The Gift of Suffering (C.S. Lewis)

PRIDE

C.S. Lewis on PRIDE (How would you know if you are proud or humble?):

• "As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."
• " . . . pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."
• To test how proud you are, "ask yourself, 'How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off.'"
• "If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."
• "Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble'... Probably all you will think about him is that he seems a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all."

The coronavirus makes death real and that is good, because death is real

Lewis preached in Oxford at the onset of World War II titled, "Learning in War-Time." Substitute "pandemic" or "coronavirus" in place of the word "war." Then the current Covid19 pandemic helps us re-focus, shatter hopes for finding ultimate fulfillment in this world, point us to the Divine reality, and lead us to peace in this life (Jn 14:27), knowing that our eternal Hope lies in the Lord.

Yet war [Covid19] does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at 60 or the paralysis at 75 do not bother us is that we forget them. War [Covid19] makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.

All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centred in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realise it. Now the stupidest of us know. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times [like Covid19], the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.¹

^{1 C.S. Lewis, "Learning in War-Time", The Weight of Glory and Other.}