On Finishing ‘Mere Christianity’

I have danced around finishing Mere Christianity, perhaps the most influential explication of my faith in the last hundred years, for quite some time. I’ve had it on my shelf for well over a decade, I’ve started it several times, and until this last year, never got very far into it. That’s no reflection on Lewis’ writing, which is impeccable, nor is the book a difficult or unengaging read – in fact, its brevity, clarity, and unpretentious style are a large part of why it has had such a reach. But I find almost any thorough discussion of theology which attempts to cover all the essential points almost inherently stressful to engage with. It’s work, for me, emotionally, because I read everything looking for implications that set off my anxiety about what I should be doing, but am not, or I encounter reminders of aspects of my faith which I am scared to look at. I don’t think this is an ideal or healthy way to engage with faith, but if anything it is in this context an endorsement of the book. Because Mere Christianity is, to my mind, probably the most emotionally and intellectually compelling framing of orthodox Christianity for modern western culture, it short-circuits my tendency to justify defensiveness at doctrines I struggle with by blaming them as harsh or unreasonable, and instead leaves me feeling exposed with my own anxieties and recalcitrances in front of concepts that make sense, but whose implications I fear.

I’ve lived for a long time with a kind of anxiety about the question of certainty around salvation that is bound up in my OCD, my tendency to require absolute certainty, and to frame things in extreme all-or-nothing terms. This intersects with my historically frequent willful rebellion, and my tendency to both feel highly scrupulous about what I should do, and to assume a total unwillingness to actually do it. How to parse attribution for any of my feelings between emotional and mental health symptoms, and actual conviction of sin, is exactly the question I can’t or won’t allow myself to finally answer, either because of OCD or because I’m holding out to get my own way – depending on the answer. And such ruminations are, I have been told, unproductive and unhealthy.

In this context, I have since childhood deployed my feeling of being made anxious, or taking umbrage at things in scripture, as a sort of unformed protest against understandings of doctrine that I assent to but dislike. In recent years I have come to feel more at peace with much of orthodoxy, both because I actually experience the wisdom of it in practice, or because I come to a different emotional understanding of what’s behind it, or because I accept more uncertainty as Mystery. But, at the same time, I have if anything become less tolerant of intellectual uncertainty about ultimate safety, and I have come to credibly hope that there might be some possibility of a universal redemption within orthodox Christianity – and as soon as that feels like a possibility, it becomes an emotional need to believe in. Charitably, this is because I have too much imaginative empathy to contemplate anyone perishing eternally as compatible with the kind of peace we are to have in Christ; cynically, it is because I do not want to have to be responsible to try to repent and bear fruit when I don’t feel like it, or else have any uncertainty about my own safety; and whichever of those might be true, it is certainly also because I find any possibility of being lost based on what does or not do, or what choice one makes, to be an unacceptable source of fear, even as a theoretical possibility.

To someone like myself, then, engaging with Mere Christianity is both absolutely essential for being open to the truth, and it is also fearful, because even though the book is in many ways reassuring and paints a picture of God and Christianity that more than sufficiently answers many of the most popular emotional objections people have to it, that very success of its apology leaves me frightened that my emotional desire to demand a kind of cruciform Christian universalism is actually unsympathetic, insincere, unjustifiable – that perhaps I am unwilling to accept things, and am also in the wrong on that, and because I do not want to have to change to be safe, or do not feel able to do so sincerely enough to feel secure, what I fear most is being left in a position where I know I am wrong and can choose not to be, but have not already done so and do not want to, with dire consequences.

The fear is that, if a doctrine I’ve refused to reconcile with peace and sanity, the idea that there is a risk people can be lost, can make sense and be true, and the way it does is by God simply allowing people to be unwilling, allowing them freedom – which of course, He does – that opens two troubling possibilities.

First, that the things I care about, which I don’t feel can be exchanged for better things without loss, because every thing is specific in its aesthetic quiddity – better is still different – that those things might be worthless or evil, and to live I might have to ultimately give them up and become a person whose feelings and tastes and values are alien to myself, or –

That if I am unwilling to be so transformed (and I don’t want to believe I am under pressure to have to be more willing than I’ve already decided to be), then I worry about my ability to have certainty of safety. Of course, this all-or-nothing position on anxiety is quite likely an excuse to get my own way.

Lewis writes “Handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus is you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”

To this, I always return with the same objection in practice – how can I try to obey in a less worried way, if not trying means that I should be worried (and again I start from the premise that I am not trying to do all that I should, partly to be safe, and partly because I do not want to have to do more than I have decided to accept now). So perhaps the objection is in bad faith, seeking to change the topic to my anxiety as a disorder, in order to not actually have to repent. This of course then turns the screw of anxiety tighter, as long as I won’t give up the position that I’m not willing to try. But if I were to try, as I have done many times, I would quickly fall into the same trap on some other rung of the ladder. I know I have a problem with scrupulosity, but I worry that behind my anxiety is not simply a sympathetic mental disorder I must disregard, but an occasion for pride – a refusal to say God is right and I am wrong about the Good, at least in some things. And I either seem unable to trust that God’s love will overcome my pride – unless it does for everyone, hence universalism – or that I simply do not want the responsibility of choosing. But perhaps it is wrong to frame it as a choice between two things. Life and death, after all, are not mirrored equivalent states: they are presence and absence. Only one of the two is real.

