"The Habit of Faith"
It's strange not to have a weekly platform as an outlet to speak about what I've studied and lived in regards to faith. So I've been doing all this reading and have no place to talk about it, except in this blog and to friends who likely wish I'd stop reading altogether. Since the Narnia film came out it's been a point of conversation to rediscover the mind of CS Lewis as it pertains to the topic of faith. One of my favorite excerpts from Mere Christianity speaks of that very thing and reads as follows:
"Now faith...is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith."
I find it interesting that Lewis uses the phrase "where to get off" for it seems to be contrary to the dignity of his role at Oxford. Yet it demonstrates the level of frustration that anyone can reach when we realize that we are people seemingly at the mercy of moods. Ours as well as others. We would surely do ourselves and the world a lot of good if we would train the habit of faith in such a way that a thing as flippant as a mood would not be able to sway it.