C.S. Lewis on how to act in love

The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his ‘gratitude’, you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

Uncommon Courage

I picked up a Readers Digest Books published in 1941 that for some reason was in a stack near my couch.  As I paged through it I came across a title of a condensation "Reaching for the Stars" by Nora Waln (p.157) written in 1939 about her travels through Germany.  The following passage kind of blew me away and made me wonder what ever happened to this kind of character.  Sadly, it seems in very short supply today.

We drove to Kessel, where we went to find a stranger, of whom we had been asked to bring news to England. She was at her home, with her five children. Her husband, a pastor, was in a concentration camp. She was grateful for the invitation for some of her children to come to England, but thought Germans ought to stay in the Fatherland. The "cause" would be lost in Germany if those with eyes that saw the decline of morals, hearts that felt it, and tongues that dared rebuke it, went into exile.

"Father could come out at any time," a six year old told me. "God gives him courage to stay in."

"To come out," explained the daughter of eleven, "he has to sign a promise to support everything the Nazis do. He has to take the oath of blind obedience to Adolf Hitler. Our father is a Christian. A Christian cannot approve or be quiet in the face of the things the Nazis do."

"Christianity is a religion of love," offered the tiniest solemnly. "Love and sorrow for all whom the Nazis hurt; and love and sorrow for the Nazis, too."