Mere Christianity

I have had this book on my shelf for many years now and always intended to read it, but am embarrassed to say that I didn't even crack it open. This semester I am required to read it for a class, and I have to tell you, I love it. It's as if all my floundering and questioning and learning things that hard way have convened into reading this book. Like if I would have only opened this 5 years ago, I could have grown more than and not have had to wait to come up with what Lewis does in 227 pages.

Mere Christianity was actually written to England as a radio broadcast that was read by Lewis during WWII after he himself had served in the trenches of WWI. This book is the broadcast in text form. When you think of what England was going through at the time, these words must have seemed like a breath of fresh air, like they seem to be in my life today. My favorite passage (out of many so far but I am not done reading it yet) is on page 91:

"It is well to put thus the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of man's psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises."

And my next favorite part is on page 93:

"One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know abut either."

It's been a long time since something regarding faith has given a fresh perspective and a glimpse of a virtue that I did not even know I was missing-- hope.