Putting Faith into Practice

When platitudes turn into truths

To Dom Bede Griffiths May 8, 1939

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience: that is why there is no real teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch.

(CL 2, 258)

On the Christian view of marriage

To Mary Neylan April 18, 1940

(a former student who said she felt like a “slave-wife” as a married person)

On the marriage service [in the Anglican Prayer Book]. The three “reasons” for marrying, in modern English are (a) To have children. (b) Because you are very unlikely to succeed in leading a life of total sexual abstinence, and marriage is the only innocent outlet, (c) To be in a partnership. What is there to object to in the order in which they are put?

The modern tradition is that the proper reason for marrying is the state described as “being in love.” Now I have nothing to say against “being in love”: but the idea that this is or ought to be the exclusive reason or that it can ever be by itself an adequate basis seems to me simply moonshine.

In the first place, many ages, many cultures, and many individuals don’t experience it—and Christianity is for all men, not simply for modern Western Europeans. Secondly, it often unites most unsuitable people. Thirdly, is it not usually transitory? Doesn’t the modern emphasis on “love” lead people either into divorce or into misery, because when that emotion dies down they conclude that their marriage is a “failure,” though in fact they have just reached the point at which real marriage begins. Fourthly, it would be undesirable, even if it were possible, for people to be “in love” all their lives. What a world it would be if most of the people we met were perpetually in this trance!

The Prayer Book therefore begins with something universal and solid—the biological aspect. No one is going to deny that the biological end of the sexual functions is offspring. And this is, on any sane view, of more importance than the feelings of the parents. Your descendants may be alive a million years hence and may number tens of thousands. In this regard marriages are the fountains of History. Surely to put the mere emotional aspects first would be sheer sentimentalism. Then the second reason. Forgive me: but it is simply no good trying to explain this to a woman. The emotional temptations may be worse for women than for men: but the pressure of mere appetite on the male, they simply don’t understand. In this second reason, the Prayer Book is saying “If you can’t be chaste (and most of you can’t) the alternative is marriage.” This may be brutal sense, but, to a man, it is sense, and that’s that. The third reason gives the thing that matters far more than “being in love” and will last and increase, between good people, long after “love” in the popular sense is only as a memory of childhood—the partnership, the loyalty to “the firm,” the composite creature. (Remember it is not a cynic but a devoted husband and inconsolable widower, Dr. Johnson, who said that a man who has been happy with one woman could have been equally happy with any one of “tens of thousands” of other women. i.e. the original attraction will turn out in the end to have been almost accidental: it is what is built up on that, or any other, basis which may have brought the people together that matters.)

Now the second reason involves the whole Christian view of sex. It is all contained in Christ’s saying that two shall be “one flesh.” He says nothing about two “who married for love”: the mere fact of marriage at all—however it came about—sets up the “one flesh.” There is a terrible comment on this in I Corinthians 6:16 “he that is joined to a harlot is one flesh.” You see? Apparently, if Christianity is true, the mere fact of sexual intercourse sets up between human beings a relation which has, so to speak, transcendental repercussions—some eternal relation is established whether they like it or not.

This sounds very odd. But is it? After all, if there is an eternal world and if our world is its manifestation, then you would expect bits of it to “stick through” into ours. We are like children pulling the levers of a vast machine of which most is concealed. We see a few little wheels that buzz round on this side when we start it up—but what glorious or frightful processes we are initiating in there, we don’t know. That’s why it is so important to do what we’re told (cf.—what does the Holy Communion imply about the real significance of eating?) . . .

(CL 2, 392–394)

On deciding to go to confession

To Sister Penelope October 24, 1940

I am going to make my first confession next week, which will seem odd to you, but I wasn’t brought up to that kind of thing. It’s an odd experience. The decision to do so was one of the hardest I have ever made: but now that I am committed (by dint of posting the letter before I had time to change my mind) I begin to be afraid of the opposite extreme—afraid that I am merely indulging in an orgy of egoism. However, quod ubique quod ab omnibus!* It will be terrifying to face the A.T.S. [Association of Theological Schools] but it is a wonderful opportunity. Remember that resistance at the time means very little. Those who resist most violently in words are often those who go away and think it over most fruitfully.

