C. S. Lewis’ essay “Learning in Wartime,” found in his book Weight of Glory, is an amazing essay in its own right. But it’s even more powerful right now, as we face a virus which is just as life-altering as World War II was back in the 1940s. Originally an address in Oxford in October 1939, a month after Britain had declared war on Germany, Lewis writes to students who may be wondering why they should worry about their studies in light of something so threatening and all-encompassing. Even if you are not a student, no matter what your calling might be, this essay is applicable to you on many levels. The last few pages are particularly rich. I quoted a part of these paragraphs in my sermon this past Sunday, but want to give you more of Lewis’ classic work. As in my sermon, I’m going to replace “war” with “coronavirus” so that we might be helped to apply these words more directly to our situation:
I would again repeat what I have been saying in one form or another every since I started - do not let your nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it really is. Perhaps it may be useful to mention the three mental exercises which may serve as defenses against the three enemies which coronavirus raises up against the scholar [enter your calling here].
The first enemy is excitement - the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work. The best defense is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, coronavirus has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. There are, of course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that only superhuman self-control could resist it. They come both in coronavirus and peace. We must do the best we can.
The second enemy is frustration - the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to fell the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say “No time for that,” “Too late now,” and “Not for me.” But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or coronavirus, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
The third enemy is fear. Coronavirus threatens us with death and pain. No man - and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane - need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the [hospitals of Wuhan, Italy, New York, etc.] and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or that – of a virus now or a cancer forty years later. What does coronavirus do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how may years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering…Yet coronavirus does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. Coronavirus makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.”