SATISFIED WITH OUR EXCUSES

"I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.” If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites. Of course, in dozens of cases, either between God and man, or between one man and another, there may be a mixture of the two. Part of what seemed at first to be the sins turns out to be really nobody’s fault and is excused; the bit that is left over is forgiven. . . . . But the trouble is that what we call “asking God’s forgiveness” very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses. What leads us into this mistake is the fact that there usually is some amount of excuse, some “extenuating circumstances.” We are so very anxious to point these out to God (and to ourselves) that we are apt to forget the really important thing; that is, the bit left over, the bit which the excuses don’t cover, the bit which is inexcusable but not, thank God, unforgivable. And if we forget this, we shall go away imagining that we have repented and been forgiven when all that has really happened is that we have satisfied ourselves with our own excuses. They may be very bad excuses; we are all too easily satisfied about ourselves."

C.S. LEWIS, THE WEIGHT OF GLORY

THE HALLWAY OF SKEPTICISM

Honest skepticism (and I really do mean the honest kind) asks us to leave the room of our faith commitments and stand in the hallway of non-commitment to question the validity of certain truth-claims. It asks us to view all rooms with equal objectivity and from a single vantage point. Such skepticism is to be encouraged and welcomed. However the fact of the matter is that we often find it near impossible to play in the hallways of non-commitment. As such, if we were to examine our doubt honestly enough, we would soon discover that our ability to doubt with such conviction comes from the fact that we have imperceptibly crept backwards out of the hallway and into a room. It is, in fact, very difficult to critique the confidence of one faith committment without making the mistake of standing just as confidently on another.

OUR PERPETUAL HOMELESSNESS

"When any organism is at home, there is an ecological fit with its environment, a harmony, a rightness. If the environment does not supply this, that environment is not its home. A fish has no quarrel with the sea. Yet we have a lover’s quarrel with the world. 'If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!’) In heaven’s name, why? Unless indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.'"

PETER KREEFT, HEAVEN: THE HEART'S DEEPEST LONGING quoting C.S. Lewis.