Worries

I woke up this morning unable to decide what to worry about...or, as it were, if it were even worth worrying about anything at all? I had to ground myself with some Matthew 6 (that worry section is darn useful) but I then had to ask myself “Ok then, what else should I do?”

Earlier this year, I came upon a C.S. Lewis essay from 1948 entitled “ Living in an Atomic Age”...written as mankind began to grapple with the reality that we now possessed the means to exterminate our entire species.

When I first read it, I focused on the beginning of the essay which first reminds us that the so-called “novelty: of our situation is not novel at all--humans have always lived alongside the knowledge that horror can visit at any moment. He says:

“It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.”

I took comfort in one of the lines he writes thereafter:

“If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

But the essay goes on to talk about part of what people had newly begun to fear was the idea that all of human civilization might be wiped out--that we, as a species, would simply cease. And that IS a new fear we likely did not have before...except that he reminds us:

“This brings us much nearer to the real point; but let me try to make clear exactly what I think that point is. What were your views about the ultimate future of civilization before the atomic bomb appeared on the scene? What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end?

The real answer is known to almost everyone who has even a smattering of science; yet, oddly enough, it is hardly ever mentioned. And the real answer (almost beyond doubt) is that, with or without atomic bombs, the whole story is going to end in NOTHING. The astronomers hold out no hope that this planet is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship.”

And from there the essay invites you to question what you believe about the nature of “Nature” itself.

Today, I properly read through that part (which I had only skimmed before TBH) and rather than find comfort from my worries in simply trying to not worry, I found the final two paragraphs that CS Lewis writes to us. A reminder that there is more to this life and we are called to be a part of it:

“But what, then, is Nature, and how do we come to be imprisoned in a system so alien to us? Oddly enough, the question becomes much less sinister the moment one realizes that Nature is not all.

Mistaken for our mother, she is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister — if she and we have a common Creator — if she is our sparring partner — then the situation is quite tolerable.

Perhaps we are not here as prisoners but as colonists: only consider what we have done already to the dog, the horse, or the daffodil. She is indeed a rough playfellow. There are elements of evil in her. To explain that would carry us far back: I should have to speak of Power and Principalities and all that would seem to be a modern reader most mythological. This is not the place, nor do these questions come first.

It is enough to say here that Nature, like us but in her different way, is much alienated from her Creator, though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain. But they are there not to be worshipped but to be enjoyed. She has nothing to teach us. It is our business to live by our own law not by hers: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our survival.

For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture of class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honourable and merciful means.

The sacrifice is not so great as it seems. Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved.

Those who want Heaven must have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.”

Link to CS Lewis’s essay “Living in an Atomic Age”

Link to Kate Bowler’s Living with the Ache essay in which I originally found it.