Lenten Weekday

YOUR INNUMERABLE CHOICES
From an excerpt from “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis 4
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Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges
them by their moral choices… When a man who has been perverted from his
youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness,
or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps,
risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more
than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend…

Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little
use of a good heredity and a 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 then 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 the 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 the worst out of
this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice 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…

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God
says, “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other
thing.”… I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are
turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a
little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all
your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central
thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a
creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself,
or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellowcreatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that it is joy
and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror,
idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness…

One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands,
and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at.
But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done
something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to
keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when
he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that
twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed
if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is
not what really matters…

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… Good people know about both good
and evil: bad people do not know about either.

4 Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966. 85-87.