*Reference to the Latin phrase which means “believed everywhere, by all, at all times”

(CL 2, 452)

To a correspondent who worried her questions were taking up too much of Lewis’s time

To Mary Neylan April 30, 1941

You may put out of your head any idea of “not having a claim” on any help I can give. Every human being, still more every Christian, has an absolute claim on me for any service I can render them without neglecting other duties.

(CL 2, 482)

Saying and doing in the Christian life

To the Editor of The Listener March 9, 1944

It is no use to say “Lord, Lord,” if we do not do what Christ tells us: that, indeed, is one of the reasons why I think an aesthetic religion of “flowers and music” insufficient. My reason for thinking that a mere statement of even the highest ethical principles is not enough is precisely that to know these things is not necessarily to do them, and if Christianity brought no healing to the impotent will, Christ’s teaching would not help us.

(CL 2, 605)

To a correspondent whose friend was struggling with her faith

To Miss Gladding June 7, 1945

I am afraid I don’t know any books more elementary than my own which would help. The truth is that when a person (not herself very bookish or philosophical) has lost faith under so very great and bewildering a trial, no intellectual approach is likely to avail. But where people can resist and ignore arguments they may be unable to resist lives. I am afraid, my dear lady, the only hope lies in you and in any other Christian friends she has. It is insofar as you succeed in representing Christ to her by all your actions and words that she may, even unconsciously, come to know Him. This is a terrible thing to say to you, but He will make you able to be what you need to be.

(CL 2, 659)

Worrying about the state of the world

To Dom Bede Griffiths December 20, 1946

It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know).

A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the bird’s song and the frosty sunrise.

As about the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there’s usually light enough for the next step or so. Pray for me always.

(CL 2, 747–748)

Ambition

To Warfield M. Firor March 12, 1950

Boys are now taught to regard Ambition as a virtue. I think we shall find that up to the 18th Century, and back into pagan times, all moralists regarded it as a vice and dealt with it accordingly.

(CL 3, 17)

On Public and Private Worship

To Mary Van Deusen December 7, 1950

The only rite which we know to have been instituted by Our Lord Himself is the Holy Communion (“Do this in remembrance of me”—“If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you”). This is an order and must be obeyed. The other services are, I take it, traditional and might lawfully be altered. But the New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practicing members of the Church.

Of course we differ in temperament. Some (like you—and me) find it more natural to approach God in solitude: but we must go to church as well. Others find it easier to approach Him thro’ the services: but they must practice private prayer and reading as well. For the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ in which all members however different (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping and receiving one another precisely by their differences. (Reread 1st Corinthians, chapter 12, and meditate on it. The word translated members would perhaps be better translated organs).

If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public and corporate side of Christianity all the better for us: it will teach us humility and charity towards simple lowbrow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns: the face, and life, of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them, teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation. . . .

“Regular but cool” in Church attendance is no bad symptom. 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.

(CL 3, 68–69)

To a recent convert whose husband was not a Christian

To Mrs. Jessup October 15, 1951

Our regeneration is a slow process. As Charles Williams says there are three stages: (1.) The Old Self on the Old Way. (2.) The Old Self on the New Way. (3.) The New Self on the New Way.

After conversion the Old Self can of course be just as arrogant, importunate, and imperialistic about the Faith as it previously was about any other interest. I had almost said “Any other Fad”—for just as the loveliest complexion turns green in a green light, so the Faith itself may have at first all the characteristics of a Fad and we may be as ill to live with as if we had taken up Nudism or Psychoanalysis or Pure Wool Clothing. You and I, clearly, both know all about that: one makes blunders.

