In C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy we get to see what life would be like in a sinless world.

What is the point of such imaginations? Comparing our life, which in almost every aspect in tainted with unnatural desires, to lives that don't even comprehend what it would be to grasp any good thing solely for the pleasure that it brings...the only conclusion we can come to is that we are indeed "bent." Out of alignment, we feel want where we should feel content. We consider always what we have left behind, missed, or has taken from us...instead of seeing the actual joy that is in the present moment. For creatures in time...we cannot abide the "now" and are ever looking only to before or after.

There are many proposed formulas today on how to attain the satisfied life. Deny yourself in order to save so that you will never want...work enough so you can finally stop working--these are some of the most common anecdotes for attaining happiness. Lewis proposes something else entirely I think. Stop wanting that which you feel you deserve or need, and instead find contentment in the thought that all goods flow from the same source. The spring which brings one also brings the other. Wherever the currents of life direct you, all the ocean rests in His hands. If you receive gladly what the Giver gives, how can life ever hold disappointment?

I know this sounds simplistic--and today things seem much more complicated. Even if I tried very hard there is no escaping the fact that I live in a sinful world and thus all my positive thinking comes to naught in the end because people are just bad and all this will end. Ransom, the hero of Lewis' story, is himself confronted with hopelessness. Even he, who had seen things that I only imagine, found that the cynical truth was that there was in the end nothing worth hoping for...or so it seemed. Yet he fought and walked on as he was led, and when he had failed himself, he found that God had not failed him. I think that was the real truth that Lewis was getting at. Ransom's road was difficult and more then he was able to handle. He was only a man...and fighting the battle of good versus evil was too much for him. What hope can there be for a man against the "unman." We are temporary...our lives go like leaves in the wind. Yet perhaps it is because all this is temporary that I must cling to the hope and trust in His hands all the more. To resist and cling to my life will not lengthen my days a single hour...but if I choose to move my will with His, I can for the first time know what true freedom is like and have the contentment of actual hope.

Seeing the end of my personal ambitions and hopes is not a bad thing then...to come to peace and hope that cannot truly die, I must have all traces of my own false hopes washed away entirely. If I am to ever look out on the shapeless horizon with joy, believing that the unknown holds only more goodness from the hands that I rest upon...I must give up ever attempting to determine with my own desires the way that I will go to meet that horizon.

Ah-HA! Having successfully found my blog once again...I begin to write.

The Space Trilogy at first glance...

Having gotten through the first two of the brilliant Proffessor Lewis' Space Trilogy for the first time in my life, I am first shocked that I never read it before. It awakens in me the desire to look at the beginnings of worlds more then perhaps I have ever felt it. I have always been interested in what the first ones must have been like...Adam and Eve are, of course, something that sparks curiosity, because if I am ever to know what should be examining the originals seems like a good place to start. But we have very little actual knowledge of them before the fall, so the fictional birth of a world, complete with a new Adam and Eve on Perelandra, is a delight in and of itself, even if it is simply speculation.

But perhaps the greatest lesson that stands out from this story is the idea of contentment...of will and of body...in what we have, and in the goods that are given to us. From the very first fruit that Ransom eats, to the terrible battles with the Unman, and then in the resolution...Lewis hammers on the idea that in this new world, untainted by sin, it is possible to want only that which is actually the good that has been put before you. Maybe that's not it...let me try again...while it is possible that the will could want its own desired good (or the good that it has chosen above all others) the idea of that sort of choosing seems perverse. To take more when you are satisfied...to intend one thing, and then to do it even when a new good (and therefore, perhaps, a better good) has replaced the option of doing what you originally intended...this sort of foolishness is inconceivable to the Green Lady of Venus. Ransom has to be quite honest about those desires that he experiences in himself when trying to explain it, and that is of course part of the genius of Lewis, because while his hero learns the truth...I am feeling my own lies fall apart and have to deal with the truth--that I would prefer my choice even when I DO know it is no longer good.