Learning in War-Time

After reading many works by C.S. Lewis I have gotten used to being blown away by how subtle some of his ideas and perspectives are on certain issues, and this essay was no exception. The background for this essay is World War II, so, not surprisingly, Lewis talks about war and what the citizens of a country not involved in the war should be doing back home. He says that war doesn't create a new situation for us, "it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it... Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself." He then goes on to say something that is very simple, but it is also very profound, he says that "Life has never been normal." All of what he says can easily apply to the situation of the war at that time, but it's true for our lives now as well. Lewis says that even though the war is a distraction, we can't make it, or any other distraction, an excuse for not learning. Lewis stronly believes that even though a war was going on, the people back home should be educating themselves and learning, not just paying attention to the war and not thinking about how they can learn while it is going on.

I also really liked the analogy that Lewis used when he compared a person that had a duty to save a drowning man to a man that has made it his whole life to save people. He says that it's a good idea to learn life-saving techniques to save a potential drowning person, especially if you live on the coast or close to somewhere where the risk is even greater. He then says, "But if anyone devoted himself to life-saving in the sence of giving it his total attention -- so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim --he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for... A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country." I found these quotes to be really interesting here because this relates to what God wants us to do with worship very nicely. Here Lewis is telling us that God calls us worship Him and to put everything we have into it, but that doesn't mean that we can't do anything else. God still wants us to enjoy our lives here and have relationships with people and have fun, He doesn't want us to just be "monmaniacs." Lewis then goes on to say that even though there are non-Christian writers out there, we should still read there material and we should not just ignore someone's work because they are not a believer as well. He says that it is important to have and learn from different perspectives, whether that be fellow believers or non-believers.