About obedience, the principle is clear. Obedience to man is limited by obedience to God and, when they really conflict, must go. But of course that gives one very little guidance about particulars. The converted party must pray: I suppose it is not often necessary to pray in the presence of the other! Especially if the converted party is the woman, who usually has the house to herself all day. Of course there must be no concealment, in the sense that if the question comes up one must say frankly that one does pray. But there is a difference between not concealing and flaunting. For the rest (did I quote this before?) MacDonald says “the time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs.” Let you and me pray for each other.

(CL 3, 141)

The principle of vicariousness in the universe

To Mary Van Deusen June 10, 1952

We can all “take” from a stranger what we can’t “take” from our own parents. I listen with profit to elderly friends saying the very same things which I neglected or even resented when my father said them. Nay more: I can obey advice from others which I have often given myself in vain. I suppose this is one aspect of the vicariousness of the universe: Charles Williams’s view that everyone can help to paddle everyone else’s canoe better than his own. We must bear one another’s burdens because that is the only way the burdens can get borne: and “He saved others, himself He cannot save” is a fundamental law.

(CL 3, 200)

How to combat the prideful feeling that “I’m special”

To Genia Goelz June 20, 1952

I would prefer to combat the “I’m special” feeling not by the thought “I’m no more special than anyone else” but by the feeling “Everyone is as special as me.” In one way there is no difference, I grant, for both remove the specialty. But there is a difference in another way. The first might lead you to think, “I’m only one of the crowd like anyone else.” But the second leads to the truth that there isn’t any crowd. No one is like anyone else. All are “members” (organs) in the Body of Christ. All different and all necessary to the whole and to one another: each loved by God individually, as if it were the only creature in existence. Otherwise you might get the idea that God is like the government which can only deal with the people in the mass.

(CL 3, 204)

How the Spirit speaks

To Genia Goelz June 20, 1952

About confession, I take it that the view of our Church is that everyone may use it but none is obliged to. I don’t doubt that the Holy Spirit guides your decisions from within when you make them with the intention of pleasing God. The error would be to think that He speaks only within whereas, in reality, He speaks also through Scripture, the Church, Christian friends, books etc.

(CL 3, 204)

Dealing with religious faultfinders

To Mary Van Deusen June 26, 1952

I think we may except [accept] it as a rule that whenever a person’s religious conversation dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people’s religions, he is in a bad condition. The fact that he shakes your faith is significant. Pray for him but not, I should say, with him. If he insists on talking religion to you ask him for positive things: ask him to tell you what he knows of God.

(CL 3, 209)

Those who get lost and blame the map

To Miss Reidy June 28, 1952

The point was that as foolish people on a walk, when by their own errors they are off the course, think the map was wrong, so, when we do not find in ourselves the fruits of the Spirit which all our teachers promise, it is not that the promise was false, but that we have failed to use the Grace we have been given. The “map” can be found in almost any Christian teaching.

(CL 3, 210)

On resisting unwanted thoughts

To Vera Gebbert March 23, 1953

One can’t help momentary wishes: guilt begins only when one embraces them. You can’t help their knocking at the door, but one mustn’t ask them in to lunch.

(CL 3, 310)

On going to confession

To Mary Van Deusen April 6, 1953

I think our [Anglican] official view of confession can be seen in the form for the Visitation of the Sick where it says “Then shall the sick person be moved (i.e. advised, prompted) to make a . . . Confession . . . if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter.” That is, where Rome makes Confession compulsory for all, we make it permissible for any: not “generally necessary” but profitable. We do not doubt that there can be forgiveness without it. But, as your own experience shows, many people do not feel forgiven, i.e. do not effectively “believe in the forgiveness of sins,” without it. The quite enormous advantage of coming really to believe in forgiveness is well worth the horrors (I agree, they are horrors) of a first confession.

