Learning in War-Time

 While I have never really experienced what it's like to be in war-time, CS Lewis' "Learning in War-Time" still presents really good points. As the sermon was preached in 1939, Lewis begins by proposing the question of "Why should we continue to learn and educate ourselves during times of warfare?" As he continues on, the question really becomes:

He must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology.

I think this is an important question, in one form or another, that everyone asks themselves in one point in their lives. Its also these types of questions that makes people grow as they reexamine and reevaluate their lives.
Lewis answers the question by making a point in its simplest and most effective way: "We are mistaken when we compare war with 'normal life.' Life has never been normal." Included in the idea, he writes

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.

By the end of the sermon, he comes around again to address the nature of war and what people think of it.  Lewis' discussion focuses on the topic of death. He points out that death is a part of Fear, which is the third enemy we face during times of war.

We think of the streets of Warsaw 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 of that -- of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.

Lewis brings up the idea that the nature death hasn't been changed at all. Everyone dies at some point, whether by a bullet or a disease.

Yet the war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it.

I think this sermon really gives us something to think about. I think, while the enemies, Excitement, Frustration and Fear, are present in war, they can also creep up on us in our daily lives. Therefore we must always be on guard to defend ourselves from these enemies.