CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Is ‘growing up’ turning to or away from God?
Sigmund Freud says to C.S. Lewis: “Grow up!”
I recently saw the new movie Freud’s Last Session which imagines an encounter between the two men on the day World War II broke out. (In fact they almost certainly never met.)
To Freud, all religion was illusion, a projection of our unconscious longing for a protective parent. In contrast, writer and academic C. S. Lewis had journeyed from atheism, to belief in God, to the acknowledgement of Jesus as the Son of God.
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By autumn 1939, Freud was in constant pain from mouth cancer. The film implies his motive in inviting Lewis’s visit in the closing weeks of his life was to seek reassurance through trouncing Lewis’s reasoning that his own atheist convictions were accurate, and that death thus held no fears.
This rather clunky film (with a sub-plot about Freud’s daughter Anna) is based on a stage play, and it shows. It is at its most moving when Lewis and Freud support each other through the terrors of an air-raid warning. The two men discuss God, suffering, sexuality, Lewis’s conversion. Neither wins the argument decisively, but the film hints that Lewis has found the better way.
The same debates are taking place today - and it’s good that they are, for it is not illogical to believe. But more is involved than simply logic.
There’s a growing sense that in moving away from God, our society has destroyed our birthright. We have abandoned Christian-based principles and values which, despite all our grievous failings, undergirded society for 1500 years, and the new ideologies have failed.
People today are coming to faith as C. S. Lewis did. For example, writer Paul Kingsnorth discovered that materialism does not fill ‘this abyss inside me’. His spiritual search led from atheism, to pantheism, to Buddhism, to Wiccan priesthood until the night he ‘dreamed of Jesus’.
Many of the things we think about God may be human projections. But supposing, beyond all the projections there exists a spiritual being, a Great Love beyond our imagining; supposing that being revealed themselves in human form; supposing Love draws near us?
Kingsnorth uses C. S. Lewis’s words to describe his coming to faith: he could not ignore ‘the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet’.
After the encounter, Kingsnorth was ‘overcome with a huge and inexplicable love’. He wrote: ‘I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true’.
And so to ‘grow up’ is not to turn from God, but to move in openness towards the Love beyond all of our projections, the love who says ‘I AM’.