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By Lawrence Reid Bechtel
Bronze mounted on polished stone base
My co-bloggers What's Wrong With the World from James Kalb's "Other Trads" site discuss a speech by C. S. Lewis. They've also provided a link to the speech.
At the final third of the speech, Lewis articulates many of the things I've been clumsily trying to write about in the past few days:
"Social service ends in red tape of officialdom"
"Good intentions going wrong"
" People trying to do good things, but somehow something goes wrong."
(These are not my words, by quotes from Lewis's speech I've partly transcribed below.)
Near the end of the excerpt, Lewis says:
...the real cure lies far deeper. Out of our selves and into Christ we must go.Here is the transcript of the latter part of the speech, which you can also listen to here:
The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self change into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed. That's why unbelievers complain that Christianity is a very selfish religion. "Isn't it very selfish, even morbid," they say "to be always bothering about the inside of your own soul, instead of thinking about humanity?"
Now what would an NCO say to a soldier who had a dirty rifle, and when told to clean it, reply "But Sergeant, isn't it very selfish, even morbid, to be always bothering about the inside of your own rifle, instead of thinking of the United Nations?" Well, we needn't bother about what the NCO would actually say. You see the point. The man isn't going to be much use to the United Nations if his rifle isn't fit to shoot with.
In the same way, people who are still acting from their old natural selves wont do much real permanent good to other people. Let me explain that. History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things, but somehow something goes wrong. Think the common expression "cold as charity." How did we come to say that? From experience. We've learned how unsympathetic and patronizing and conceited charitable people often are. And yet, hundreds and thousands of the started out really anxious to do good. And when they'd done it, somehow, it just wasn't as good as it ought to have been. The old story. What you are comes out in what you do. A crab apple tree can't produce eating apple. As long as the old self is there, its taint will be over all we do. We try to be religious, and become Pharisees. We try to be kind, and become patronizing. Social service ends in red tape of officialdom. Unselfishness becomes a form of showing off.
I don't mean of course to put a stop trying to be good. We've got to do the best we can. If the soldier is fool enough to go into battle with a dirty rifle, he mustn't run away. But I do mean that the real cure lies far deeper. Out of our selves and into Christ we must go. The change wont for most of us happen suddenly. And I must admit, that for most Christians it will on be beginning to the very end of our present lives. But there are some in whom it goes further, even before then. Far enough for you to see it. Their very faces and voices are different. When you meet them, you know you're up against something which, so to speak, begins where you leave off. Something stronger, quieter, happier, more alive than ordinary humanity.