nothing, and to pity the self than to pity no one.” 

On Time

I think a lot about time. You might say, I spend a lot of time thinking about time. 

And here are two core convictions: Time is a gift. And we spend time on what we love. I'll add to those, since it's the season of Advent, that when God comes to us in Christ in the Incarnation and inhabits time, God sanctifies time. This post then is what sanctified time looks like.

Speaking of the Incarnation, perhaps the most profound and counter-intuitive statement Jesus spoke was this: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:19). 

Without reflection, we might think he said the reverse: where our heart is, there our treasure will be. In this version of Jesus, we adjust our inner attitude, and then we do the right actions. 

But the order is different, and that fact is critical: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”Our hearts follow our treasures. I.e., what we spend our time is what we love, and the more time we spend the more our love grows. Invest your time in a church or nonprofit and see how you begin to care more about it. 

But why then do I often spend my time so poorly? Why do I not inhabit the present moment?

 

The problem is that we seem to live in every other time but the present. We throw away our time like it's dispensable. We don't treasure it. 

Blaise Pascal, the brilliant seventeenth-century scientist and theologian, offered a profound meditation on this topic: 

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so. (italics added)

Or as the brilliant writer, Anne Lamott puts it, God wants to give us the child’s experience of “big, round hours." 

This thought, like so many, takes me to St. Clive, aka C. S. Lewis, who puts the problem of human existence—or better the ongoing temptation of time—into the mouth of a devil, Screwtape in his fictional correspondence,The Screwtape Letters. 

Screwtape writes to his junior devil, Wormwood, that “we want a man hag-ridden by the Future” because in essence the future does not yet exist and it takes his eyes off the present moment. 

"We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present."

And now back to Pascal; this also comes from Pensées: 

"So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists.” 

My Conversation with John Lennox about St. Clive

Today, I interviewed Doctor John Lennox, Oxford University mathematician and Christian apologist. He’s authored several books, such as Can Science Explain Everything? and most recently, 2084 Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. The upcoming film Against the Tide features Doctor Lennox’s thought.

This is one part of our conversation I really enjoyed, which I start in medias res...

Lennox

... a professor of Latin and Greek introduced me to the classical world, and so the humanities are as important to me as the natural sciences. Being a linguist fits with mathematics because it's a specialized language, and therefore the idea of clear explanation is very important. 

C. S. Lewis once said, as you probably know, if a person cannot explain what they believe with words that people can understand either they don't believe it, or they don't understand it.

I'm constantly looking for ways or stories that aren't arbitrary, but enable us to get a grasp difficult concepts. Lewis was a genius.

Cootsona

Lewis is the greatest at this that I know of.

He had so many great images, and I was think you might be referring to the essay that lecture he gave to Anglican youth pastors, where he said there should be an exam for every ordination where you must translate things right into the common language. 

And oh boy, we could really get lost in Lewis. I loved in the Oxford Socratic Club, his response to Doctor Pittenger, where he says, I have always wanted to speak for the people, right? And that means that I'm going to have to round off some edges, which is hard for academics. 

I've given different presentations where I've talked to academics and said we need to learn from Lewis. Because we need to communicate, if we have great ideas, especially as people of Christian faith. But we have to realize there's going to be a loss because it's not going to sound as precise. Academics also like to hide sometimes behind their language. 

Lennox

I fear they do. They do indeed.

Cootsona

You have a boldness about you, which I think is really compelling.

Lennox

A thought can be both clear and deep, and sometimes people have the impression that unless they use virtually unintelligible high flow language.

They're not really coming across as intellectuals, and a lot of it is human pride. Of course, yes, Lewis wanted to speak clearly and to articulate profound ideas at levels that people could grasp. Part of them and that really is a goal.

And he's a model for for me in that way.

C.S. Lewis: From Creation to Creator

I also call this "a theology of nature with a touch of Lewis." (It is also an excerpt from this post.)

Several options exist that link nature—and thus science, which studies nature—with how we understanding God. The physicist and theologian Ian Barbour is often associated with the concept of "a theology of nature." It's more or less what I’m outlining here. 

