ad vera i innsta hring

eda ekki. Hversu langt erum vid tilbuin ad ganga til ad falla i hopinn a vinnustad eda annarstadar? Gudfraedingurinn C.S.Lewis:

His starting point is taken from Tolstoy's War and Peace in which Boris, a soldier in the Russian Army, discovers that there are really two kinds of rules: the ones laid down by army regulations-the written system-and also an unwritten system of rules dictated by an inner circle or ring

Lewis takes this example as a paradigm of the Christian life. All of us, he suggests, want to be part of the Inner Ring-that group of people in any organization or institution who really organise things, get things done: the people who have power to make things happen. While the existence of such rings is not evil in itself, Lewis maintains that membership of a ring may require us to do something which otherwise we might regard as wrong. The following describes a membership invitation:

Over a drink or a cup of coffee disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still-just at that moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naif or a prig-the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we"-and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure-something "we always do". And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.

It would be so terrible to see the other man's face-that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face-turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

Lewis concludes: `The quest of the Inner Ring will break you heart unless you break it'. Again: `Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.'

- Meira her: Anglican theological review

Athugasemdir

[Ragnar Kristján Gestsson, 14.3.2008 kl. 18:02]

so far so good.  Las Inner Ring einhverntíman og þótti góð.  En punkturinn hjá þér er ...?

[SM, 14.3.2008 kl. 21:05]

lokaorðin, segir sig sjálft.