January 25, 2017 at 7:48 am, by Carl

“Christians increasingly live on a spiritual island; new and rival ways of life surround it in all directions and their tides come further up the beach every time.  None of these new ways is yet so filthy or cruel as some Semitic Paganism. But many of them ignore all individual rights and are already cruel enough.  Some give morality a wholly new meaning which we cannot accept, some deny its possibility.  Perhaps we shall all learn, sharply enough, to value the clean air and “sweet reasonableness” of the Christian ethics which in a more Christian age we might have taken for granted.  But, of course, if we do, we shall then be exposed to the danger priggery.  We might come to “thank God that we are not as other men”.

 

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

 

Writing this in the early years of the Cold War (around the mid-1950s), Lewis was already seeing the world deeply changed.  He was by this time an older man who had lived through the two world wars while also noting the change of his students at the University.    Here, in this point in his reflections, he is dealing with the challenge that the Psalmists called for the reader to love the laws of God deeply.  For Lewis, this demand for such a feeling “utterly bewildering.”  But, it is not impossible for in God’s directions for living lies truth and life.  Knowing life is there, to then desire them is obvious.  And we need to recover them in our days.  I don’t mean the “non-Christians” around us who live like they wish (typically in ways,with values, the Christians disagrees with).

 

No, I mean the person who calls oneself by the title.  It is that person that must recover and relearn this passion for God’s ways in our OWN lives.