Daniel Halverson describes it as follows: 

“Where natural theology tries to understand God in scientific context, theology of nature tries to understand nature in theological context.” Daniel Halverson

A Christian theology of nature asks this first: "What we can infer about nature from the God we know in Jesus Christ?" Second, it integrates these inferences with scientific discoveries.

And this brings me to C. S. Lewis, who presented a similar view to a theology of nature. It is part of his famous array of apologetics, and one that resonates with all kinds of people: 

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” C.S. Lewis

Lewis concluded that the only satisfaction for our desire for something more than the natural world has to offer is God.

Many call this Lewis’s "Argument from Desire" (which I've discussed in this blog post and here).

Let me pause to consider Ecclesiastes 3:11: God “has also set eternity in the human heart….” This means our hearts search for the Eternal God. Nature—even our human nature—is a sign, but it is not the end, of our journey. God alone is. The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) supports Lewis. In analyzing the structure of the human mind, CSR finds a natural openness to God. 

In 1941 Lewis preached his brilliant sermon “The Weight of Glory.” It is, in my view, one of the greatest ever preached. He presents a form of the argument from desire by calling out in his listeners their desire for beauty. They cannot satisfy this desire cannot in the things of the world, “but through them, and what came through them was longing.” 

Ultimately, Lewis linked this longing with God, the Source of beauty. 

“We are summoned to pass in and through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.” C.S. Lewis

Starting a Chapter on Christianity and Science with a Little Help from C.S. Lewis

I've been working on a new book about religions (in the plural) and science. As I move into the chapter on Christianity and science, I’m pondering this line from Stephen Prothero: 

“There is a persistent, unexplored bias in the study of religion toward the extraordinary and away from the ordinary. In the United States this bias manifests in a strong attraction (even among scholars who are atheists) toward hardcore religious practitioners….” Prothero, God is Not One

Nowhere is this more applicable than with Christianity and its relationship with, where too often the loudest and most strident voice is heard. The fundamentalists rage against “godless” evolution and the climate change “hoax,” while millions of believers have no significant problems with either. Though this approach makes good copy for the media, I won’t work for this book. 

Why don't we like talking about reasonable religious believers?

Fundamentalist approaches to Christianity can certainly ungird a "believe-no-matter-what-you-discover" approach to faith. Exploring questions becomes the much-dreaded "doubt." Nonetheless, unbelievers often supply the worst distortions. They assert that Christian faith is opposed to scientific reasoning. Consider this from the arch-atheist, Richard Dawkins, 

"Faith means blind trust, in the absence of evidence even in the teeth of evidence." Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Here I bring in St. Clive, aka Clive Staples Lewis, to assist. (Nothing new for me about that!) Certainly, there are believers who have faith despite the evidence, but St. Clive, whose book, Mere Christianity, still sells millions and guides their understanding of the Christian faith, writes this,

Faith is “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

That seems to be reasonable approach to faith. Faith is faithfulness to our commitments.

A word then about what this means for Christian faith and science... A reasonable faith, like the one Lewis presents, is one good historical ground for the rise of modern science in 16th and 17th century Europe. Of course, scientific endeavors flourished in the 8th-14th centuries in Muslim countries (a topic for another post). Still, this approach to faith and reason, to state it ever so succinctly, is cause of why the Scientific Revolution occurred in Christian Europe. Faith in the God who creates gives us an ordered creation to study. As the Nobel Laureate UC Berkeley physicist Charles Townes once noted (and as I've quoted before), 

"For successful science of the type we know, we must have faith that the universe is governed by reliable laws and, further, that these laws can be discovered by human inquiry." Charles Townes

That's a start to my chapter. More to come I suspect...

ETs and the Incarnation (with Insights from C. S. Lewis)

I wrote this week's eSTEAM, online newsletter, on whether the existence of extraterrestrials would invalidate our teaching of the Incarnation, that is, that God became human.

(If you want to subscribe to eSTEAM, by the way, you can do that here.)

This post complements  C. S. Lewis and ETs from three weeks ago. Here's a lightly edited excerpt from this week's eSTEAM...

Does the possible existence of ETs invalidate the Incarnation? 

