Finding footnotes in this gray world of ours

I love reading the books in Dad's library. He highlights and leaves footnotes from his past readings, and sometimes I leave imprints of my own on its text. I opened up to The Great Divorce's preface, and it took only one page for things to be very, very relevant. It started with Philosophy Club and ended with an inked-in diagram.


For about five Fridays of this past semester, I attended what is called the Philosophy and Free Thought Club at my high school. It's a student-led group managed mainly by three senior guys and is mostly attended by the magnet students, which really can go without saying. I was interested for two main reasons used by my friends in convincing me to go:

1. It's a really cool club with good discussion and questions not a lot of people are willing to ask.
2. There's free tea and coffee.

They got me in with a debate on the afterlife and why humans believe in a life after death. I always drank both offered beverages, even when there was no sugar or milk.

It was a great club--I was able to get a word in every now and then and listen to a lot of intelligent people say their bits as well. The problem is that, whenever people would inevitably disagree with the discussion leader, he would argue the same point back to them as if opinion justified everything and made him right. One day he grilled me for my "black and white" way of thinking. I tried to explain my logic that if there was no absolute black or white, how could anything be definite? Without opposing ends of a spectrum there can be no gray in the first place.

This also came up in a personal conversation with a friend. She asked me suddenly, "What color is the world?"

I, being the literal thinker I am, replied, "Well, the world is blue and green and brown and white an--"

"Gray."

"Gray?"

"There is no good or evil, only gray."

This took me by surprise. She had her own faith. Different from mine, but still. Don't most religions abide to the idea that there is good and evil in the world? For if there wasn't, how could there be a right or wrong way to go? How could there be anything but the sameness of character and behavior? 

"Yes," I agreed, "the world is gray. It looks that way from a distance. But I think that it's like a printed magazine, where if you look close enough, you can see the individual spots of black and white that all come together to form this gray."

It may not have been said that calmly and eloquently, but let's pretend, shall we?

And tonight, after snatching another Lewis book from my father's massive library, I read into it and find this quote:

"[when speaking of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell] The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable 'either-or'; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and nearer and meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good." C. S. "Jack" Lewis, The Great Divorce.

Next to the road analogy Dad had drawn a set of lines all converging in the center. (Or is it centre?) Below it in quotes was a common phrase people who support all religions use, "all roads lead to God." What I never realized was that, to a certain extent, I may be making that assumption as well.

Christianity is the only religion I have ever known. I even go to the same sect. Church of Christ, whole life long, even in my dear mother's womb. I know what I believe and intend to grow within that belief in this time of waiting for the next chapter of my life. But I cannot assume that everyone else feels so deeply grounded when they go to their place of worship. All of my peers are different--I have one guy over here who will profess his non-belief in any god, but loves reading Lewis. I have another one who wants everything to be secular despite having a belief system, or at least a sense of one. I have the girl who will insist that nobody curse in her presence because of her faith--I admire her a lot. And then there is me. Nobody is surprised when they learn I'm Christian, at least. But the few times where I work up the ability to talk about my religion it's shot down rather quickly and openly criticized, and all I can do is say, "Well..." Maybe I lack courage, or maybe it's the situations I put myself into, but in comparison to many people I know, I think I feel fairly secure and sure of myself. And coming from me, a young teenage girl living in an era where the average psychiatric patient in the 1950's had less stress than I have now, that's saying something.

I cannot say for certain what will happen in the coming years. Not for my family, my friends, least of all me. But what I do know is that I have people I can count on in the crow's nest. I have the capability to be in the crow's nest for other people too, on certain things. And I know that I have deep passions about the world and the increasingly different branches of it, and that words are both my healer and my sword. I can turn to words I trust to heal and seek guidance, and use them to forge words of my own. A scythe to reap even more, a saber to cut through the dense undergrowth and reach sunlight, a rapier if necessary, or to heal the other lost ones.

On a different note, I also know that I really appreciate Jack's use of the semicolon.