Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: Sinners, Sons of God

C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Book IV, Beyond Personality, "Let's Pretend":

          May I once again start by putting two pictures, or two stories rather, into your minds? One 

     is the story you have all read called Beauty and the Beast. The girl, you remember, had to 

     marry a monster for some reason. And she did. She kissed it as if it were a man. And then, 

     much to her relief, it really turned into a man and all went well. The other story is about 

     someone who had to wear a mask; a mask which made him look much nicer than he really 

     was. He had to wear it for year. And when he took it off he found his own face had grown to 

     fit it. He was now really beautiful. What had begun as disguise had become a reality. I think 

     both these stories may (in a fanciful way, of course) help to illustrate what I have to say in this 

     chapter. Up till now, I have been trying to describe facts--what God is and what He has done. 

     Now I want to talk about practice--what do we do next? What difference does all this 

     theology make? It can start making a difference tonight. If you are interested enough to have 

     read thus far you are probably interested enough to make a shot at saying your prayers: 

     and, whatever else you say, you will probably say the Lord's Prayer.

          Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean 

     quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you 

     are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment 

     you realise what the words mean, you realise that you are not a son of God. You are not 

     being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you 

     are a bundle of self-centred fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed 

     to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But 

     the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it.

          Why? What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human 

     level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretence 

     is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of 

     really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real 

     thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing 

     you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer 

     person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really 

     feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start 

     behaving as if you had it already. That is why children's games are so important. They are 

     always pretending to be grown-ups--playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are 

     hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence of being grown-up 

     helps them to grow up in earnest.  

          Now, the moment you realise "Here I am, dressing up as Christ," it is extremely likely that 

      you will see at once some way in which at that very moment the pretence could be made 

     less of a pretence and more of a reality. You will find several things going on in your mind 

     which would not be going on there if you were really a son of God. Well, stop them. Or you 

     may realise that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be downstairs writing a letter, 

     or helping your wife to wash-up. Well, go and do it.

          You see what is happening. The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) 

     and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side and is already at that moment 

     beginning to turn your pretence into a reality. This is not merely a fancy way of saying that 

     your conscience is telling you what to do. If you simply ask your conscience, you get one 

     result: if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a different one. There are 

     lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong (specially things in your 

     mind) but which you will see at once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be 

     like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to 

     catch the good infection from a Person. It is more like painting a portrait than like obeying a 

     set of rules. And the odd thing is that while in one way it is much harder than keeping rules, 

     in another way it is far easier.

          The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of 

     thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to "inject" His kind of life and thought, His 

     Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not 

     like it is the part that is still tin. Some of you may feel that this is very unlike your own 

     experience. You may say "I've never had the sense of being helped by an invisible Christ, 

     but I often have been helped by other human beings." That is rather like the woman in the 

     first war who said that if there were a bread shortage it would not bother her house because 

     they always ate toast. If there is no bread there will be no toast. If there were no help from 

     Christ, there would be no help from other human beings. He works on us in all sorts of ways: 

     not only through what we think our "religious life." He works through Nature, through our own 

     bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti-

     Christian. When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly 

     realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going-provided he does it for 

     honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents--the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to 

     him then than it ever was before. But above all, He works on us through each other.

          Men are mirrors, or "carriers" of Christ to other men. Sometimes unconscious carriers. 

     This "good infection" can be carried by those who have not got it themselves. People who 

     were not Christians themselves helped me to Christianity. But usually it is those who know 

     Him that bring Him to others. That is why the Church, the whole body of Christians showing 

     Him to one another, is so important. You might say that when two Christians are following 

     Christ together there is not twice as much Christianity as when they are apart, but sixteen 

     times as much.

          But do not forget this. At first it is natural for a baby to take its mother's milk without 

     knowing its mother. It is equally natural for us to see the man who helps us without seeing 

     Christ behind him. But we must not remain babies. We must go on to recognise the real 

     Giver. It is madness not to. Because, if we do not, we shall be relying on human beings. And 

     that is going to let us down. The best of them will make mistakes; all of them will die. We 

     must be thankful to all the people who have helped us, we must honour them and love them. 

     But never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in 

     the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a 

     house on it.

          And now we begin to see what it is that the New Testament is always talking about. It 

     talks about Christians "being born again"; it talks about them "putting on Christ"; about 

     Christ "being formed in us"; about our coming to "have the mind of Christ."

          Put right out of your head the idea that these are only fancy ways of saying that Christians 

     are to read what Christ said and try to carry it out--as a man may read what Plato or Marx 

     said and try to carry it out. They mean something much more than that. They mean that a real 

     Person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing 

     things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a 

     living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created 

     the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you 

     and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer 

     periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a 

     new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which 

     shares in His power, joy, knowledge and eternity. And soon we make two other discoveries.

          (1) We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be 

     alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are. This may sound rather difficult, 

     so I will try to make it clear from my own case. When I come to my evening prayers and try to 

     reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against 

     charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that 

     immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected: I 

     was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating 

     circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had 

     been deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is 

     taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out 

     before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are 

     most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the 

     rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation 

     does not make me an ill-tempered man: it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. 

     The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have 

     taken cover before you switch on the light. Apparently the rats of resentment and

     vindictiveness are always there in the cellar of my soul. Now that cellar is out of reach of my 

     conscious will. I can to some extent control my acts: I have no direct control over my 

     temperament. And if (as I said before) what we are matters even more than what we do--if, 

     indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are--then it follows that the 

     change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts 

     cannot bring about And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them were done 

     for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a desire to show off? How many 

     from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority which, in different circumstances, might 

     equally had led to some very bad act? But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new 

     motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really 

     needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God. And that brings us to something 

     which has been very misleading in my language up to now.

          (2) I have been talking as if it were we who did everything. In reality, of course, it is God 

     who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us. In a sense you might even say it 

     is God who does the pretending. The Three-Personal God, so to speak, sees before Him in 

     fact a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says "Let us pretend 

     that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He 

     became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what 

     in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." God looks at you 

     as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea 

     of a divine make-believe sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that 

     how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to 

     it as if it understood long before it really does. We treat our dogs as if they were "almost 

     human": that is why they really become "almost human" in the end.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter