Meditation in a Toolshed

In “Meditation in a Toolshed”, C.S. Lewis offers a contrast in the idea of a person looking along something and looking at it through his example of him being in a toolshed. It was a dark toolshed but with the sun shining from the outside through a crack at the top of the door, with “dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place.” Then he moved into the sunbeam. He saw, instead, leaves from the trees outside and the sun. “Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.” He then brings up the question of which one of these is right? Is looking along truer than looking at something? One example he gives is of a girl who cries over a broken doll and feels that she has lost a friend. But the psychologist that looks and analyzes the child, sees how she has been using all of her motherly instinct on a piece of “shaped and colored wax.” For the child, she is looking along the experience and feeling the hurt and pain that went with it. The psychologist looks at the girl and analyzes what he thinks is the answer. Both see things in different ways, but neither one is ultimately wrong. Sometimes one needs to see through both ways with a balance. If one just deciphered decisions with their feelings, their faith as a Christian would hurt. But if one was a doctor who just found out their patient was diagnosed with cancer and saw him without any compassion what-so-ever, then he would be a poor, cold, and unfeeling doctor. 


One example that I think of in the Bible is from the Good Samaritan. He saw a man who was beaten and helpless. The Samaritan saw this, and unlike the others that had just walked away from the hurt man, the Samaritan pushed aside all the feelings of looking "at" and saw what needed to be done to help a neighbor. He looked "along" at the man and put  him on his donkey, forgetting that he was going to get his hands dirty and did what he felt was necessary to help. When he looked "along" at the poor man, he had compassion and love that desired to see the man better. But yet, if the Samaritan had not chosen to look "at" the man and see him, then also there would probably be no story. Yet, he balanced both ways of looking.