Some assert that the discovery of other planets and the possibility of extraterrestrial life (ETs) mean the sudden death of the Christian scheme of salvation since, according to the biblical texts, God came in the unique person of Jesus to save this world or kosmos (John 3:16).

In his 1958 essay, “Religion and Rocketry” (originally titled, by the way, “Will We Lose God in Outer Space?”), C. S. Lewis took on the great Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle’s claim that the vastness of the universe makes the Christian teaching of Earth's special place in God's work of salvation essentially silly. 

As a scholar of history, Lewis steps back and cools down the argument’s heat:

"When the popular hubbub has subsided and the novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before. So it was with Copernican astronomy, with Darwinism, with Biblical Criticism…." C. S. Lewis (or Clive Staples Lewis, aka "St. Clive")

St. Clive then focuses, addressing Hoyle's assertion: this is about the Incarnation:

“If we find ourselves to be one among a million races, scattered through a million spheres, how can we, without absurd arrogance, believe ourselves to be uniquely favored?” C. S. Lewis

What might the existence of an extraterrestrial “hypothetical rational species” mean for Christian message? Lewis, an avid amateur astronomer, who mounted a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom at his home near Oxford, The Kilns, worked out answers more thoroughly in his three-part Space Trilogy. 

There and in this essay, he concluded that a good God could have created life on other planets—no problem with that—but we have no reason to assume that they are fallen. Human beings need redemption because we’ve sinned. This also implies that the great distances of the universe might be an act of grace. 

“I have wondered before now whether the vast astronomical distances may not be God’s quarantine precautions. They prevent the spiritual infection of a fallen species from spreading.” C. S. Lewis

Moving to a close, he refers to Augustine, who pondered the theological implications of the creatures whose existence was bandied about in the fourth and fifth centuries: “satyrs, monopods, and other semi-human creators. He decided it could wait till we knew there were any. So can this” (meaning the existence of ETs).

Lewis then takes this in an unexpected direction. Ultimately, the lesson is not the particulars of any discovery, scientific or otherwise, that would irrevocably validate or invalidate our faith. 

“Christians and their opponents again and again expect that some new discovery will either turn matters of faith into matters of knowledge or else reduce them to patent absurdities. But that has never happened.” C. S. Lewis

And so St. Clive directs us back to trusting in the goodness of our Creator, perhaps looking up at the stars and planets God has made and wondering whether there are other creatures looking at us, and who might be also looking to the gracious God and Creator in faith.

The Peril of Making History Too Neat

Magdalene College, where Lewis taught at Cambridge

In writing my book on science and religion in America, I've discovered again the necessity of making historical divisions (such as America between pre- and post-Darwin). This fact led me to offer a brief reflection on the perils of periodization.

My periodization in this book—sometimes as simple as divisions by decades—is admittedly overly neat transition. I do not subscribe to some Hegelian Zeitgeist, which would render this project an attempt to discern a particular “spirit” in each age, voila!out comes the right intellectual history. Still, the historical periods I propose are not entirely arbitrary, and many (pre- and post-Darwin) are standard designations. Nevertheless, I have to admit I use them lightly, with the purpose of creating a positive theoria, which at its root means a way "to see"... more clearly, I hope.

In his 1954 inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, C. S. Lewis summarized expertly the perils of making history too neat. He begins by citing G. M. Trevelyan,

As a great Cambridge historian has said, “Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussions, but very often leading historical thoughts astray.” The actual temporal process, as we meet it in our lives (and we meet it, in a strict sense, nowhere else) has no divisions, except perhaps those “blessed barriers between day and day,” our sleeps. Change is never complete, and change never ceases. Nothing is ever quite finished with; it may always begin over again…. And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for. A seamless, formless continuity-in-mutability is the mode of our life. But unhappily we cannot as historians dispense with periods. (They Asked For a Paper [Geoffrey Bles, 1962], 10-11, citing Tevelyan, English Social History [1944], 92.)

And Lewis adds a few sentences later, “There is nothing in history that quite corresponds to a coastline or a watershed in geography.” 

Ah, if history were just more clear! And though I'm not an historian—and the book I'm writing about science and religion in America is not, strictly speaking, a book of history—in creating this historical sketch, I have to make divisions as useful heuristic devices.

