Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

This title has intrigued me for a long time, so I was motivated to finally read it when it was on our Relief Society book club agenda. I'm so glad I finally read it, and when I was done, it was great to be able to discuss it. This book club night was postponed to a Friday (snow, again) and men were invited to join us. We had a lively discussion in Heather's Black Hawk living room, and it was enlightening to hear others' favorite parts. Heather shared some of the quotes from this book that have been quoted in General Conference of the church, so that was an interesting addition to the discussion, too.

This book was not what I expected...but  it delightful when I got in a little beyond the beginning essays. While Lewis's charm comes through, sometimes he's a little over my head. Some of his metaphors are brilliant; some of his reasoning I couldn't grasp. But there is so much good thinking here, I believe I need to read it again in a few years and see if more of it resonates with me. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite quotes:

From the chapter called "Sexual Morality" -
Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

(That final sentence made me laugh out loud!)

From the chapter called "The New Men"
To become new men means losing what we now call 'ourselves.' Out of our selves, into Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His thoughts, to 'have the mind of Chirst' as the Bible says. And if Christ is one, and if He is thus to be 'in' us all, whall we not be exactly the same? It certainly sounds like it; but in fact it is not so...(he gives a light and a salt illustration)...
The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of 'little Christs,' all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented--as an author invents characters in a novel--all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to 'be myself' without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop.What I call "My wishes' become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night's sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe; most of what I call 'me' can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
At the beginning I said there were no Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike are all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self  (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

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Those thoughts are so beautifully put! They remind me of much of Elder Neal Maxwell's writing and talks. And I love how paradoxical they are...the beauty of something that my soul loves but my brain finds hard to comprehend! Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia puts this philosophy so seamlessly throughout the series...it's a different perspective of a similar point.