Also, there is the gain in self-knowledge: most of [us] have never really faced the facts about ourselves until we uttered them aloud in plain words, calling a spade a spade. I certainly feel I have profited enormously by the practice. At the same time I think we are quite right not to make it generally obligatory, which would force it on some who are not ready for it and might do harm.

As for conduct of services, surely a wide latitude is reasonable. Has not each kind—the very “low” and the very “high”—its own value? [i.e., Low Church and High Church]. . . .

(CL 3, 320)

On giving advice to those who didn’t ask for it

To Mary Van Deusen April 6, 1953

I think advice is best kept till it is asked for. . . . One must beware of meddling.

(CL 3, 320)

The difficulties of trying to evangelize casual acquaintances or strangers

To Mary Van Deusen April 7, 1953

About putting one’s Christian point of view to doctors and other unpromising subjects I’m in great doubt myself. All I’m clear about is that one sins if one’s real reasons for silence is simply the fear of looking a fool. I suppose one is right if one’s reason is that the other party will be repelled still further and only confirmed in his belief that Christians are troublesome and embarrassing people, to be avoided whenever possible. But I find it a dreadfully worrying problem. (I am quite sure that an importunate bit of evangelization from a comparative stranger would not have done me any good when I was an unbeliever.)

(CL 3, 321)

Is there a decline in Christian faith or just in conventional churchgoing?

To Mary Willis Shelburne May 9, 1953

I am afraid it is certainly true in England that Christians are in the minority. But remember, the change from, say, thirty years ago, consists largely in the fact that nominal Christianity has died out, so that only those who really believe now profess. The old conventional church-going of semi-believers or almost total unbelievers is a thing of the past. Whether the real thing is rarer than it was would be hard to say. Fewer children are brought up to it: but adult conversions are very frequent.

(CL 3, 326)

How we blame everyone but ourselves

To Mary Willis Shelburne May 30, 1953

Yes, we are always told that the present widespread apostasy must be the fault of the clergy, not of the laity. If I were a parson I should always try to dwell on the faults of the clergy: being a layman, I think it more wholesome to concentrate on those of the laity. I am rather sick of the modern assumption that, for all events, “WE,” the people, are never responsible: it is always our rulers, or ancestors, or parents, or education, or anybody but precious “US.” WE are apparently perfect and blameless. Don’t you believe it.

(CL 3, 333)

Religious practices as the handrail not the staircase

To Mary Van Deusen June [2]9, 1953

I wouldn’t quite say that “religious Practices help the search for truth” for that might imply that they have no further use when the Truth has been found. I think about the practices what a wise old priest said to me* about a “rule of life” in general—“It is not a stair but a banister” (or rail or balustrade—I don’t know what you call it in America), i.e. it is, not the thing you ascend by but it is a protective against falling off and a help-up. I think thus we ascend. The stair is God’s grace. One’s climb from step to step is obedience. Many different kinds of banisters exist, all legitimate. It is possible to get up without any banisters, if need be: but no one would willingly build a staircase without them because it would be less safe, more laborious, and a little lacking in beauty.

*Lewis may be referring to Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection.

(CL 3, 342)

On giving advice and listening to advice

To Mary Van Deusen October 3, 1953

If few can give good advice, fewer still can hear with patience advice either good or bad.

(CL 3, 369)

To a correspondent who was dissatisfied with her parish priest

To Mary Van Deusen December 28, 1953

I think someone ought to write a book on “Christian life for Laymen under a bad Parish Priest” for the problem is bound to occur in the best churches. The motto would be of course Herbert’s lines about the sermon “If all lack sense, God takes a text and preaches patience.”

(CL 3, 397)

Pride as a kind of itch

To Mrs. Johnson February 18, 1954

Yes, I know one doesn’t even want to be cured of one’s pride because it gives pleasure. But the pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch: but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval: but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither but have everything else (God, our fellow humans, animals, the garden and the sky) instead.