To step back for a moment, Why do we love to make things neat and tidy, whether it's our lives, our schedules, or the writing of history? Hebrews 4:13 says "Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight," which means, among other things, that God certainly has all reality in view and, as far as I can tell, doesn't really need historical periods to make sense of reality. And so often we'd like to pretend we're like God by showing how well we comprehend the sequence of events. That's human, to be sure, but perhaps also often a flawed project.

God Wherever We Look

This is an excerpt the "eSTEAM" newsletter that will appear next week. If you'd like to sign up you can do so here.

Because I've found my faith enhanced by science (and challenged at times), I have a positive sense when I ponder how to read God's Book of Scripture and book of nature.

But I also realize, as a church teacher and leader, that a church member's felt need about science is often how to remove uneasiness. It's based on a simple, and often understandable, fear: 

"If I accept modern science, I’ll lose God." 

What Christian congregations, college groups, and adult fellowships don’t want is science without God. Or even more science that denies God’s activity.

This means, that for most of us, it’s not about a resistance to science per se, it’s about science with no God. It’s about those voices that proclaim science’s power to oust God from the universe. And this might be based on some prior decisions. As the noted physicist Stephen Weinberg phrased it,

"Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists." Stephen Weinberg

Sometimes, despite what scientists themselves say, the culture or political powers will change that message. 

The first cosmonaut in space Yuri Gagarin (who achieved this feat in 1961) was quoted by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in line with the official atheistic Soviet line, to have announced, 

“I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter God.” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev quoting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

Interesting, it seems that Gagarin, a Russian Orthodox Christian, never made that proclamation, but that the officially atheist government put those words in his mouth. The Soviet Union had an official atheistic stance and thus started by not finding God on earth. So God couldn’t be in space either. In fact, Gagarin’s friends remember his saying, 

“An astronaut cannot be suspended in space and not have God in his mind and his heart.” Yuri Gargain

To me that adds up to some great news about bringing science to church. 

We find more and more places throughout this astonishing creation, whether in space or on earth, to look and to see the Creator God we know in Jesus Christ. 

C. S. Lewis, Exoplanets, and the Gospel

I'm continuing to write on the upcoming book, tentatively entitled, Negotiating Science and Religion in America: Past, Present, and Future. Here's another excerpt.

The discovery of exoplanets (that is, planets beyond our own solar system) has substantially expanded in our time. Some assert that this means the sudden death of the Christian scheme of salvation since, according to the biblical texts, Jesus came to save this world or kosmos (such as in John 3:16) and since the cosmos, in the biblical view, was vanishingly small compared to our current understanding. 

In some ways, the logic is disastrously circular—the known world of the biblical times was small, and so why should we assume that the texts would address a gigantic universe of the 21^stcentury? 

Before this recent explosion of information about life outside our solar system, even as early as the 1950s, C. S. Lewis took on these claims in his 1958 essay, “Religion and Rocketry.” (Lewis himself was an avid amateur astronomer, who mounted a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom at his home near Oxford, The Kilns.) Lewis addressed Fred Hoyle’s claims in an essay, “The Seeing Eye,” from February 1963. 

Hoyle, along with several other thinkers, asserted that life must have originated in many times and places, given the vast size of the universe. Referring to a series of broadcast talks that Hoyle had given in 1950 (later published as The Nature of the Universe), Hoyle argued against a Christian view of origins and the uniqueness of the Christian faith, based on the size of the universe. I hear similar arguments almost seventy years later from my students.

      

Lewis recalled that, as a child, he heard an almost antiphonal view of the cosmos.

When we were boys all astronomers, so far as I know, impressed upon us the antecedent improbabilities of life in any part of the universe whatever. It was not thought unlikely that this earth was the solitary exception to a universal reign of the inorganic. Now Professor Hoyle, and many with him, say that in so vast a universe life must have occurred in times and places without number. The interesting thing is that have heard both these estimates used against Christianity. 

