The Weekly Perspective
by Burke Shade, Associate Pastor
We often don’t take family and children advice from bachelors, but C.S. Lewis is an approved exception! In his article “The Sermon and the Lunch,” he gives several points of advice for familial living that still ring true today and will help us with our own families to honor Christ and his kingdom.
First, he reminds us that since the Fall, no organization or way of life whatever has a natural tendency to go right. The family can be offered to God, converted, redeemed, and offer a channel of blessings and graces. But like everything else that is human, the family needs redemption. Meaning, that the members must fight to put off temptations, corruptions, and miseries. He notes wisely, “Charity begins at home: so does uncharity.”
Second, while not against natural “affection,” it is not a cause of lasting happiness. “Love” in that sense can become greedy, solicitous, jealous, and exacting. There must be a deeper “love” to hold the family together, a “my life for yours” love, love based on the way of Christ: “we love, because he first loved us.”
Third, Lewis is very much against the supposed pro-family slogan “at home we can be our natural selves.” The lunch at the Vicar’s house destroyed that idea, for everyone in the Vicar’s family was rude to each other, and if those actions were practiced outside the family, they would simply be knocked down! Nowhere on this side of heaven can we simply “be ourselves.”
Finally, he asks, “must we not teach that if the home is to be a means of grace it must be a place of rules? There cannot be a common life without a regula.” The alternative to rule is not freedom but the unconstitutional (and often unconscious) tyranny of the most selfish member.