Last night I finished reading That Hideous Strength, the final part of C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Its an interesting set of books that seek to retell the story of God and His work from a more cosmic--and lively--perspective. In the final volume, the forces of science ally themselves with more sinister spiritual powers in an attempt to achieve their nefarious ends, while a stalwart band of humans find themselves guided by angelic beings to offer the necessary resistance.Its an engaging book, and one I understand much better now than when I initially read it in my high school days.
One of the characters that jumped out to me during this readthrough was Mark Studdock. Simply stated, he is a scholarly man torn between his desire to be identified with the "in crowd" (in this case those allied with the forces of darkness) and the more simple and authentic life he left behind long ago.
While in some sense his dilemma is nothing more than the old spectre of peer pressure writ large, I still can't help but identify with it. For though age has given me some distance from this stereotypically teenage plight, from time to time I can't help but get the twinges of desire for my own increased social mobility, standing, and respect. I get the feeling that I want to be something more in everyone else's eyes and that if I just try a little harder or politick a little more it can be so.
It's easy to fall into that trap...to want so badly the approval of our peers--or of a single person--that we'll bend and fold and shape ourselves into all sorts of contortions to arrive at that desired outcome.
Reaching beyond ourselves for something more is understandable. It's human. But denying who we are while doing that puts us in the gravest danger--the danger of losing ourselves and becoming a flat and lifeless parody of those around us.
And if we're really willing to do that? Then we're in quite a bit of trouble.
How much better the final fate of Lewis' Studdock, who in the end decided against the foolish path of comfortable accomodation and quickly felt "the relief of no longer trying to win these men's confidence, the shuffling off of miserable hopes...the straight fight, after the long series of diplomatic failures, was tonic."
Some days we all could use a bit more of that tonic as we begin to fight for who we're really supposed to be--regardless of the shifting sands of popular opinion or public approval.
Its true whether we're teenagers or not. And that's a fact.
2 comments:
You should get "moody" more often...
Good writing.
Blessings,
Donald Miller wrote a book, pretty much all about what you just said, called "Searching for God Knows What." He calls it "the lifeboat theory." We're all running around trying to get people to like us and think we're important, because it gives us a safer position in the lifeboat that we all seem to be stranded on in this world. He postulates that the cause of this lack of self-identity, this needing of other's approval and acceptance to feel comfortable with ourselves, is a direct result of separation from God. He says that we're hard - wired to get our identity from something outside oursleves, from God. And being separated from him causes us to try and seek out that identify from, well, something else outside of ourselves, people. It's interesting that you say "it's human" to seek approval of others. But, I wonder, is it? Or is it inhuman, is it a condition that we've developed through the ultimate loss of God's presence in our lives? And can we remedy it by a slow and steady process of building a relationship with him? Something I've often said Miller points out, God always describes himself in some kind of relationship to us. Father, brother, sister, mother, king, Lord....
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