(CL 3, 429)

On combating fears

To Mary Van Deusen February 22, 1954

If only people (including myself: I also have fears) were still brought up with the idea that life is a battle where death and wounds await us at every moment, so that courage is the first and most necessary of virtues, things would be easier. As it is, fears are all the harder to combat because they disappoint expectations bred on modern poppycock in which unbroken security is regarded as somehow “normal” and the touch of reality as anomalous. Notice, too, how our bad habit of lying to those who are really ill renders vain our true assurances to those who are not!

(CL 3, 432)

On dealing with nasty people

To Mary Willis Shelburne March 10, 1954

I am very puzzled by people like your Committee Secretary, people who are just nasty. I find it easier to understand the great crimes, for the raw material of them exists in us all; the mere disagreeableness which seems to spring from no recognizable passion is mysterious. (Like the total stranger in a train of whom I once asked “Do you know when we get to Liverpool” and who replied “I’m not paid to answer your questions: ask the guard”). I have found it more among Boys than anyone else. That makes me think it really comes from inner insecurity—a dim sense that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody, and a belief that this can be achieved by arrogance. Probably you, who can’t hit back, come in for a good deal of resentful arrogance aroused by others on whom she doesn’t vent it, because they can. (A bully in an Elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man he dare not fight, says “I’ll go home and beat all my servants”). But I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her: that, after all, is almost the greatest evil nasty people can do us—to become an obsession, to haunt our minds. A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects, is the thing, if one can only stick to it.

(CL 3, 438)

A parable about fear

To Mrs. D. Jessup March 26, 1954

One last word, about getting rid of fear.

Two men had to cross a dangerous bridge. The first convinced himself that it would bear them, and called this conviction Faith. The second said “Whether it breaks or holds, whether I die here or somewhere else, I am equally in God’s good hands.” And the bridge did break and they were both killed: and the second man’s Faith was not disappointed and the first man’s was.

(CL 3, 448)

On humility and humiliation

To Mary Willis Shelburne March 31, 1954

We should mind humiliation less if [we] were humbler.

(CL 3, 448)

The three patiences

To Mary Willis Shelburne March 31, 1954

How right you are to see that anger (even when directed against oneself) “worketh not the righteousness of God.”* One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself. My old confessor** (now dead) used to impress on me the need for the 3 Patiences: patience with God, with my neighbor, with oneself.

*James 1:20

**Father Walter Adams

(CL 3, 449)

Note to a discouraged Christian apologist

To Corbin Scott Carnell June 25, 1954

If you are losing your faith in argument, why trust the arguments that lead you to do so? (This skepticism about reason undercuts itself). Some people can be converted on rational grounds, but more can’t. All rests with God, and one must not get flustered. If in a particular case He doesn’t use you or me as His instrument, no doubt he has excellent reasons. No general conclusion follows.

(CL 3, 494)

Is sex the chief stumbling block of men?

To Mrs. “Jones” September 27, 1954

“Why has sex become man’s chief stumbling block?” But has it? Or is it only the most recognizable of the stumbling blocks? I mean, we can mistake Pride for a good conscience, and Cruelty for zeal, but Idleness for the peace of God etc. But when Lust is upon us, then, owing to the obvious physical symptoms, we can’t pretend it is anything else. Is it perhaps only the least disguisable of our dangers. At the same time I think there is something in what you say. If marriage is an image of the mystical marriage between Christ & the Church, then adultery is an image of apostasy. Also, all the sexual vices have this unfair advantage that the very temptation is itself pleasurable: whereas the temptations, say, to Anger or Cowardice are in themselves unpleasant.

(CL 3, 510)

To a correspondent whose spouse was not a Christian

To Mrs. Johnson March 2, 1955

It is right and inevitable that we should be much concerned about the salvation of those we love. But we must be careful not to expect or demand that their salvation should conform to some ready-made pattern of our own. Some Protestant sects have gone very wrong about this. They have a whole program of “conviction,” “conversion” etc. marked out, the same for everyone, and will not believe that anyone can be saved who doesn’t go through it “just so.” But (see the last chapter of my Problem of Pain) God has His own way with each soul.

