ONCE more, I find myself giving in to the temptation to doom-scroll: to check the news websites too frequently, to listen to the newscasts obsessively, and to oscillate unhealthily between over-stimulated anxiety and a kind of horrid fascination.

Of course, it is right to follow the news; it is natural and human to be distressed by the war in the Gulf and to feel empathy for its immediate victims. At the very least, it can inform my prayers. But that is not what concerns me here. What concerns me is the loss of discernment, proportion, and the equilibrium necessary for me to follow my vocation, such as it is, to do and be those things that God has called me to be — and to do — in the time that he has allotted me.

At a time like this, I find myself returning to the perennial wisdom of C. S. Lewis’s famous sermon “Learning in War Time”, delivered to students in Oxford in 1939, at the outbreak of a war in which they were directly involved and threatened, not one that they were watching on screens from afar.

There is an especially helpful passage where he says: “Perhaps it may be useful to mention the three mental exercises which may serve as defences against the three enemies which war raises up against the scholar.”

He speaks here of the scholar, but I find what he says just as helpful if he were speaking to the poet or the priest. So, he continues: “The first enemy is excitement — the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work.” Ouch! That hits the target.

But Lewis goes on to advise us on how to defend ourselves: “The best defence is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.”

How true this is! And I find myself braced and more resolute for the task in hand when he reminds me: “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.” I’ve only got so much time to finish my epic, or even my sermon. I may as well get on with it now.

The other two enemies that Lewis mentions are frustration and fear. By frustration, he means “the feeling that we shall not have time to finish”. That is, indeed, something that I do feel and fear about my Arthurian epic; but Lewis’s typically robust response to this is to say that “no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner”. We ought, in any case, in both war and peace, to sit lightly to our long-term plans and leave the future where it belongs, in God’s hands: “The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

As for the third enemy, fear, what he has to say was perhaps more relevant to those students at the outbreak of the Second World War than it is to us, watching a Gulf war from afar. He points out, laconically, that death comes to us all, whether in war or peace, and concludes that all we do can still be done to the glory of God, and that any vocation, offered humbly to God, even in the most trying circumstances, may be an approach “to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter”.