All across campus there are 18-22 year old guys who own gaming systems. Most of them received their first system sometime between age 8-14. The problem is, many of them play perpetually, literally all the time, oblivious to a much larger world around them.
Many of these guys have never grown up into the gift they received. They play their gaming at age 20 in the same ways that they did at age 14.
All of us have things like this in our lives. All of us have talents, abilities, gifts that we operate in at some frequency (ranging from hourly to just annually) that we have never grown up into.
In some cases, this isn't that big a deal. I never had a gaming system, so I never developed the eye-hand coordination. The guys love it when I play Halo, I'm an easy target.
But when it comes to our primary areas of life--emotional intelligence, our spiritual gifts that are given to us to bless the body of Christ, our intellect, and particularly the strengths and abilities that we build our lives around--remaining stunted in our growth isn't just inconvenient. It's disastrous.
C.S. Lewis suggests that Jesus is the personalizing person. That is, as we look to Jesus, follow him and obey him, we become not freaks but who we were actually intended to be. We become more fully human, more alive.
But this doesn't happen accidentally. And so we must be deliberate about asking the Lord to help us to grow up into the gifts he's given us--the spiritual gifts, the natural talents and abilities...all of it.
If we don't do this, we remain stunted in our gifts. They become a curse to those around us rather than the blessing they were intended to be. But if we engage with the Lord to grow up into the gifts he's given to us, they become mighty and powerful agents of blessing and joy.
And if anyone can give me some pointers for how to improve my Halo, Guitar Hero, or Smash game, I'm all ears.
Showing posts with label C.S. Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C.S. Lewis. Show all posts
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Monday, December 08, 2008
Lewis: Screwtape on Time
Yesterday's post motivated me to dig up C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters to find the passage where he shreds the whole notion of "my" time.
A quick caveat for those who are unfamiliar with the book. It's written as a series of letters from an older uncle demon (Screwtape) to his nephew demon (Wormwood) who is assigned to a man who just became a Christian. Uncle Screwtape's job is to help Wormwood get his man away from God ("the Enemy" as Screwtape calls him).
Here's a chunk of the portion on time:
"Men are not angered by mere misfortune but my misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied...Now you will notice that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him...
They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it has been stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption "My time is my own."
Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possesor of twenty-four hours...what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."
A quick caveat for those who are unfamiliar with the book. It's written as a series of letters from an older uncle demon (Screwtape) to his nephew demon (Wormwood) who is assigned to a man who just became a Christian. Uncle Screwtape's job is to help Wormwood get his man away from God ("the Enemy" as Screwtape calls him).
Here's a chunk of the portion on time:
"Men are not angered by mere misfortune but my misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied...Now you will notice that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him...
They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it has been stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption "My time is my own."
Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possesor of twenty-four hours...what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Christianity and Reward
And so we come to the question of reward. Was Mother Teresa really just selfishly piling up (in Singer's mind) imaginary treasures in heaven by living in the slums of Calcutta with the poorest of the poor while billionaire atheists/agnostics Gates and Buffet give purely altruistically in between spa treatments at luxury resorts?
C.S. Lewis deals with this issue of "reward" exquisitely, so I'll let him speak with this (for me) life-changing excerpt from his work The Weight of Glory:
"The NewTestament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire
If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connexion with the things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it.
A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
There is also a third case, which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire.
His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just in so far as he approaches the reward that be becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward.
The Christian, in relation to heaven, is in much the same position as this schoolboy. Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward.
Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship."
C.S. Lewis deals with this issue of "reward" exquisitely, so I'll let him speak with this (for me) life-changing excerpt from his work The Weight of Glory:
"The NewTestament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire
If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connexion with the things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it.
A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
There is also a third case, which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire.
His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just in so far as he approaches the reward that be becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward.
The Christian, in relation to heaven, is in much the same position as this schoolboy. Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward.
Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship."
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