Elie Wiesel, the famous author and holocaust survivor, prompts me to wonder if one of the great but often unseen stumbling blocks in life is indifference.
Recently my new 60-second question on love post drew a lot of attention. The question was set into motion by these words from C.S. Lewis:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Here’s the question I asked readers to ponder: “how vulnerable or ‘breakable’ is your heart?”
It’s an important question each of us might regularly ask ourselves. Asked in another way, this question becomes the title of this post.
Granted, indifference is not exactly what Lewis is describing. Lewis is making the point that when we try to protect ourselves from emotional pain by keeping aloof, distant, uncommitted, avoiding entanglements, instead of protecting our hearts, we harden them.
Yes, this lack of vulnerability may protect our hearts from being broken. But this is because our lack of all empathy or emotional connection—in other words, love—leaves our hearts, in Lewis’ prediction, “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” It’s a tragic trade-off! We have avoided the risk of pain that always accompanies vulnerability; but we have consequently closed ourselves to any genuine experience of love.
However, the fact that we wish to protect ourselves from pain in Lewis’ scenario shows that we care, at least a little. Indifference is far worse, for it does not care at all.
I’m oblivious to the homeless person pan-handling on the street corner as I walk quickly past him, not because I feel a need to guard my heart or else I’ll get too involved but because I just see so many homeless he is invisible to me. I’m indifferent.
I have no issue that gets me worked up, no desire to right a wrong, no need to take a stand or make my voice heard. Voting is for suckers. The greatest refugee crisis in the world since WWII, the prospect that millions of Americans might lose their health insurance and return to getting medical care from emergency rooms or not at all, my responsibilities as a community member, nothing penetrates. As long as it stays outside the boundaries of self, I’m indifferent.
I do my work, but am equally blasé about praise or criticism. There is not much of “me” in what I do for a living—it’s that and nothing more, making a living. I don’t know quite how I got into how I earn my money and have no desire to find something else more satisfying. I’m indifferent.
To the person C.S. Lewis is describing, we might (as Lewis does) challenge them to be concerned for the consequences of their invulnerability, the dangers of their ever-hardening heart. But how do we reach out to the indifferent person? How do we say, “Your indifference is killing your soul?” What will break through it?
All this leads me back to Elie Wiesel. “The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.” For all of us to some extent—and for some of us to a great extent—coming to faith is a process of peeling back layers of indifference. It means taking risks, becoming vulnerable, laying everything on the line.
Here’s C.S. Lewis again:
Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end. Submit yourself with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life.
Keep back nothing.
Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.
Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I see this not as a one-time act, but a life-long process. When I find myself indifferent to challenges that need to be taken on, people who need to be noticed, wrongs that need to be righted, perhaps my indifference can be like a Geiger counter pointing me in Christ’s direction.
