"You don't need the bible, creeds or the Church to be spiritual"

C.S. Lewis tells a story of an officer in the RAF who, after listening to a talk on Christianity, burst out with the protest: "I've no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I'm a religious man too. I know that there is a God. I've felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I don't believe in all your neat little dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who has met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"

And Lewis remarks that, in a sense, he quite agreed with that man. He may well have had a real experience of some sort in the desert, and "when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real."

"In the same way," Lewis writes, "if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he will also be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point.

The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has masses of experience just as real as the one you could have had from the beach; only while yours would be a simple isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America."

(Mere Christianity, p.121)