Perhaps I have been going about things backwards, having been warned in advance not to let my own feelings determine what I call good, and have instead been scrupulously careful to assent to the belief that the Good proceeds from God and has that objective form on its own, which might be disconnected from how I feel about it. This is not really wrong, but over the years I have come to err on the side of assuming that whatever I find good will be taken away or is a deception; and, in a desire to not have to permanently sacrifice anything I do find good, I have framed all my religious anxiety from the standpoint of taking for granted that I will not accept God’s definition of the Good. This is a defensive posture, an irrational rhetorical reflex to make something unacceptable and therefore untrue, if I am to be healthy and at peace, as I should be. And the corollary, reinforcing belief, is that if I am wrong, then to climb down from this precarious perch requires unburdening myself of everything I do not want to give up – a kind of total abnegation. But suffering for its own sake is not what we see in the Gospels or in the life Lewis led (and for all his self-admitted faults I do consider him a role model). In his book, Lewis suggests that we recognize the Good, because it is good – taste and see that the Lord is good, scripture says. What does that mean, if not to give hope that what we find good, our experience of good, if not dispositive remains imperfectly indicative of ultimate good, and the parts that seem to be missing now from that eschaton will in fact be painted in colors we cannot imagine?

While I worry that I am reading into all spiritual reassurance the easiest, most favorable interpretation for myself, and deceiving myself by taking umbrage at anything harder, and in so doing, doubt the hope that I try to grasp, nevertheless I am encouraged by Lewis’ words on hope:

“Most of us find it very difficult to want ‘Heaven’ at all – except in so far as ‘Heaven’ means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognise it. Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean… The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

This is the passage from Mere Christianity that I have carried about with me for many years as the argument that our desires will be deferred, and yet met – not denied. Of course I struggle greatly with the problem of some desires being or seeming intrinsically evil, and the idea that people’s desires must be transformed to enter this new country. And if it is possible someone could or would refuse God, that must be, it often seems to me, because there is some real difference between the desire they will not surrender and the Good, and if there is a real difference, it implies uniqueness, which implies inexchangeability, because aesthetics are not fungible: you cannot replace one rose with a better rose and say there is no loss, as long as they are different, because beauty is unique and if any is missing, that is a loss. So I try to read in Lewis an affirmation that somehow, in a way I cannot understand, nothing I desire will be missing, not simply through some kind of transformation of character, but through an abundance which puts to shame the apparent logical contradictions of this world. Still, I fear this is a dodge, a refusal to give up the longing for some part of evil. It would seem too good to be safe to believe. And yet, when Christ spoke of the Kingdom to come, he did so in terms his hearers would understand and relate to, in their needs and longings. He began by feeding and healing, rather than telling people that they wanted the wrong things. At the well in Sychar Christ taught that those who came to the well were not wrong in the wanting, but that they did not want enough.

Of course, this feels like it flirts with excusing or endorsing all desires, when we know perfectly well from experience that people desire to harm themselves or others. And it feels like an easy way out, an undemanding theology, a way to have and eat cake. But I am forgetting that the sacrifice, the trade-off, of Christianity is not the shedding of earthly desires in exchange for nirvana, it is the sacrifice of Christ, in whose death and resurrection perhaps we do have and eat cake. And in fact, in the doctrine of the Trinity, the Holy Paradox, there is a glimmer that contradictory truths can be reconciled. In discussing how God can be an individual and a community at the same time, Lewis turns to our real preoccupation: what is to become of us?

“Some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be ‘absorbed’ into God. But when they try to explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is a like a drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves – in fact, be very much more themselves than they were before.”

Again, I worry I am trying to stitch together a soteriology I can accept from a corpus of scripture that in many ways frightens or admonishes me, and I am exquisitely sensitive to the fear of the pleasant self-delusion. And yet, if the Gospel is truly Good News, then perhaps the truth, properly understood, will feel like something one would want to believe, a story one would tell oneself, if only one had the imagination. But then, why would anyone refuse it, properly understood, and be lost? Perhaps no one will.

When I finished the book, I wrote in my journal that I was left, as always, with the feeling that the invitation of the Gospel was a terrifying threat, and that hearing it again required me to do what I always do, and run to other Christians for reassurance of safety, which I always second-guess because I am attempting to see if I can feel safe while refusing to give myself up, and any way out of that rock-and-hard-place feels like a false hope. But there was no one around to talk to. I was in bed, in a cabin by the banks of Caswell Creek, in Alaska, in winter. So I went outside, into forty degrees of frost. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw above me more points of light in the firmament than I had seen since I was a child in the Australian bush. I knew I would always doubt any reassuring closure; and yet, at some point we have to move on. In that moment, between shivers, I thought that at the end of all thought, one must trust the Person who made the stars so beautiful for us to see.