“Not that way either,” said Ransom, hesitating like a man who is reluctant to come to the point.“No power that is merely earthly,” he continued at last, “will serve against the Hideous Strength.”
Recently I finally finished reading another great work by C.S. Lewis: The Space Trilogy. More specifically, I finished That Hideous Strength having finished the other two in September of 2018 (yes, to my shame, it took me that long to get around to finishing the Trilogy). The reality is, I wasn’t very motivated to finish because I wasn’t enjoying the beginning of the third book. After the spiritual high that ensues from reading Perelandra, the beginning of That Hideous Strength (from here, THS) is, well, just not that interesting. It’s also kind of weird. Just putting that out there.
It wasn’t until forcing myself to finish that I realized the immense beauty of the series as a whole. One thing has been stuck in my mind since and that is a reflection on a motif that I think dominates both the series and the Christian life: Freedom.
Warning: What follows is a multi-part reflection that requires some plot points to be discussed. If you haven’t read the book and are planning on it in the near future, read them and then come back to this. You’ve been warned. Also, I do not claim to have a perfect understanding of the book, I simply present some simple thoughts about one way to view it.
There is one thing God wants, and surprisingly, it is the one thing He cannot take. What’s God after? What has He been waiting for, working for, for all eternity? Your heart.
God is omnipotent, but it would be an absurdity to think that God can contradict Himself due to His all-powerful nature (the question of whether God can make a stone too large for Him to lift falls into this kind of category, but I digress). Therefore, if God creates each one of us in His image and likeness, He creates us with a free will that He cannot manipulate, because that would mean its, eh, well, not actually free.
John tells us in his first letter that, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Without going into the distinctions of love and its complex nature, it suffices here to simply say that without freedom there can be no love. That is why God must give us free will if we are made in His image and likeness.
That we might not is precisely what makes that we do meaningful (that is why the phrase, “you didn’t have to”, or “you shouldn’t have” sneaks into our vocabulary as a way of expressing gratitude for a surprise act of love). Therefore if we are made to love, our freedom can never be interrupted or manipulated in any way in authentic love. One way we experience this is in every Sacrament there is some aspect of the expression of consent.
When you present yourself for Confession or Anointing you come by your own free will. When you come to the Church to be married, you are asked before all if you come “without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly (Rite of Matrimony).” When a man petitions his bishop for Holy Orders, at the end of the letter he must assert that he will “receive the sacred order of his own accord and freely (Can. 1036).” In Baptism you are asked what you desire from the Church (or your parents are asked for you). In Confirmation, you ask your sponsor to present you to the Bishop.
Lastly, at the Eucharist, you freely come forward to receive communion. However, I would contend that your assent to receive actually is made during the preface. In the dialogue with the priest before the Eucharistic Prayer begins, he says to the people: “Lift up your hearts” to which the people respond, “we lift them up to the Lord.” One can only imagine how long God has waited to hear you say those words freely and without reservation.
It is the freedom of all of these encounters that makes love possible. If we are in any way coerced into a relationship, it loses its meaning because part of us is missing, namely, our free will which is essential to who we are as humans.
In the next part, we will go into the ways in which THS shows how God invites us into His love and how Satan creates roadblocks of all kinds to do his best to prevent our freedom from being exercised.
A Voice in the Wilderness 