The Weight of Glory - Selection 3 (Our Efforts Are Medicine, Not Food)
Jan 18, 2007 / By: Michael Spielman
Category: Christian Living
Here is my 3rd selection from C.S. Lewis', The Weight of Glory. Pray that my life never becomes so "obsessed" with opposing the injustice of abortion, that I stop dreaming of the day when I will never have to give abortion another thought. I firmly agree with Lewis. I believe my activities with Abort73 are a necessary response to massive societal sickness, but there is a danger in becoming so enamored with my "successes", that I lose sight of the fact that everything I'm doing aims at making everything I'm doing... absolutely unnecessary.
As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit. Collective activities are, of course, necessary, but this is the end to which they are necessary. Great sacrifices of this private happiness by those who have it may be necessary in order that it may be more widely distributed. All may have have to be a little hungry in order that none may starve. But do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. The mistake is easily made. Fruit has to be tinned if it is to be transported and has to lose thereby some of its good qualities. But one meets people who have learned actually to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh. A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind – if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else – then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease. There is, in fact, a fatal tendency in all human activities for the means to encroach upon the very ends which they were intended to serve (161).
Michael Spielman is the founder and director of Abort73.com. Subscribe to Michael's Substack for his latest articles and recordings. His book, Love the Least (A Lot), is available as a free download. Abort73 is part of Loxafamosity Ministries, a 501c3, Christian education corporation. If you have been helped by the information available at Abort73.com, please consider making a donation.