First Steps – December 2, 2019

Lately I’ve been asked a few questions about morality, personal and societal. Those questions made me think of a segment from Mere Christianity, by C S Lewis. He wrote this and it is worth reflection:

“A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.

There are…occasions on which a mother’s love for her own children or [one’s] love for own country have to be suppressed or they’ll lead to unfairness toward other people’s children or countries. Strictly speaking, there aren’t such things as good and bad impulses. Think of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the right notes and the wrong notes. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The moral law isn’t any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts…

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There’s not one of them that won’t make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn’t. If you leave out justice, you’ll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials ‘for the sake of humanity,’ and becoming in the end a treacherous [person].”

Morality, for the follower of Christ, is not a solo project. It is a duo between Christ’s will and our will. Together, we walk the path of life following His lead, not the other way around. We follow His impulse, not our own.