I finally got around to reading The Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. I read the first two books of the Space Trilogy years ago, but never read the final book. I'm about 3/4 of the way through it. For those who never read it, it's a story about that revolves around the lives of a married couple Mark and Jane Studdock and an ostensibly scientific institute, the N.I.C.E., which is a front for a sinister supernatural forces. Lewis weaves a tail of good versus evil as only he can.
Today, I was struck by a passage that reminded me of a struggle in my own life and I think one that many struggle with as well: the desire to belong. I remember as a kid and young adult wanting to fit in, to find a group that would accept me, to be part of the "in" crowd. I don't think this desire is inherently sinful. We are made to belong. In the end, Christians will be part of a single group, a single tribe, a single people who will spend eternity together sharing in the joy of the presence of God. As Christians, we are commanded to love one another and consider each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. Now, we should be striving to belong to one another under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And wanting to be part of a club - bowling league, baseball team, a geneology club, a Ford club - is a good thing, too. The joy of commaderie is a gift from God.
But like with everything in human life, we tend to distort what is good. We want to belong, to be part of a group - but we often want it too much; we seek entry into the group as a way to find an identity, to find life's purpose, to feed our pride, to feel superior to others...you name it and humans can distort even this good gift. Young people are particularly susceptible to this, but this temptation really knows no time limit. It haunts me even at my age.
The passage below comes from The Hideous Strength. Mark Studdock is in a prison cell and he's reflecting on how he wound up there. How did he get involved in such an organization as N.I.C.E. or the "Progressive Element"? What did he give up to get here? What did he give up throughout his life just to belong, just be part of the "in" crowd? I can't explain all of the characters or circumstance here, but I think you'll get it - you'll see the struggle. You'll understand the regret. Most of have been where Mark finds himself. May God help use to resist this temptation, to repent when we sin in order to belong, and find our ultimate solace, identity, purpose, and belonging in Him.
With extraordinary clarity, but with renewed astonishment, he remembered how he had felt about the Progressive Element at Bracton [College] when he was first admitted to its confidence: he remembered, even more incredulously, how he had felt as a very junior fellow while he was outside it—how he had looked almost with awe at the heads of Curry and Busby bent close together in Common Room, hearing occasional fragments of their whispered conversation, pretending himself the while to be absorbed in a periodical but longing—oh, so intensely longing —for one of them to cross the room and speak to him. And then, after months and months, it had happened. He had a picture of himself, the odious little outsider who wanted to be an insider, the infantile gull, drinking in the husky and unimportant confidences, as if he were being admitted to the government of the planet. Was there no beginning to his folly? Had he been an utter fool all through from the very day of his birth? Even as a schoolboy, when he had ruined his work and half broken his heart trying to get into the society called Grip, and lost his only real friend in doing so?
....He himself did not understand why all this, which was now so clear, had never previously crossed his mind. He was unaware that such thoughts had often knocked for entrance, but had always been excluded for the very good reason that if they were once entertained it involved ripping up the whole web of his life, cancelling almost every decision his will had ever made, and really beginning over again as though he were an infant. The indistinct mass of problems which would have to be faced if he admitted such thoughts, the innumerable “somethings” about which “something” would have to be done, had deterred him from ever raising these questions. What had now taken the blinkers off was the fact that nothing could be done.
There were no moral considerations at this moment in Mark’s mind. He looked back on his life, not with shame but with a kind of disgust at its dreariness....He saw himself making believe that he enjoyed those Sunday afternoons with the athletic heroes of Grip, while all the time (as he now saw) he was almost homesick for one of the old walks with Pearson—Pearson whom he had taken such pains to leave behind. He saw himself in his teens laboriously reading rubbishy grown-up novels and drinking beer when he really enjoyed John Buchan and stone ginger.
The hours that he had spent learning the very slang of each new circle that attracted him, the perpetual assumption of interest in things he found dull and of knowledge he did not possess, the almost heroic sacrifice of nearly every person and thing he actually enjoyed, the miserable attempt to pretend that one could enjoy Grip, or the Progressive Element, or the N.I.C.E.—all this came over him with a kind of heartbreak. When had he ever done what he wanted? Mixed with the people whom he liked? Or even eaten and drunk what took his fancy? The concentrated insipidity of it all filled him with self-pity.
In his normal condition, explanations that laid on impersonal forces outside himself the responsibility for all this life of dust and broken bottles would have occurred at once to his mind and been at once accepted. It would have been “the system” or “an inferiority complex” due to his parents, or things occurred to him now....He was aware, without even having to think of it, that it was he himself —nothing else in the whole universe—that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.
