"Attempting to Fill Sieves with Water"

I just finished reading Weight of Glory by, C.S. Lewis. Such a great book! The chapter that stood out to me the most was entitled, The Inner Ring. This was rich with truth! Even after I finished the book, I returned to it three more times just to read this chapter again.

To summarize, it’s another approach to helping us understand how pride, competition, comparison, and the desire to “fit in” take a good man and make him do very bad things… how the very elect are deceived.

Below, are a few of my favorite lines from C.S. Lewis' The Inner Ring:

“I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside…. 

This desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it….

Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things…. 

The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want.”  

- C.S. Lewis - Weight of Glory