Don't be a Consumer in your Own Life
C.S. Lewis on how we can receive our time as a gift to be enjoyed & stewarded
Photo by Murray Campbell on Unsplash
Our consumerist culture has trained us to see everything in our lives as objects for us to crave, use, and discard. Much recent focus has been given to the damage done to the church and family by this consumerist appetite. Today I’m thinking about the problems that arise when we see our lives and times as consumers.
In Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis imagines a world that, though it experiences death and the passage of time, has not had been wholly muddied by the effects of sin.
At one point the protagonist, Ransom, has a conversation with a Hrossa, an inhabitant of Malacandra (Mars), on the difference between how Malacandrians experience the passage of time in contrast to humans’ experience. If you’re unfamiliar with the novel, Hman is their word for man, and the seroni are essentially the local alien intelligentsia. This is the Hrossa speaking:
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?
“Perhaps some of them do,” said Ransom, “But even in a poem does a hross never long to hear one splendid line over again?”
….[The hrossa] continued, “the poem is a good example. For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it.”
In a poem, every line has its place and purpose. The sequence of events matters, and each line builds on the last. In the same way, our present experiences echo past themes, and flow into the future. To wish for another time is to kill the poem.
Our instinct as fallen creatures living within time is to be constantly longing to go back to an earlier line of the poem, or to be wishing we could experience a future line.
Much is lost when you see your life primarily in terms of good things lost, or future goods withheld. You are unable to see your life in terms of good seasons, one unfolding into the next, each one holding the pleasures and pains of gifts, hardships, and obstacles to overcome. You lose the gift of memory, your ability to remember and savor earlier lines of the poem.
You lose your ability to grieve your mistakes in a healthy manner without falling into crippling regret. To convert your failures into wisdom that can guide your future actions and be shared with your community.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. –Ecclesiastes 3:11
Our lives are not given to us for our own consumption. Enjoyment, yes, but something much more. The time we’ve been given here is too short to allow any realistic sense of entitlement. Nothing is owed to us, everything given.
I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice, and to do good in their lives, and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor—it is the gift of God. –Ecclesiastes 3:12
God’s intention is that we will enjoy the fruit of our labor, and not spend our lives in futility, even though there is nothing in this life you can grasp or hold onto, least of all the big picture.
We long for past and future lines because we cannot see the goodness of the whole poem at once. We don’t see the good in the present moment because we have placed all our legitimacy on what we had in a different moment. We worshiped the God who gave us x. Now that x is gone, we don’t know how to locate ourselves in relation to God. Who is God to us now that he is no longer the giver of that particular good?
As creatures, we are unable to see the big picture; all we can see are bits and pieces. Some of those bits are are a glimpse of the tight, colorful pattern on the front of the tapestry. Some of the bits are the loose, tangled knots on the backside, where Jesus suffered with us in moments whose larger meaning we can’t comprehend. When viewed in the light of the resurrection, we will see how everything fits together: how all the sad and nonsensical pieces of our lives were held together with the beautiful pieces, and all subsumed into the larger whole.
We are not given the grand narrative of our lives, other than a few marching orders: do justice, walk humbly with our God, go and disciple all nations, love one another. We don’t know why this or that thing happened, or how it will all work together in the end. Our place is to enjoy the poem as we are able, refusing to fixate on past or future lines.
What allows us to fully embrace the present moment—the current line of our poem—even with all its anxieties and frustrations, is knowing that God has the big picture, and that he is pulling all the threads together into a beautiful masterpiece.