Thursday, January 6, 2011

My Meditation on Meditation in a Toolshed

In "Meditation in a Toolshed," C.S. Lewis claims that there are two ways of looking at life life: both by looking at and along it. He used several different examples of comparing ways of living at and along life, and the one that I thought was most interesting was about the little girl crying over her broken doll while the psychologist knows that it is just her maternal instinct that is "temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax."

C.S. Lewis provides an interesting viewpoint here. This article made me question myself how I tend to live my own life, and also which way of living was right or wrong. One part of this article that I really appreciated was that Lewis didn't absolutely say that one way was right and one was wrong. He came up with arguments and critiques for both styles, which is often quite rare for an author. He believes that there needs to be a balance between the two styles of living in order to create a good life. If we spend too much time living at life instead of along it, we can't identify the experiences that we have had. We can know happiness as being some neurons switching around in the brain, but we won't truly know happiness unless we've looked alongside it, not simply at it. On the other hand, if we only look alongside life, that could also be a problem because we are often deceived by things that we base simply off of experience. In conclusion, he believes that we need to look both at and along everything in order to have a balanced life.

I think as Christians, we need to be careful about looking at both sides of everything. I believe that we tend to just look at other religions and see how corrupt and misleading they are. We tend to be quick to judge the people who have those religions and wonder why on earth they would believe what they do. However, I think that we need to also look along these people's lives, and try to understand their religion before being so quick to judge them. On the other hand, I think that often as Christians, we tend to only look along our own religion. We base our faith on simply emotion and feeling, rather than going to God's Word to back up our faith. I think Lewis had an excellent point in his meditation, and really helped his readers to take a step back and think about their own lives.

2 comments:

  1. I think you made some really good points about other religions. I think we ought to strive to understand why other people believe what they do, especially if we hope to be a good witness of our own religion. But (and I'm not saying that this is what you mean), I think we ought not look along other religions in the sense of participation. God is jealous of our worship. Instead we ought to point those others to God, in hope of their salvation.

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  2. I never considered how much we truly do judge other people so quickly without walking along side and seeing things from their point of view. I also liked your point about how we never tend to look more than along our own religion.

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