On Moral Choices

C.S. Lewis

My regular readers know I am a huge C.S. Lewis fan. I found an old book by Lewis in the seminary library on Tuesday. It’s fascinating. The book is titled “Christian Behaviour” and was printed in London in December, 1943. There is an inscription in the front of the book obviously written with a fountain pen, where someone wrote their name, C.P. Bonner, and then it says, Delhi, 1 April 45.

As I looked at that my mind wandered; who was this man, most likely a British man and what was he doing in Delhi in 1945? Did he take a steamer to India after picking up a copy of the book at a bookstore in London? I love a good mystery.

But that’s not the topic I want to address in this post. Instead I want to simply quote Lewis from the mysterious man’s book, where Lewis writes, as only he can, about moral choices:

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I don’t think that is the best way of looking at it. I’d much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other (pg. 24-25).

Lewis reminds us here that for most of us it’s not the monumental choices that lead us down one path or the other, but the countless little decisions we make each day. His words form a good corrective to the kind of “all or nothing” thinking I know I’m guilty of. Tomorrow let's all remember the cumulative nature of our choices and press on towards becoming “heavenly” creatures instead of “the other.”