Lewis then addresses what the Christian message might mean to these “hypothetical rational species," who might be good and not need redemption (as the fallen human race does). They might also be “strictly diabolical." To Lewis, it seems most likely that this species would contain both good and bad. He concludes that, like any missionary work, the Christian duty is to preach the Gospel, and then ends with this question, 

Would this spreading of the Gospel from earth, through man, imply a pre-eminence for earth and man? Not in any real sense. If a thing is to begin at all, it must begin in some particular time and place; and any time and pace raises the question: “Why then and just then?" One can conceive an extraterrestrial development of Christianity so brilliant that earth’s place in the story might sink to that of a prologue.

How do we evaluate this proposal?

I find it stunning that Lewis, this still visionary thinker, was already looking at perceiving the threat to the veracity of the Gospel and responding. And the question of exoplanets, and his response, are still relevant. I'll have more to say, I hope, as my book progresses... But on the way, why not listen to one of the greats?

Lamott and Lewis In the Time of Tragedy

I write this as my community of Chico-Paradise continues to be hit by the devastation of the Camp Fire. (Incidentally, this is also the "Month of St. Clive," i.e., Clive Staples Lewis, and November 22, is the day he died.)

From a few different fronts, I've been asked to offer my insights on the Camp Fire. Right now, to be honest, I'm struggling with what to write. I'm not sure I have the words that meet this moment. All I seem to have is impressions. And so I turn to two others.

Hope

In trying to grasp that key virtue of hope in this time, I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s 

Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, and I loved this from her because it’s my experience right now in Chico, 

“The forty-three people who died in the catastrophic fires in Santa Rosa, California, in 2017 lost everything. The survivors lost almost as much: their homes, gardens, friends, property, pets. But they had one another. They had life. And they had us—shabby, busy us. The fire was a sword that cut away all the comfort and treasure in life, the illusion of the solidity of objects, which turns out not to be so solid after all. We saw devastation, of course, but we also witnessed holiness in the burned world and what was left standing—a fireplace, a heavily laden persimmon tree, pallets of bottled water from out of state, the sky. We saw humanity. Don’t get me wrong—it sucked. I believe I would grieve and wail forever if this happened to me. But I would be mistaken. I would come through, via friends, community, love, grace, relief efforts. We are flattened, we come through.” Anne Lamott

Giving thanks

I’ve learned that the tragedy is profound and devastating, but human compassion (as a gift God gives us to give to others) is powerful.

Secondly, in addition to hope, I also know that giving thanks is key. And really, that's where Lamott's reflections lead me. As I've said in other places, science has taught us that  gratitude is good for us. Which shouldn't surprise Christians who are reminded, "Give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thessalonians 5:18). That's how God made us.

Ok, back to St. Clive. Something C.S. Lewis wrote has also recently come to mind. He reminded us about praise—and we could extend this to thanksgiving:

“Praise is inner health made audible.” C. S. Lewis

Even in times of tragedy, let’s be audible with our praise and thanks, as well as our hope. It's good for us and for those who need our care.

A question, an offer

I'm working on my list of subscribers who'd like to hear more from me about how to flourish in faith and life in our contemporary technological and scientific age. If you send your email to greg@cootsona.net, I’ll send you my book on spiritual discernment, A Time for Yes: Enjoying What’s Best in Life, Work, and Love.

The Camp Fire, Suffering, and St. Clive

The Camp Fire

These are this morning's statistics about the Camp Fire, centered in the next door town of Paradise (or what is left): 35% contained with 138,000 acres burned and 56 deaths. It is the most destructive and deadliest fire in California history. The smoky air, which is “hazardous” for health, presents a continual, oppressive atmosphere to those who live here and mirrors the weight of suffering of this area.

As a result of the fire, my class last night on C. S. Lewis at Chico’s Bidwell Presbyterian Church was cancelled. And the topic was Lewis on suffering—how did his writings speak to times like these? And maybe that’s a good place to go today. Because I often look to the Wisdom of St. Clive at times of stress… 

Why is that CSL can speak in times like this? We often think of Lewis as the Christian Answer Man, his Oxford-trained brain spinning out responses to life’s most difficult questions. So it’s worth saying that Lewis, even if he never (to my knowledge) experienced a raging fire, nonetheless faced significant crises and suffering—his mother’s death when he was nine; being shipped off soon after to a series of boarding schools that he detested; being wounded in World War I; living through the Great Depression and World War II; caring for an alcoholic and beloved brother; and, finally, the death of his wife, Joy. This man knew pain.

