Today I open C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity once again, because I need it. I first read Mere Christianity about a decade ago during a crisis in faith. It was and has been one of the most consoling books I have ever read. And I don’t think books are worth much if they do not console. Not even the phone book. Why reach for a book except for knowledge? And why seek knowledge if it is not for consolation?

Modernists sometimes imply that we should seek knowledge because we should know truth, no matter if truth is consoling or an agonizing horror. That is something of a paradox, since it is saying that truth needn’t be good for us. If truth is not good for us, then it is certainly not worth seeking, any more than it makes sense for us to keep eating the mushroom that always makes us sick. There ought to be a better way to look at the truth than that.

Truth is good. Even disturbing truths are good, since they liberate us from falsehood. But in the end, liberation has to free us to move towards something. To be free, in its most concrete sense, is a useless thing. Free to do what? One cannot simply be free. One must be free to do something, like love, write, live, or worship. All of those things involve some kind of commitment. They involve a movement towards goodness. The goodness that makes itself apparent when falsehood is stripped away.

So truth, in being good, is really only a service to good. Truth by itself is not an end. It is the liberation that allows us to migrate to the good. I believe God to be the source of all goodness. As Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, if a person does not believe God exists, it is brutally hard to come up with an alternative goodness that makes any sense. I don’t think any of the evolutionary explanations of goodness — that belief in good is a biological adaptation to create a coherent society that can survive evolutionary pressure — makes any sense. When I see a woman in a short skirt walking down the street, I know my reaction to her is biological. When I think that goodness is essential to my understanding of the world, I know that concept is not. I may not be an epi-geneticist, but I am not such a fool that I do not know the difference between a biological urge and a logical thought.

Somehow in the process of secularizing our world a profound thought is being liquified. To adhere to a faith is not simply a delusion for comfort, or an irrational attempt to create a moral system to dominate others. In case Christianity’s critics have been nodding off, I point out that life is devilishly hard, and religion is a way to cope. We can all agree that the difficulty of life is a fact. So if a belief system is founded on that fact, it deserves at least some respect.

To ridicule someone for religious belief is like making fun of a person being swept away in a swollen river for the type of log he is clinging to. We are all clinging to something, be it an oak or a pine log, an old tire or even a refrigerator. Once we have secured ourselves to what floats, then we can be concerned about who has the boat.

Happy Easter.