I've recently been quite cast down at my workplace by just one person. I simply can't see how anyone can treat everybody under his management merely as a means to an end, no more than that, and still have a clear conscience. The unbridled hypocrisy in every conversation shared is simply piercing to me. And its effect on the spirit is as jarring as having Marx preach alienation to your ears ten hours every day.
It didn't take me long to remember that this was in fact commonplace in the corporate jockeyship. Or in fact in any group of organised peoples. I was just not used to it. Still, is my shock misplaced?
Yet, if my faith isn't where it is today, The Button would have sunk me right into those blameworthy shoes, if I'm not already one foot in. Wrapped around his little finger, I guess I had no choice but to look at my own hands. Furthermore, the Apostle Paul's exhortation for us to become all things to men for the sake of the gospel - we easily turn it on its head by our callous desire for men to all but become mere things to us. Therefore the button is not the problem. The button-pusher is.
I think it's fair to say: If there is no love, then there is only utility. Learning how to love is a tiring affair, and I rest my soul on the hope of this godly appeal.
We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feelings for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
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