Here are the three points from Lewis on suffering.

Suffering calls us to be the response to others' pain

This is where we in Chico live right now. In Lewis's introduction to the heady Problem of Pain, which seeks to solve intellectual questions about suffering, he admitted that many things are more powerful than intellectual solutions: 

“When pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.” C. S. Lewis

On a related note, this blog is frequently about science and faith. And I’m also going to have to admit that, at times like this, we want all the science and technology available  for those people fighting the fires. And yet right now, science by itself seems quite cold. We also want stories and companionship and rituals. That’s what our lives of faith and Christian community bring. 

Blankets for those who had lost their homes

Speaking of Bidwell Pres Monday I was with volunteer for the church’s pop up store downstairs where they were distributing clothing, blankets, etc. for people devastated by the fire. Worth noting is that not all volunteers, by any means, were BPC members. I was struck by how these tragedies are terribly powerful, but human compassion is greater still. We want to give and care. (This is something I learned during 9-11 when I was in New York City. In fact, this whole experience is very similar for me.) 

Human community is so important—a gift of God. I noted that Monday when I had a birthday beer with a friend at the Handlebar in Chico, and well, speaking of beer, a similar moment last night with some dear friends who lost their house in Paradise. Both times I felt like people around us were gathered there just wanted to be in a place where other human beings were alive and celebrating life. It's such a basic human need and, in many ways, the essence of religion (if I may use the category) and religious community. 

Bidwell Presbyterian's Pop Up Store

Suffering can lead us to hope

I remember when that a good friend Jim was in his final days. He knew that I loved Lewis (as he did) and that St. Clive had some amazing writing on heaven. So he asked me in the final weeks of his life: 

“Greg, can you give me some good stuff on heaven?”

Here’s one piece of Lewis that was good then and remains so in light of his impending death and this current devastation.

“The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast.... The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God.... Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.” C. S. Lewis

It doesn’t get much better than that.

Suffering can form us.

In my book on C.S. Lewis and crisis, I wrote this, and thankfully, even after a few years, it still strikes me as accurate, 

“Lewis will not dwell on the abstract why question: Why does a good and powerful God allow for evil; instead he looks at how God uses suffering for a purpose—to make us better. This, given that God is omnipotent, seems to suggest that God causes suffering. Lewis instead emphasizes that the cost of freedom is that the world has suffering. God does not create it, but will use it for our good.”

Maybe in these times we can become better people as we reach out in compassion. I’ve found that the tragedy is profound and scary, but human compassion is even more powerful.

A profound prayer

There’s a prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (not C. S. Lewis) that I heard at the end of the sermon Sunday and that I’ve been meditating on daily. It so beautifully summarizes the kind of people God wants us to be become.

Lord make me an instrument of your peace

Where there is hatred let me sow love

Where there is injury, pardon

Where there is doubt, faith

Where there is despair, hope

Where there is darkness, light

And where there is sadness, joy

O divine master grant that I may

not so much seek to be consoled as to console

to be understood as to understand

To be loved as to love

For it is in giving that we receive

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned

And it's in dying that we are born to eternal life

Amen

A question, an offer

I'm working on my list of subscribers who'd like to hear more from me about how to flourish in faith and life in our contemporary technological and scientific age. If you send your email to greg@cootsona.net, I’ll send you my book on spiritual discernment, A Time for Yes: Enjoying What’s Best in Life, Work, and Love.

On Head/Heart, Feelings/Thoughts, and the Dichotomies that Divide

Which is more important for human flourishing? Reason or emotion? (And since this was the election week, we can also ask which is more important for voting? Right now a good deal of political discourse concerns our emotions, especially our fears? Where are the ideas that guide our country?) C.S. Lewis was certainly concerned about how to relate those two key sides to human life. 

Learning from Lewis and several others, I'm worried about the dichotomies that unnecessarily divide.

It’ll take me a few steps to arrive at Lewis’s thought.

