Though known by many as the most famous 20th century Christian writer, C. S. Lewis didn't focus on "churchy" things. In fact, he always maintained a healthy and sustained understanding of life as it is lived by all human beings: marked by disappointment and depression, suffering and trials, as well as the prospect of death, which we can all see and which none of us will escape. I suspect his setting in life -- his teaching at two secular universities, Oxford and Cambridge -- kept him mindful of those who never walked inside Magdalen College's chapel or read the pages of the King James Bible as a devotional practice. (By the way, this post is adapted from my recent book on C. S. Lewis.)
Here was a man who relished a good walk, a pint of beer with his friends and reading exceptional books. Here was a man who also described personal crises not limited to believers in Christ, like sorrow over the death of a friend in battle and disappointment over never achieving recognition as a poet. Indeed, the Bible itself recognizes the destiny of all humankind and its sorrows:
"Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward" (Job 5:7).
For this reason, I continue to turn to Lewis because, frankly, I'm not drawn to people who display their spirituality too boldly in their writings or who seem to think that all of life consists of praying, reading Scripture and singing hymns. Writers who resonate with me acknowledge the mundane, like filling the car with gas, having keys copied at the hardware store and buying butter, flour and orange juice at the grocery store. They also acknowledge the hard realities of life: watching your children grow up, realizing your time on earth is also passing, seeing parents age and die, or grasping that dreams you once held will never come to pass.
Given all these daily, quotidian issues, how do we know what to do? Feelings -- particularly the emotional rush of life -- remain the final arbiter of truth and decision-making for our culture. Contemporary American culture has a nearly universal slogan: "If it feels right, do it." 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 the other day that 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.
We, or at least I, am led to repentance.
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 today implores us toward 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 looked to the "warming of the heart" as a sign of salvation -- which is certainly an element of Christian belief -- but often excluded rationality and obedience. Contemporarily, our obsession with feeling good has us wandering around in search of giddiness.
So this fixation on feelings is not new to the Christian faith, and even as this country has become less Christianized, we are still obsessed with feelings. But we should know better. Lewis certainly did. He was convinced that our feelings often deceive and that true life 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.
Although some may think of Lewis as Rationality Personified, he 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 paraphrases the Bible in The Message, gets it exactly right in his rendering of 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." Galatians 5:25, The Message
Mere ideas and changeable feelings do not themselves lead to action. Or as Lewis put in the mouth of the tempter Screwtape, his nephew Wormwood must:
"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." C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
That's the path I'm hoping to tread this Lent.