Realizing the need to say you’re sorry
Some of the daily readings in The Business of Heaven by C.S. Lewis are of a piece - that is, culled sequentially from one of his essays or books. In the course of reading each one, you can follow a train of thought.
In the past few days, he’s been looking at the fact of objective moral principle. A couple of days ago, he even mentioned the ancient Chinese and the concept of the Tao, the Way, the immutable First Principle, or, as Lewis puts it, “the reality beyond all predicates . . .the Way the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.”
He continues: “It is also the Way in which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.”
In subsequent readings, he has gone on to show that this principle - Supreme Good is a fine way to characterize it - is a fixed point. We humans don’t get to invent new goods. He uses the analogy of a train. If the station toward which it is headed is also in motion, the train will never arrive. Or, as he puts it in the reading asking if the moral law is stagnant, “We can go on getting a sum more and more nearly right only if the one perfect answer is ’stagnant.’”
He says he started to turn from atheism toward Christianity when he saw that his complaint about so much cruelty in the universe was an acknowledgement of an objective good established outside his own ability to mentally construct ideas.
Then there’s this from today’s reading: “Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing to say (as far as I know) to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.”
Bingo.
That pretty well sums up the state of our collective spiritual life in the West today. A great swath of us wants to proceed by saying, “Hey, I’m a good guy (or gal). I have a good heart. I’m inclined toward kindness, compassion, humility, giving, gentle wisdom, genuine delight in my fellow human being.” And I suppose we need to applaud people who have set the dials on their hearts thusly. A lot of human beings, after all, don’t bother to do so. And it’s certainly not our place to follow such people around, waiting to catch them in some violation of the Tao.
So how do you convince such people that they have anything to repent for? (I was going to include myself in that group that needs convincing, but a closer self-examination had me admitting that I know good and well that I violate the Creator’s laws written on my all-too-human heart many times daily. I can just feel it. A rather subjective way of wrapping that package, I suppose, but one to which I can testify nonetheless.) A lot of such people are agnostic, or maybe even New-Agey. Sending them to the Bible isn’t going to do any good.
Maybe it begins with the way C.S. Lewis approaches it in so many of his writings: by getting them to see that they do adhere to an objective moral standard, whether they’re conscious of it or not.
How about this for a concluding thought for this post (and I just came up with it myself)? A contrite heart is necessary to complete the sacred balance of creation.
