Jolly Beggars

The following comes from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis (p. 131):

“For this tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need-love, which never fully acknowledges its own neediness, Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence.  We become “jolly beggars.”  The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his Need.  He is not entirely sorry for the fresh Need they have produced.  And he is not sorry at all for the innocent Need that is inherent in his creaturely condition.  For all the time this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this pretence that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from being happy.  We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet-or one foot-or one toe-on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf.  The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not “ours.”