When the world is reeling, why read?
C.S. Lewis reminds us we will die and reading for beauty
When I was an exchange student at Oxford, the Twin Towers were hit. Phone lines were down. We couldn’t get a hold of loved ones back at home. As 21-year-olds we huddled together, unsure of next steps, and as Americans abroad we felt our out-of-placeness keenly.
One of the deans of our program then spoke to us of C.S. Lewis’ sermon, “Learning in Wartime.” Lewis’s famous remarks asks us to consider not just learning in wartime, but really what is at stake in emphasizing learning at all? Aren’t we always inundated with hunger and famine, homelessness, evil, and violence? Doesn’t it always seem that much must always be done to combat the evils of the human heart and embedded into systems?
We are perhaps in such a time, now. Daily, our news feeds are flooded, much of it keen to help us understand the barrage of information coming from Trump’s executive orders. USAID is frozen. ICE is raiding. Tariffs are increasing. Elon Musk has access to our financial and personal data. The speed is dizzying. (I don’t pretend to have my mind wrapped around these things but I commend this article on ICE raids in church and this one on asylum by
What good is something like reading for reading’s sake? What good is poetry? What good is slowing down, taking a walk, or talking about something other than the insanity du jour?
Lewis reminds us “Life has never been normal.” We imagine, perhaps, that some transcendent experience (perhaps like a religious conversion) or some great cause (such as fighting in a war) will deeply focus our attention, give our lives purpose, and as Lewis says, be something like “war all the time.” But it is not so.
He writes: “Neither conversion nor enlistment in the army is really going to obliterate our human life.” That is, getting dressed, sleeping, and eating are still happening in wartime. Thinking, recreating, being bored, wondering what one is going to eat for lunch, and choosing what to digest in our news feeds all happens in the midst of catastrophe (and in the midst of spiritual awakenings).
I wonder if we use the premise of war (and our use of war metaphors more generally) to try to wake us up (or distract us from) the pain of ordinary life.
When we believe that all of life is war, we’ve short-circuited meaning and purpose. We’ve given ourselves a dopamine hit that replaces transcendence, and aligned ourselves with the “right” side (depending on your algorithm).
Lewis is helpful here — bringing us right back to the everyday that exists in times of relative peace and in times of turmoil: ”do not let your nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it really is.” This isn’t to say we become lazy and uncritical of evil, injustice, or abuse. But it is to say that we — and the times in which we live— are not so unique as perhaps we like to think.
Wartime — real war, not the manufactured kind to hype us up — just brings us face-to-face with death and now in such a time, “the stupidest of us knows.”
Lewis concludes:
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.
So what is one to do, now in this moment of human history?
According to Lewis, we remember our death. This shattering of hopes or of a so-called peace reminds us that trying to build a heaven-on-earth is always doomed to frustration and decay.
I will leave the news cycle to the journalists (they are doing important, vital work). And here, at Beauty Leads the Way, I will do what I can with the learning and care God has granted me to help us remember the frailty and beauty of our humanity — war or no war.
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To that end….
May I commend to you an evergreen piece I wrote at Christianity Today (in print as: “Overplaying Blue Like Jazz: Donald Miller’s Bestseller Helped us Improvise our way right out of church.”)? I hope you’ll read and share.
For more of my work, check out The Willowbrae Institute, my books (Finding Holy in the Suburbs and A Spacious Life) and The Cartographers Podcast (where we’re talking about formation, technology, suffering and hope).