Today's Quote

From Mere Christianity (1952), Chapter 9, by C. S. Lewis, emphasis mine:

Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

I pointed out in the chapter on Forgiveness that our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good. In the same way, Christian Love (or Charity) for our neighbors is quite a different thing from liking or affection. We 'like' or are 'fond of' some people, and not of others. It is important to understand that this natural 'liking' is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes and dislikes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact. But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous. . . .

The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.

 There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his 'gratitude', you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) 

But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

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Note:  C. S. Lewis was, in a way, my spiritual mentor.  I came to the Episcopal Church as an adult, and was confirmed after a short, perfunctory course in the fundamentals; but I wanted more guidance.  I had already come across some of Lewis’s writings, so I bought up most of his non-fiction books, perhaps a dozen, and read and re-read them for years.  His keen insight and intellectual perspective, along with good humor and humility, gave me the spiritual roots I needed in that seedling period.

Sadly, I have not been to church for the better part of two decades now, for very good reasons.  But my faith goes on.

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Love Your Enemies

Nikiforos Lytras, Antigone in front of the dead Polynices (1865)

From the Sermon on the Mount:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Your Head Trucker feels old and weary, and not up to writing a lengthy, well-polished post today, so I will just throw out some thoughts and leave it up to you fellas to connect the dots, if they mean anything to you.

It's a gray, drizzly day here in Texas, where last night, several counties away from me, tornadoes destroyed a subdivision, killing or injuring scores of people. Which seems only to be expected somehow, in a week when the news has been brimful of scandal, crime, murder, outrage, and every kind of horrible mayhem. Too much to take in, and far too much to dwell on: it seems the veneer of civilization is worn through in many places, and the ugly, bloody, barbaric core is bleeding out. I suppose awful things have always been happening somewhere, to someone, every day of mankind's existence on this planet; but whereas news used to travel slowly and partially, now it comes roaring at you in living color at all hours of the night and day. Too much to bear. All one can do is look away, and occupy the mind with puttering around the house, and tending one's own narrow garden.

As much as I applaud the recent advances for gay rights and marriage equality that I often feature here in the Blue Truck, I also have to say that I can hardly help despairing for the future of the world, and to be honest, I am glad that whenever it is my time to depart from it, I will leave behind no posterity to worry about. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," Yeats wrote a hundred years ago, and it is even truer now than it was then.

At nearly 60 years of age, few illusions about human nature are left to me; with time and experience, one comes to see people for who and what they really are, not what they pretend to be. It is particularly discouraging to see that the great mass of supposedly civilized Western people - the great majority of them at least nominally Christian - are all in a headlong rush to the worst excesses of barbarism. It feels that way, anyhow.  My second-grade teacher got it exactly right one day, fifty years ago, when she asked why a bunch of us little boys were all stepping on one another's shoes in the cafeteria line. "Well, he did it to me, so I did it to the other boy," was the repeated answer to her question. Summing up her inquest with a wry face and a disapproving shake of the head, she exclaimed, "Monkey see, monkey do."

Man is an imitative creature. You become what you think about, what you idolize, what you adore - which may be something quite different from what you say you do. And it seems to me that nearly everyone is doing their damnedest to behave just like characters in a low-class, scrum-bum reality show nowadays. Hence the decline of manners, of civility, of literacy and of reason. Of course, I have to remind myself that the worst examples are not necessarily representative of the whole in any group, but - "Monkey see, monkey do."

Continued after the jump

Today's Quote: C. S. Lewis

From Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 4:

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.

The Love Drug

Sullivan posts a link to the Worst Love Letter Ever - and I have to agree.

Whoever the kid that wrote it is, I feel so sorry for him.  Because he is stuck in that ridiculous stage of childhood fantasy, even though his body has grown up.  And because he reminds me - and how I blush to recall - of the fact that I have also been just this fucking stupid and totally deluded about my own motives.

The ancient Greeks had two sayings carved on the temple of Apollo, the god of wisdom; one of them was "Know thyself."  How much suffering the human race would be spared if we all took that to heart.

I went steady with two girls in junior high school - yeah, girls:  that was the only game in town forty years ago.  And it was a great boost to my awkward, self-conscious, fumbling adolescent ego.  But even though I was the one to break it off with both of them, I carried a torch for the second one till after I'd graduated from high school.  And pestered her to come back to me; how embarrassing to remember.  Having once felt that ego boost and inner security, I just couldn't let go of it somehow, kept imagining the two of us with a rose-covered cottage, the picket fence, the kids and dogs, etc.  (And of course imagining that the gay thing would somehow just evaporate away if I got married, like a good boy.)

But then by the time I was out of school, I'd developed a crush on a guy friend.  And that went on for several years: we even roomed together for a time, although - stupid me! - we never did anything.  Not really.  Long story there; another time I'll blog about it, perhaps.

And then there have been a couple of others along the road that I held on to in my heart for way, way too long, even after all hope was gone, even after the relationship had torn me all up inside.   It took me many years to learn that wisdom, and in a sense, manliness, is knowing when to let go - and then to let go with grace.

But until you truly grow up on the inside - respect yourself, and learn to stand on your own two feet, come what may, and not to fear being alone - it's hard to let go of the love drug:  just as powerful an addiction as booze or drugs.  I believe it was C. S. Lewis who once wrote that when we say, "I love you," most of the time what we really mean is, "Please love me."

Looking back over my life, I can see the truth of that.  I would have been a much better man if I'd known it sooner.