A Lesson Learned

Reading: Learning in War-Time, C. S. Lewis

"If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun." Lewis has a point, of course. His essay, addressed to the students who were not involved in the war, targeted the continuation of learning, of work, of living life through the small things, no matter what the circumstances. "The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come," writes Lewis. His words, as with most of his writing, are deeply applicable to even a college student here at Calvin, sixty, seventy, eighty years later. It's powerful advice he gives. As a student in college, I am bound to find myself distracted by big events, in classes in which I dislike a professor, or my classmates. But Lewis advises, or rather, hints very strongly that a student truly yearning to learn will seek knowledge no matter what the conditions. After all, he says, "favourable conditions never come."

It is difficult, though. We have a tendency to make plans, to get distracted, to get caught up in big events, to want to do what we can for a cause. When we cannot do anything, however; when the excitement dies away, it melts into fear and frustration. In each state of passion, Lewis gives a few words of advice.

In excitement, he writes, do not neglect your work. The conditions, of course, are not in your favour; but, the question is, will they ever be?

We tend to make plans, and when those plans are not realized, frustration becomes a difficult emotion to control. Now, if anyone else has experienced life, they have noticed life's tendency to ruin plans. From a Christian perspective, Lewis points out that we ought to put our future in God's hands. "We may as well," Lewis writes sensibly, "for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not." His warning is clear enough: do not commit your happiness to the future, but rather, keep in mind that, "happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment 'as to the Lord'."

In his final paragraph, Lewis brings forth a very interesting thought: "All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration." When times are what we like to call "normal," that is, when we aren't in the middle of world wars and the like, a particularly wise person might be able to realize that happiness and the world do not coincide. "Foolish un-Christian hopes," Lewis calls them, these ideas that a sort of heaven might be built on earth. And yet, it seems that Lewis has a bit of a contradiction, a set of circumstances in which the Kingdom of God can be glimpsed on earth: "But," he writes, that funny little word that seems to negate whatever has been written before it. "If we thought that for some souls, and at some times, 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."