HONOR THE LOST OR FOUND SOUL'S HIDDEN MAJESTY

The most hardened criminal as well as the most devout of human beings have had a spiritual formation. They have become a certain kind of person.

In one of C. S. Lewis’s more striking passages, he challenges us to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Strangely, it is precisely the intrinsic greatness of the person that makes it in its ruined condition “a horror and a corruption such as you now meet . . . only in a nightmare.”

God has hidden the majesty of the human soul from us to prevent our being ruined by vanity.

This explains why even in its ruined condition a human being is regarded by God as something immensely worth saving. Sin does not make it worthless, but only lost.

And in its lostness it is still capable of great strength, dignity, and heartbreaking beauty and goodness—enough so to hide from the unenlightened, or those who do not wish to understand, the horror it has become and is becoming.

Those who are supposed to know are lost in speculations about “causes,” while the real sources of our failures lie in choice and the factors at work in it. Choice is where sin dwells.

Our social and psychological sciences stand helpless before the terrible things done by human beings, but the warpedness and wrungness of the human will is something we cannot admit into “serious” conversation. We are like farmers who diligently plant crops but cannot admit the existence of weeds and insects and can only think to pour on more fertilizer. Similarly, the only solution we know to human problems today is “education.” pp. 45-46 MIND-BLOWING SOURCE

 

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