Sitting on the Corner

Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed. It is a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters – when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. “Look out!” we cry, “It’s alive.” And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back – I would have done so myself if I could – and proceed no further with Christianity. An “impersonal God” – well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads – better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap – best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching us at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband – that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“Man’s search for God”!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, suppose He had found us?

So it is a sort of Rubicon. One goes across; or not. But if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles. One may be in for anything.

– C.S. Lewis, from Miracles, “Christianity and ‘Religion’”

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If I had to pick one paragraph out of all that I’ve read over the years which had the most profound impact on my life, this would be a likely candidate. I know exactly where I was when I read it the first time. I remember the chair, the kitchen table, the time of day. The very book that I had in my hand that day is the one I typed from this morning. I see where I’ve added some glue to hold a yellowed page in here and there.

It struck me, perhaps, because I was exactly that kind of an intellectual dabbler, searching for a god I could accept. At the moment I read this I got the sense that I had gotten myself into something I had not expected. It was only afterward that I could say with Paul that I sought to get hold of Christ because Christ had already gotten hold of me.

All I really wanted, I thought, was strength and control. I wanted to be able to make myself over in my own ideal image. I was not satisfied with what I was, and I thought that religious wisdom and understanding might enable me to become like the perfected and enlightened being I held as a picture in my head. Neither education nor sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll had done it. I thought perhaps money or prestige might, but those weren’t even on the horizon. In the meantime, religion was practically free and readily accessible.

I won’t say that I became a Christian the moment I read this, but it tripped me up and turned my perspective upside down -- a revelation I could not question. A month or two later, I sat on my deck one Sunday morning and prayed a prayer of surrender – probably the first genuine prayer I’d uttered in more than a dozen years. I did all right for a while. I have no one to blame except myself for the entanglements – religious entanglements I got caught up in along the way. I was often alone among the more conventionally religious, trying to go along with them, often listening to and taking the advice of “teachers” and “prophets” who knew less about God than I did the moment I finished Lewis’ paragraph. Nevertheless, I managed to hang on, I think in part because I took this as a sort of personal covenant. It was the one point I knew for certain and that I knew was right. It is like Polaris, or an old stone landmark precisely on the corner. When I get confused or frustrated, I come back here and sit a spell, until I can see again where the lines have fallen to me.