There is no evidence that St. John underwent the same kind of “conversion” as St. Paul. It’s not essential to believe in the Devil: and I’m sure a man can get to Heaven without being accurate about Methuselah’s age. Also, as Macdonald says “the time for saying comes seldom, the time for being is always here.” What we practice, not (save at rare intervals) what we preach is usually our great contribution to the conversion of others.

(CL 3, 576)

Objections to religious teetotalism

To Mrs. Johnson March 16, 1955

I am afraid I am not going to be much help about all the religious bodies mentioned in your letter. . . . I have always in my books been concerned simply to put forward “mere” Christianity, and am no guide on these (most regrettable) “interdenominational” questions. I do however strongly object to the tyrannic and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls itself a Church and makes tee-totalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection (that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers) it is so provincial (what I believe you people call “small town”). Don’t they realize that Christianity arose in the Mediterranean world where, then as now, wine was as much part of the normal diet as bread?

(CL 3, 580)

On “having to depend solely on God”

To Mary Willis Shelburne December 6, 1955

I feel it almost impossible to say anything (in my comfort and security—apparent security, for real security is in Heaven and thus earth affords only imitations) which would not sound horribly false and facile. Also, you know it all better than I do. I should in your place be (I have in similar places been) far more panic-stricken and even perhaps rebellious. For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) “having to depend solely on God” is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. But trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained, we will not turn to Him as long as He leaves us anything else to turn to. I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. In the hour of death and the day of judgment, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwittingly) to begin practicing it here on earth. It is good of Him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time.

(CL 3, 679)

The vast commercial drive called “Xmas”

To Father Peter Milward December 17, 1955

Christmas cards in general and the whole vast commercial drive called “Xmas” are one of my pet abominations: I wish they could die away and leave the Christian feast unentangled. Not of course that even secular festivities are, on their own level, an evil: but the labored and organized jollity of this—the spurious childlikeness—the half-hearted and sometimes rather profane attempts to keep up some superficial connection with the Nativity—are disgusting.

(CL 3, 686)

In praise of Russian Orthodox services

To Mrs. Johnson March 13, 1956

Let’s go on disagreeing but don’t let us judge. What doesn’t suit us may suit possible converts of a different type.

My model here is the behavior of the congregation at a “Russian Orthodox” service, where some sit, some lie on their faces, some stand, some kneel, some walk about, and no one takes the slightest notice of what anyone else is doing. That is good sense, good manners, and good Christianity. “Mind one’s own business” is a good rule in religion as in other things.

(CL 3, 720)

On religious music

To Mrs. Halvorson March 1956

Concerning hymn singing and organ playing: if they have been helpful and edified anyone, then the fact that they set my teeth on edge is infinitely unimportant.

One must first distinguish the effect which music has on people like me who are musically illiterate and get only the emotional effect, and that which it has on real musical scholars who perceive the structure and get an intellectual satisfaction as well.

Either of these effects is, I think, ambivalent from the religious point of view: i.e. each can be a preparation for or even a medium for meeting God but can also be a distraction and impediment. In that respect music is not different from a good many other things, human relations, landscape, poetry, philosophy. The most relevant one is wine which can be used sacramentally or for getting drunk or neutrally.

I think every natural thing which is not in itself sinful can become the servant of the spiritual life, but none is automatically so. When it is not, it becomes either just trivial (as music is to millions of people) or a dangerous idol. The emotional effect of music may be not only a distraction (to some people at some times) but a delusion: i.e. feeling certain emotions in church they mistake them for religious emotions when they may be wholly natural. That means that even genuinely religious emotion is only a servant. No soul is saved by having it or damned by lacking it. The love we are commended to have for God and our neighbor is a state of the will, not of the affections (though if they ever also play their part so much the better). So that the test of music or religion or even visions if one has them is always the same—do they make one more obedient, more God-centered, and neighbor-centered and less self-centered? “Though I speak with the tongues of Bach and Palestrina and have not charity etc!”*

*See Corinthians 13:1.