            

First of all, let me mention a theme I'm following through Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in my humanities class. In this book the two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, represent common sense (or “sense”) and passions (or “sensibility”) respectively, and the question Austen raises is which one works better for human life. She was writing in the early 19^thcentury when the glories of the scientific revolution and the rationality and objectivity of the Enlightenment had become challenged by Romanticism’s emphasis on emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. 

This led me to ponder an age old question: Is it more human to think or to feel? And how different are they really?

Secondly, I came across an article on moral reason by Lauren Cassini Davis, “Do Emotions and Morality Mix?” in which she interviews the Harvard psychologist and philosopher, Joshua Green. Davis summarizes the core of this post so well:

“Emotions, like our love for our friends and family, are a crucial part of what give life meaning, and ought to play a guiding role in morality. Some say absolutely not: Cold, impartial, rational thinking is the only proper way to make a decision. Emotion versus reason—it’s one of the oldest and most epic standoffs we know.”

Ultimately Green echoes the conclusions of neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, who found that emotions are wound together inextricably with moral judgments.

Of course, I’m not saying that every question between emotions and reason concerns morality, but making decisions forms a key part of human life and where reason and emotion fit is certainly a conversation that runs through C. S. Lewis’s reflections on Christian spirituality. 

Finally, if I’m allowed to quote myself (with some editing)—in this case, from C. S. Lewis and the Crisis of a Christian—I’d put this in:

Contemporary American culture has a nearly universal slogan: "If it feels right, do it." Feelings—particularly the emotional rush of life—remain the final arbiter of truth and decision-making for our culture. And sadly that is true for those inside the church as well, where I often hear distrust of "head knowledge" and an emphasis on the interior life, which in this case usually means our emotions. I read this the other day: faith is “much deeper than intellectual agreement with facts” in that it “affects the desires of one’s heart.” With the way most of us define “heart” as a place where we feel emotion, that sounds a lot like feelings are more important than thought.

Certainly it is the nature of American revivalism that we tend to want a ‘burning in the bosom’ and the feeling of conversion. Too much of Christian spirituality implores us to introspection and seeing how the Lord is working and “whether you feel God’s joy.” There are some historical roots: early Puritans, who were anxious about whether God had elected them or not, worried about signs of salvation, about whether they felt God’s concerns, although this was never the response John Calvin wanted to the doctrine of predestination. Later in our history, revivalism, particularly following John Wesley but not restricted him, looked to the “warming of the heart” as a sign of salvation—which is certainly an element of Christian belief—but that emphasis often excluded rationality and obedience. Contemporarily, our obsession with feeling good has us wandering around in search of giddiness.

All in all, this fixation on emotions isn't nothing new for American Christianity. 

My helper with this post, Boots the cat

Surprisingly, even as this country has become less Christianized, we are still obsessed with feelings. But we should know better. C. S. Lewis certainly did. He was convinced that our feelings often deceive and that true life often begins when the rush of feelings lets off. As he wrote in a letter from 1950, 

“Obedience is the key to all doors: feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases. We can’t produce them at will and mustn’t try.” C.S Lewis

As I’ve emphasized above, Lewis was not given over simply to intellectual abstraction either. He believed that what we know must affect our lives. In this way, he mirrors the biblical emphasis on the heart not as the arbiter of emotions but as the center of action. So it’s neither feelings nor abstract cognition that matters. Eugene Peterson, when he paraphrased the Bible in The Message, gets it exactly right in rendering Galatians 5:25: 

“Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives” (italics are mine). 

Mere ideas and changeable feelings do not themselves lead to action. We can brood over feelings or mull over ideas forever.Neither state transforms our soul. Or as Lewis put in the mouth of Screwtape, his nephew Wormwood 

“The great thing is to prevent his doing anything.As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it . . . Let him do anything but act.”

Lewis sided with rationality, but even more, he knew that it was action that formed our lives. I would add that, without emotion, it’s hard for us to act as human beings.

And with that, I’m almost done for this post. And so I’ll simply add this: when I reflect on what Lewis has taught me about the spiritual life and what I’ve learned from Scripture. I have discovered: 

To be fully alive means to be ruled by neither emotion nor rationality, but for all of us to be transformed by the Holy Spirit.

And that—to my mind—is life as it’s meant to be lived. I’m thankful that St. Clive taught me so much along the way.