Religion and Mercy

If it isn't obvious enough by now, I am a huge fan of Mr. C. S. Lewis. My wife found a copy of The Screwtape Letters at a garage sale almost 30 years ago, and I read and was hooked. As is my usual habit when I discover an author I like, I proceeded to seek out and read all of his books.

I haven't quite made it. Not being interested I have never read any of his books in his academic specialty, Medieval and Renaissance literature. And two of his books, Dymer and Spirits in Bondage, being published early on in his career and before his reconversion to Christianity, well, I haven't honestly looked very hard for them. I have read a passage from Dymer and it sounds interesting, though.

I cannot begin to tell you enough about a later edition of Screwtape which includes the addendum Screwtape Proposes a Toast. As it happens he was addressing American education, and was dead on in his assessment. I have used his arguments there quite often in my dealings with, ahem, modern educators.

The Abolition of Man may be the best work of nonfiction outside of the Bible. Mr. Lewis' defense of the doctrine of objective knowledge is far more fantastic and profound than the small book in which he delivers it. In short, I adore the man, and must credit him to a great degree in cementing my belief in God.

Yet there is a skeleton in the closet which most of his admirers, Catholic and Protestant alike, tend to downplay or ignore. And that is his refusal to make pronouncements about certain particulars of Christian doctrine. He asserts that he is not enough of a theologian to do so.

I am not aware that one must be a theologian in order to understand most theology. I understand, as a Catholic, that the consecrated host is really the Body of Christ. Lewis famously says in regards to this that Christ's directive is, take, eat, not take, understand. I say with all due respect that he rather begs the question. Why would God not want us to understand? Wouldn't we want that closer relationship with Him?

Much of it can be linked to the psychology of Mr. Lewis I'm sure. Dr. Joseph Pearce wrote a very good book called C. S. Lewis and the Church of Rome which deals with the issue of why Lewis never became Catholic as he certainly was very close to it. Dr. Pearce's answer was, essentially, because of Lewis' background and his Ulster stubbornness (he was from Northern Ireland).

I would have to agree. And I don't mean that without sympathy: sometimes, and I say this with absolutely no disrespect intended, invincible ignorance gets in our way. Lewis may not have had the capacity to take that next step; it's the same as I think of my dear maternal grandfather who, though he came to accept and respect my father's Catholicism, could not be expected to easily let go of his Southern Baptist background. Thankfully, God will accept us on those terms, if the situation is real and sincere, and not an intentional blindness.

That question used to plague me yet now I can accept it. But even in that light, we still must address our skeletons as honestly and openly as we can. C. S. Lewis did what he could with what he given, and had accomplished with it a far sight more than anything most of us have managed. So he perhaps could not take that last step towards full Christianity. How many of us can? It is an area in which we must be supremely grateful for God's mercy.

The Power of God

An article on AOL this morning posed an interesting question. It asked whether the super-storm Sandy was a punishment from God. The direct and most likely answer is, probably not. It just happened.

But that doesn't mean that it absolutely was not God's will. He may have been issuing a punishment, or a warning of some sort. The best we can accurately say is, maybe so and maybe no. It's simply more than we can ever know, at least while we still walk the Earth.

It's far too easy to say and think that God wouldn't do that, yet we must be very careful about presuming His will in either a positive or negative direction. We put ourselves at great peril to assume that He would never never do anything destructive if He thought that humanity needed the lesson. The Old Testament is replete with stories of Divine wrath, and even Christ Himself cursed the fig tree which afforded Him no fruit.

It's all too easy to believe that an almighty yet loving God will do good things for us while never calling out nature for His own purposes. To be sure, Christ Himself also pointed out that the people who died when a tower fell on them weren't necessarily greater sinners than anyone who still lived after the incident. So it's all whatever God wills it, and that's that.

We must remember too that nature, like man, is imperfect. If nature were perfect, no storms would form, and we only get exactly what we needed of Her at a given time. So the storm may have been nothing more than a reflection of nature's, well, nature. Part of the point here is to remind Christians that bad things are not automatically or inherently, except indirectly, of course, the Will of God. Yet it also to remind Christians as well as the world at large that we need to pay attention to these seemingly natural events in that they may indeed be meant to tell us something. The bottom line is that it isn't very outlandish to think of Sandy and the harm she caused as a chance at introspection, to consider how fragile our lives are and how they may be changed by the events around us over which we have no control.

Perhaps that is the lesson in a nutshell. As such, it is all the easier to believe that the Hand of God is behind it just the same.