(CL 3, 731–732)

Intellectual assent vs. real belief

To Mary Van Deusen May 14, 1956

Almost exactly the same thing that happened to you about the Incarnation happened to me a few years ago about the Forgiveness of Sins. Like you, I had assented to the doctrine years earlier and would have said I believed it. Then, one blessed day, it suddenly became real to me and made what I had previously called “belief” look absolutely unreal. It is a wonderful thing. But not, on inferior matters, so very uncommon. We all in one sense “believe” we are mortal: but until one’s forties does one not really believe one is going to die? On the edge of a cliff can’t one believe, and yet not really believe, that there’s no danger? But certainly this real belief in the truths of our religion is a great gift from God. When in Hebrews “faith” is defined as “the substance of things hoped for,” I would translate “substance” as “substantialness” or “solidity” or (almost) “palpableness.”

(CL 3, 751)

The problem with erotic fantasies

To Keith Masson June 3, 1956

For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself. . . .

The true exercise of imagination, in my view, is (a) To help us to understand other people (b) To respond to, and, some of us, to produce, art. But it has also a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for virtues, successes, distinctions etc. which ought to be sought outside in the real world—e.g. picturing all I’d do if I were rich instead of earning and saving. Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of ourselves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.

(CL 3, 758–759)

On living with adversity

To Mary Willis Shelburne June 14, 1956

The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.

(CL 3, 761–762)

On human suffering and Christ’s suffering

To Mary Margaret McCaslin November 15, 1956

I will indeed pray for you: I did so already, and will do so more. You have made a great sacrifice for conscience’s sake. Such things, we may be sure, enrich one: but God knows it doesn’t feel like it at the time. It did not, even for our Lord himself, in Gethsemane. I always try to remember what MacDonald said “The Son of God died not that we might not suffer but that our sufferings might become like His.”

But of course the real difficulty is not in rising to this point of view but in staying there. One does it—and ten minutes later it all has to be done over again. And one gets so tired, doesn’t one? . . . May God strengthen you, as only He can.

(CL 3, 806)

“God gives where He finds empty hands.”

To Mary Willis Shelburne March 31, 1958

St. Augustine says “God gives where He finds empty hands.” A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift. Perhaps these parcels are not always sins or earthly cares, but sometimes our own fussy attempts to worship Him in our way. Incidentally, what most often interrupts my own prayers is not great distractions but tiny ones—things one will have to do or avoid in the course of the next hour.

(CL 3, 930–931)

To a correspondent who asked for a book on egocentrism

To Edward Lofstrom March 8, 1959

One can argue against egoism, but then egoism is not his trouble. If he were a real egoist he would be either blissfully unconscious of the fact or else fully convinced that egoism was the rational attitude. You, on the other hand, suffer from a more than ordinary horror of egoism which you share with us all. And therefore, as you will see, the thing you need is not to think more or better about it but to think less: to act unselfishly—that is, charitably and justly—and leave the state of your feelings for God to deal with in His own way and His own time. And this of course you know better than I do.

But how to do it? For the very effort to forget something is itself a remembering of that something! I think, if I were in your shoes I should try to regard this sense of self-imprisonment not at all as a sin but as a mere tribulation, like rheumatism, to be endured in the same way. It has no doubt its medical side: diet, exercise, and recreations might all be considered. And, though this is a hard saying, your early upbringing may have something to do with it. Great piety in the parents can produce in the child a mistaken sense of guilt: may lead him to regard as sin what is really not sin at all but merely the fact that he is a boy and not a mature Christian. At any rate, remember “I cannot turn one hair black or white: but I can brush my hair daily and go to the barber at regular intervals.” In other words we must divert our efforts from our general condition or frame of mind (which we can’t alter by direct action of the will) to what is in our power—our words and acts. Try to remember that the “bottomless sea” can’t hurt us as long as we keep on swimming. You will be in my prayers.

