Reading C. S. Lewis

. . . And so I began reading The Screwtape Letters. This story was an excellent treatise on understanding the human condition and the psychology of temptation from the perspective of hell. It takes the viewpoint that devils are not engaged in the pursuit of something actually called “evil,” but are more motivated by either a  fear of punishment, or else by a kind of hunger, something  rather like a corrupted ravenous passion to dominate, or make some one’s intellectual and/or emotional  life an extension of their own. It’s kind of like the very unhealthy flipside of “Love” that we are all too familiar with on the human plane.   The devil, Wormwood, would basically “feed” on his victim, destroying him from the inside out, by zeroing in on character flaws that he could use to tempt his victim into further developing those same flaws, thus moving him further away from the experience of a truer, healthier love (which is God).  The Great Divorce continued with the theme of hell, examining the nature of good and evil, saying that the two could never exist together, that it must be “either-or.”   The real sins that would more likely keep a person from Heaven, or Love, would be character flaws like false pride, possessive love, lustfulness, cynicism and doubt, self-pity, grumbling, materialism, and the like. Not the big things like, say, murder, which an individual would be far more likely to see as wrong and thus ask forgiveness for.  It would be one’s free-will, combined with one’s corrupted passions, which would keep an individual basically living in his own “hell,” until he becomes so utterly unwilling to let go of that passion that it literally “eats him up” and keeps him always separated from anyone he could not affect by his own corrupt will. We might also say that he has become so “consumed”  that he is burning up alive, or rather more realistically, living in his own hell. Pure evil is a purely corrupted passion let loose in its extreme form!  Living in eternity consumed by the flames of hell can now be seen as both symbolic and literal.. Wow! Lewis was stretching my imagination while at the same time giving me something that made sense. I had surely seen this kind of corruption of human nature in action, and I had read about it in literature from the beginning of time!  I wanted to know more about this C.  S. Lewis guy, and what else he may have written that would give me more food for thought.

Ultimately, to make a long story short, reading more Lewis (his autobiography Surprised by Joy, as well as his apologetics works) brought me eventually to the place where I could accept Jesus as God who came to earth in the body to make the ultimate sacrifice of dying in order to save me from having to keep trying to do it for myself!  I knew I needed saving from Karma, at least; I knew that I didn’t want good and evil to exist together into eternity, and that something ultimately had to work to keep them separated so that Heaven, or Paradise, could actually be experienced;  I knew that  every human being had the potential to be or do “evil,” and that coming back to earth over and over might increase the odds of that happening, not decrease them. And so in one moment I acknowledged my need and Christ’s gift, feeling in that moment of accepting this “grace” a huge relief and thankfulness! No other religious system described a god who so loved what he had created that he died for them so that in accepting him they were free; Instead, they had more or less offered up a formula for how you might do it yourself.  And good luck! (But you can have all the time in the world that you need.) On the human plane, laying down your life for someone had always been perceived as being the ultimate act of love, so why wouldn’t it be true on the Divine level? Well, I held that Grace in my heart for all about 5 seconds before my true nature took back hold of me and I thought, Oh shit! You’ve got to be kidding! 

Dating Off and On for Four Years

     J and I dated for four years off and on, though there were, it seemed, more long stretches of off than on. He was a serious flirt, and had other young women chasing after him besides me, plus he had his own classes and teaching assistantships to be concerned with. I had my coursework and teaching assistantships too, which kept me plenty busy as well; and for relief from all the stress I'd often make weekend visits back to WVa in order to keep up some semblance of a social life. When we were on he'd come over to see me and I'd make sure that my daughter would be away for the night at her best friend's house. Every now and then when we were just sitting around talking I'd ask him some question about his theological views on something or other, and he'd answer me honestly and intelligently, offering thorough explanations that wouldn't make me feel that I was being judged. However (and unfortunately), all along he was judging himself more harshly than I could ever know at the time. He not only had earned two MA degrees at a Christian seminary (one in Christian Apologetics and one in Near Eastern Antiquities), he was serving as a campus minister while he worked on another MA and PhD in ancient history at Miami University. His Christian views on dating and relationships were in direct opposition to what he was doing, and the guilt was eating him up! But God always has a plan, and the truth of the matter is that any real goodie-two-shoes Christian wouldn't have given me the time of day, nor would I have him! Anyway, during one of our conversations J suggested that I might like to read C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters and/or The Great Divorce, also by Lewis, as he knew that I was a huge Tolkien Lord of the Rings fan, and the two authors had been colleagues and friends. My daughter's 2nd grade teacher had read The Chronicles of Narnia (also by Lewis) to her class, but I had not heard of him otherwise. As J's suggested readings were both works of fiction, I thought that no harm could come from reading more mythopoetic works, as I already loved that genre. It would be nothing too overtly Christian, and nothing "preachy." Okay, no problem; I looked forward to it. How could I have known how much it would eventually shake up my whole way of thinking!