My Hero
Father's Day 2012
Mt. Charleston, Nevada
Thought for the Day:
Rats
in the Cellar...
Lewis, Magdalen College, Oxford
Lewis, Magdalen College, Oxford
C.
S. Lewis is regarded as perhaps the foremost defender of the Christian faith of
the last century. The work he is arguably best known for, Mere Christianity,
has had a profound influence upon the lives of many noteworthy people,
including Chuck Colson and Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza and
formerly the owner of the Detroit Tigers baseball club. Mere Christianity,
which was based upon a series of radio broadcasts he delivered over the BBC
during between 1941 and 1944, continues to sell millions of copies each year.
And
for all Lewis did to show the reasonableness of "mere" Christian
orthodoxy, it often escapes one's notice that he also demonstrated a great
grasp of the challenges in living out our faith. Perhaps one of the reasons for
Lewis' perennial appeal is that he speaks without using
"Christianese," or churchy, religious jargon, to get his point
across. One of the clearest examples of this occurs in the chapter of Mere
Christianity entitled, "Let's Pretend," where he is describing
the arduous task of Christ "being formed in us," about our coming
"to have the mind of Christ." He writes that we begin to notice,
"besides our sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not
only about what we do, but about what we are." He then gives this
example from his own personal life:
"When
I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine
times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have
sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that
immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and
unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now
that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they
would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the
other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best
evidence for what sort of man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has
time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are
most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not
create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the
suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only
shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the
cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before
you switch on the light. Apparently the rats of resentment and vindictiveness
are always there in the cellar of my soul..."
Lewis
here puts his finger on the true essence of genuine righteousness, not simply
our deeds, but our very thoughts. Not what just what we do, but who we are.
This is closely akin to Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount, where He told
His audience that, "Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the
scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into Heaven." (Matthew 5:20) And
try as we may to live out our lives for God, we know that we are incapable of
doing it on our own. Our daily failures, evidences of the rats that reside in
the cellar of our souls, are divine reminders that the way to life is through
the mercies of God.
Kathleen
Norris, in her excellent Foreword to the current HarperOne edition of Mere
Christianity, rightly observes of Lewis' Christianity: "The 'mere'
Christianity of C. S. Lewis is not a philosophy or even a theology that may be
considered, argued, and put away in a book on a shelf. It is a way of
life...The Christianity Lewis espouses is humane, but not easy: it asks us to
recognize that the great religious struggle is not fought on a spectacular
battleground, but within the ordinary human heart, when every morning we awake
and feel the pressures of the day crowding in on us, and we must decide what
sort of immortals we wish to be."
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