(CL 3, 1027–1028)

On giving alms

To Mary Willis Shelburne October 26, 1962

I do most thoroughly agree with your father’s principle about alms. It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been “had for a sucker” by any number of impostors; but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need. After all, the parable of the sheep and goats* makes our duty perfectly plain, doesn’t it. Another thing that annoys me is when people say “Why did you give that man money? He’ll probably go and drink it.” My reply is “But if I’d kept [it] I should probably have drunk it.”

*Matthew 25:31–46

(CL 3, 1376)

On resisting change

To Mary Van Deusen November 21, 1962

I think I share, to excess, your feeling about a move. By nature I demand from the arrangements of this world just that permanence which God has expressly refused to give them. It is not merely the nuisance and expense of any big change in one’s way of life that I dread. It is also the psychological uprooting and the feeling—to me, and to you, intensely unwelcome—of having ended a chapter. One more portion of oneself slipping away into the past! I would like everything to be immemorial—to have the same old horizons, the same gender, the same smells and sound, always there changeless. The old wine is to me always better. That is, I desire the “abiding city” where I will know it is not and ought not to be found. I suppose all these changes should prepare us for the far greater change which has drawn nearer even since I began this letter. We must “sit light” not only to life itself but to all its phases. The useless word is “Encore!”

(CL 3, 1383)

On forgiveness as a process

To Phoebe Hesketh June 14, 1960

The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn’t stayed put and all has to be done over again.

(CL 3, 1162)

On dealing with family members

To Mary Willis Shelburne February 24, 1961

I hope and pray you will be able to do them some good, but probably if you do, it will not be by any voluntary and conscious actions. Your prayers for them will be more use. Probably the safe rule will be “When in doubt what to do or say, do or say nothing.” I feel this very much with my stepsons.* I so easily meddle and gas: when all the time what will really influence them, for good or ill, is not anything I do or say but what I am. And this unfortunately one can’t know and can’t much alter, though God can. Two rules from William Law** must be always before our minds.

*David and Douglas Gresham, sons of Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis, who was married to Lewis from 1956 until her death in 1960

**William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life

(CL 3, 1242–1243)

Avoid fixating on the past

To Mary Willis Shelburne June 5, 1961

We must beware of the Past, mustn’t we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past. Not so the saved. This is one of the dangers of being, like you and me, old. There’s so much past, now, isn’t there? And so little else. But we must try very hard not to keep on endlessly chewing the cud. We must look forward more eagerly to sloughing that old skin off forever—metaphors getting a bit mixed here, but you know what I mean.

(CL 3, 1274)

On temptations to sin and confessions of sin

To Harvey Karlsen October 13, 1961

Of course I have had and still have plenty of temptations. Frequent and regular prayer, and frequent and regular Communions, are a great help, whether they feel at the time as if they were doing you good or whether they don’t. I also found great help in monthly confession to a wise old clergyman.*

Perhaps, however, the most important thing is to keep on: not to be discouraged however often one yields to the temptation, but always to pick yourself up again and ask forgiveness. In reviewing your sins don’t either exaggerate them or minimize them. Call them by their ordinary names and try to see them as you would see the same faults in somebody else—no special blackening or whitewashing. Remember the condition on which we are promised forgiveness: we shall always be forgiven provided that we forgive all who sin against us. If we do that we have nothing to fear: if we don’t, all else will be in vain. Of course there are other helps which are mere commonsense. We must learn by experience to avoid either trains of thought or social situations which for us (not necessarily for everyone) lead to temptations. Like motoring—don’t wait till the last moment before you put on the brakes but put them on, gently and quietly, while the danger is still a good way off.

*Father Walter Adams

(CL 3, 1285–1286)

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