“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably, all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed. […]
Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says, ‘Well done,’ are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, ‘I have pleased him; all is well,’ to thinking, ‘What a fine person I must be to have done it.’ The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom.”
“When remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man’s age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.”
“I’m a Jesus-loving blues man in the life of the mind.
I’m a Christ-centered Jazz man, which means that I do try to take, quite seriously, the endless quest for unarmed truth, understanding that a condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. So I don’t even think about trying to be true unless I’ve tried to enact and embody a sensitivity, even a hyper-sensitivity to the pain, the suffering, the hurts, the wounds, the scars, the bruises of people.
That deep compassion that you not only talk about, but that you embody…
Just. Bear. Witness. Be a sermon rather than give one. You don’t even need to talk about humility; just be humble. You know, a couple of months ago in the States, we had a sustained discourse on civility; and you know, I thought – why don’t you just be civil? Why do you have to have this sustained discourse? Just be respectful, that’s all.
It’s like the conclusion of a practical Aristotelian syllogism.
It’s action.
It’s not just a proposition. It’s not a sentence. It’s not a theory. It’s a mode of being in the world; it’s a way of life to be embodied, enacted.
But since I was young, I have been shaped by the legacy of Athens, by Socrates’s preoccupation with questioning: the unexamined life is not worth living.
That meant much to me as I was growing up on the chocolate side of Sacramento, going to the book mobile, and reading Plato and Kierkegaard for the first time.
I’d read Kierkegaard, put on some more Curtis Mayfield. I’d read Plato, and listen to Sly Stone — who actually did play organ in my church, Shiloh Baptist Church, every first Sunday. Northern California Mass choir. He grew up in Vallejo. Slyvester. Stewart. Genius that he was, and he could play that organ before he became Sly Stone.
But also the legacy of Jerusalem. And of course we want to acknowledge our precious Jewish brothers and sisters – it’s Passover tonight, the first night.
And there is for me no Christian faith, there’s no Jesus, without that prophetic Judaic tradition that deeply shaped me in a fundamental way.
The idea that each and every person has a sanctity. Not just a dignity the way the Stoics talked about, but a sanctity, a value that’s priceless. There’s actually a value that has no price — no market price…
There must be some standard that gets beyond the everyday culture, the everyday life, civilization, fleeting empires, changing regimes, to keep track of that sanctity, which is the ground of our equality… Our notions of equality somehow have to be anchored in that which cuts across the grain deeper than fleeting cultures and changing nation states and contingent civilizations and empires.
And these legacies of Athens and Jerusalem, for me have been brought together best in the black cultural expressions – the best of the black cultural expressions – that said, in the face of 244 years of white supremacist slavery, that somehow, we were going to love our way through that darkness, and not succumb to a hatred of the slave master even as we loathe the barbarity and the bestiality of slavery itself.
And that’s what those negro spirituals are about; I come from persecuted Christians in the land of religious liberty…
How do you look terror in the face, and still muster the courage to love?
Refuse to succumb to revenge, and drink from the cup of bitterness, and say, somehow, we’re going to hold on to love and justice, and not revenge and hatred. We’ve always known that hatred is the coward’s revenge against those who intimidate you. Always cowardly.
How do you learn to be courageous – and love wisdom, love justice, love neighbor, and love enemy?
And I am that kind of Christian.
I really do try to love my enemy. Not of course try to do it on my own, at home. A little too difficult, I need grace for that. It doesn’t make any sense – whatsoever – of talking about loving your enemy if you don’t have some connection to a power greater than you.
It’s the most absurd thing in the world, given the fact that our world is shot through with hatred, envy, player hating, backstabbing, domination, subjugation. These are the cycles of history –
And how, somehow do you break it? Even if you only break it in one life, in one community!
It’s got to be through love…
I was at the prison this morning, at Wagner. A brother asked me a question, it moved me so deeply. He said, “Brother West, I’m locked into bad habits, and I can’t break loose.”
And I said, “Brother, you’re not the only one. All of us are wrestling with that in some way.”
He said, “Oh not you… I saw you on television, looks like you got it together–”
I said, “No, no.”
I told you I’m a Christian. That means I’m a sinner, I’m just a redeemed sinner. I’m just trying to love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. That’s the best I’mma to do.
It’s true that I’ve been transformed. I was a gangster.
And after my transformation, I still have gangster proclivities, to this day. Wrestling with it all the time…
And I live in despair. Not every day, but I wrestle with it.
It’s like the 32nd chapter of Genesis. Jacob wrestling at night with the angel of death. He emerges with a new name, wounded though. God wrestler.
And a blues man and a jazz man is always a god wrestler. And I’ve got some questions that I don’t fully… grasp.
In terms of the depth of the suffering in this world.
But the fundamental ground of my life is to be faithful unto death, and to attempt to live a life of love and compassion to the best of my ability.
__________
Dr. Cornel West’s impromptu testimony, given at Princeton University, where he is a professor of philosophy and African American studies.
To really get the full force of West’s testimony, you really have to watch him speak —
— it’s one of the most captivating monlogues of this sort that I’ve ever seen.
The entire exchange between Dr. West and Radhanath Swami is fascinating. This is part two — West’s testimony and a Q&A — but Radhanath’s part (linked here) is worth watching as well.
This exchange was titled “East Meets West: A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Radhanath Swami,” and though I have never, ever seen an inter-faith exchange that was ever worth anything, this is an exception — and better than that: it’s brimming with mutual respect, intellect, engagement with the world, and humor.
“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.’
There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps.’ The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”
The photograph was taken for Life Magazine in 1946, as Lewis wandered the countryside outside of his town, one of my favorite places in the world, Oxford, UK.
God says to Adam and Eve, “This time nothing’s forbidden.
You may have the garden and the fruit of every tree.
That tree’s fruit will give you knowledge of good and evil.
The fruit of this tree, even better, will make you forget.
Eat all you want. Let bygones be bygones.”
And so at once they go to find the wall
And the way out, eating as they go,
Burning as they go, going because just thinking
There is a wall makes them feel cramped. They cross
Rivers and mountains, seas, they find no wall.
They eat the fruit of knowledge and see the problem:
Without a wall, the world is all they have,
Crisscrossed by their progress, a vacant lot.
God reminds them, “Nothing is forbidden.”
They eat the fruit of forgetfulness, and forget.
in C.S. Lewis’s 
