The three ‘S’s are nearly extinct

I was listening to another lecture on C. S. Lewis yesterday, given by Knox Chamblin from the Reformed Theological Seminary, and he was speaking about Lewis’ grief over our modern view of reality.  Lewis urges us back to a Middle Ages view of reality, one where man is not at the top of dark chaos, but at the bottom with a sovereign light above.  He reasons that our problem is that we consider reality only as what can be seen, taped and measured.  And sadly, this understanding of reality is due to our increasing snobbery.  There is nothing, according to C. S. Lewis, that has contributed to our chronological snobbery as much as the advances of technology.  In other words, the birth of machines pulls our further away from God.  Where we once lived, NOT in ignorance, but in the knowledge that there is a greater source of knowledge, we now live in a time where we deny that there is such a source that knows more than us, and try to explain what we don’t know as just chaotic coincidences and accidents.  And we turn and call those in the Middle Ages ignorant, naive, simple and backward.

Chamblin argues that there is a great paradox underlying all this, which the devil delights in.  He quotes a book (I can’t remember the name of the actual book, but it’s a new take on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters): ‘they [humans] need leisure as much as they need work so we’ve [the devil and his followers] been at work abolishing leisure from their land through all the time-saving devices of modern technology.’.  What a sad, sad truth.  We pride ourselves in the invention and use of email, the internet, email for the mobile phone, etc. etc. so that we might save time and thus use it for leisure, but we become enslaved to the very thing that we sought to free ourselves from: work.  As a result, we neglect and thus consider as unworthy of our time three important things: silence, solitude and simplicity.  No longer do we put time out to sit at the park and admire a bird perched on the tree before us, or just waste time talking to God.  Or we feel that each day of our lives must be filled with activity, or else it would be unproductive.  I felt really rebuked by that; one thing that I’ve realised about myself these uni holidays is how much I dislike having no schedule.  And more than that, how little I treasure those three ‘S’s.  I’m always thinking about how long I’m spending at doing something, even when I don’t have anything planned.  It definitely brings a lot of shame thinking about how I pray as well.  I don’t think I’ve ever just sat there and talked to God without a care for what I might do next.  I’m praying that God would help me to treasure silence, solitude and simplicity in my life, and I pray that He might move you to do the same.