A Summation of This Lent

At the beginning of this Great Lent, I felt myself to be smack dab in the middle of a crucible. I wanted to be obedient to a pull I truly believe the Lord was placing on me but at the same time I could not begin to understand how to do it. I had to let it go but I felt like doing so was just asking for more punishment, betrayal and downright evil in my life.

Well, Lent is almost over and I'm coming to understand that I was wrong. Not about being obedient, but that being obedient would open me up for more cruelty. I don't know why I thought God would want that for me (He never has before) but apparently that was the crux of the matter. I thought He wanted me to open myself up again to a relationship with a toxic human being; that by forgiving I was going to have to say that everything that had been done was okay and peachy keen.

Untrue. And I learned that today.

"And secondly, we might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbour as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently 'Love your neighbour' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my, enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either.

That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again."

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Chapter 17

I'm not saying I have reached the mountaintop. I am so far from it. But...I think I rounded a corner and caught a glimpse. Sometimes that is all you need to keep going.

Lord have mercy on me a sinner.