Now I want to talk about practice – what do we do next? What difference does all this theology make?
Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis
The very first words of the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father. Right off the bat, we are putting ourselves in the place of a son of God. But, knowing what the words mean, we also know that we are not this – certainly not in our natural state. Yet, this is how Christ taught His disciples to pray. We are “ordered” to do the same.
Lewis sees this, in a fashion, as pretending to be something we are not. He says there is a bad form of this, where there is pretense instead of the real thing – like “call me if you need any help,” while somehow never being available.
But there is the good kind of pretending, where the pretense leads to the real thing. For example, you don’t feel like being particularly friendly, but you force yourself, and eventually being friendly just becomes habit. So, the moment you “dress up as Christ,” you might actually start seeing some ways in which the pretense can be made less of a pretense and more of a reality.....
I daresay this idea of a divine make-believe sounds rather strange at first. But is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower?
A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does.
