More in Life

I am here at Caribou Coffee on a roll with blog post ideas, so here is one final quote from The Narnian, which I finished this week (and was well worth the read – I recommend it!). Towards the end of his life, as Joy is dying from cancer and they are trying to savor their remaining time together, Lewis wrote in a letter to a friend: “indeed my situation is not easy to describe. My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before; at any rate there is more in life than I knew about” (285).

There is more to life than I knew about. What I find so amazing about this statement is how late in his life Lewis can make it. By this point (1958, five years before his death) Lewis is already a literary celebrity around the globe. He has acheived as much success in his field as anyone could expect. He has experienced war, love, friendship, a dramatic conversion, and fame. His own health is even starting to fail. And yet at this stage of life he is still discovering new aspects to life that he never knew about before.

From this I draw the lesson: never stop growing. Boredom with life is simply inexcusable. If we are bored with life, the problem is with us, not the world. There is always more in life to experience, always more to learn, always more to love. This is a function of a Christian worldview: because we live in God’s world, and ultimately before God himself, reality has endless meaning, endless possibility. Anything can be a door to newness and change, because anything can point you to God. There is always more out there.

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Experiential Calvinism

During a walk the other day this thought popped into my head: if I were not a Calvinist because of Scripture, I think I would nevertheless instinctively understand something like Calvinism from my experience in sanctification, in which I progress only as God continually overcomes me. The lingering deceitfulness of sin in my heart is such that I would not maintain my faith unless God granted it to me purely for His own reasons. There is nothing in me that could have generated faith; I believe, and am sustained in belief, because of something external to me.

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Lewis, Tolkien, and Friendship

One of the interesting parts about The Narnian has been reading about Lewis’ friendships, and in particular his friendship with Tolkien. They made some funny statements about each other. For example, on hearing that the London newspaper the Daily Telegraph had done an article on Lewis which at one point referred to him as “ascetic Mr. Lewis,” Tolkien wrote to his son, “‘Ascetic Mr. Lewis’ -!!! I ask you! He put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning, and said he was ‘going short for Lent.’” Concering Tolkien’s reluctance to receive criticism and make changes to his writings, Lewis wrote: “no one ever influenced Tolkien. You might as well try to influence a bandersnatch…. He has only two reactions to criticism: either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else he takes no notice at all.”

Chiding aside, I am struck by how much Tolkien, and Lewis’ other friends, meant to him. One of the most fascinating parts of the book was Jacobs’ description on pp. 148ff. of the conversation between Lewis, Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson on September 11, 1931, which lasted till 4:00 AM, and was critical to Lewis’ conversion. On the first of October he would write to Arthur Greeves, “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

The turning point in the conversation was how Christianity relates to pagan myth, and Tolkien and Dyson helped Lewis understand that what is suggestively hinted at in pagan myth is truly and fully revealed in historic Christianity. Myths are beautiful and arouse human longing because they point to something real. Tolkien wrote Lewis a poem with the subtitle “Philomythus to Misomythus” (i.e., myth-lover to myth-hater), and it has some of the most beautiful statements about human dignity and the memory of Eden. One of my favorite parts of the poem is this:

The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act.

(I think its interesting how much you can see this influence in Lewis’ later writings. One of my favorite things about Lewis’ writings is his emphasis on Joy and the longing for heaven as a clue to the meaning of human existence, and the role of myth in his thought is evident in Till We Have Faces.)

Despite later strains in their friendship, its obvious that Tolkien and Lewis deeply loved each other, and took great pleasure in the circle of friendship they had with the other Inklings. Tolkien wrote in his diary soon after Lewis’ conversion, “friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord.” Lewis wrote of the Inklings, “we met theoretically to talk about literature, but in fact nearly always to talk about something better. What I owe to them all is incalculable. Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my own conversion. Is there any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?”

What a beautiful portrait of the delights of friendship! I’ll close this post with one more quote from Lewis which I think really encapsulates the spirit of the Inkling friendships at their best:

In a perfect friendship this Appreciate love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together; each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day’s walk have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out toward the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life — natural life — has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?

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The Narnian

I am reading, and immensely enjoying, Alan Jacob’s The Narnian, an intellectual biography of C.S. Lewis that has come out within the last few years. Among many other passages and themes that could be commented on, I was particularly struck by his description of the changes in Lewis’s personality and capacity for delight brought about by his conversion. Its a very moving passage (from p. 131, italics his):

“I first read a book by C.S. Lewis twenty-five years ago, and I have been reading his work consistently since then. I know his writerly voice quite well, as well as I know anyone’s; it is utterly distinctive. And the most dominant feeling I get when I read his early letters – that is, those written in his first thirty years of life – is that in none of them does he sound like himself. The pre-conversion Lewis is, though obviously highly intelligent, neither a particularly likable nor a particularly interesting person – at least in his letters. He may have been delightful to know, though I doubt it. But once he ‘admitted that God was God,’ it is as though the key to his own hidden and locked-away personality was given to him. What appears almost immediately is a kind of gusto (sheer, bold enthusiasm for what he loves) that is characteristic of him ever after.”

This last sentence corresponds to Jacob’s thesis at the beginning of the book that what held all of Lewis’ writings together was “willingness to be enchanted” and an “openness to delight” (xxi). What a beautiful quality! I want to to be someone who is “open to delight.”

In the pages immediately following the quote above, Jacobs uses Eustace Scrubb’s experience as a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to describe Lewis’ miserable experience of increasing consciousness of sin between his conversion to theism in 1929 and his conversion to Christianity in 1931. As I read this section I was impressed anew with what is among my main benefits from reading C.S. Lewis: the sense he gives of the drudgery of self-admiration/self-preoccupation and the sheer joy of repentance. An awareness that real life and real joy – finding one’s own God-given personality, learning to delight in the world around – begins with the painful but liberating stripping away of the dragon scales of sin. That, paradoxically, life is found through death.

I am deeply reminded of my continual need for the kind of release from self in view here, and how only God can give this (priceless) gift. Even just to see one’s deplorable situation and utter need is itself a happy recognition: how much more to be healed of it! Seeing the depths of one’s sin is difficult and bracing, but it is also the gateway to a whole world of joy and delight.

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The Voyage of Life

One of my first days here in D.C. I walked down to the National Art Gallery and spent a few hours looking at paintings. The painting that stood out to me the most was The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole. It is a series of four paintings, each allegorizing one season of life: childhood, youth, manhood, and old age. Each painting depicts a voyager in a boat sailing down a river, with the scenery characterizing that season of life. In the first painting, an infant glides safely down a rich, green landscape. In the second, a boy takes charge of the boat and sails toward a castle in the sky – without seeing the sudden turn the river takes just down the bend (which you can see barely in the far right of the painting). Here it is:

The third picture – the one depicting manhood – has meant a great deal to me this semester. In this painting, the scenery has completely changed. The lush surrounding is gone. Everything is black and rocky. Rapids appear ahead. The man has his hands clasped in prayer and is looking up to heaven in desperation. Here it is:

At various points this fall that have been particularly difficult, when I have cried out to God for guidance about our future and not heard a response, I have thought about this painting, and been comforted. It reminds me of the efficacy of simple faith. When the storms of life rise up around you, put your trust in God. He will see you through all trouble and speed you safely along.

I find very meaningful the caption that Thomas Cole wrote under it:

“Trouble is characteristic of the period of Manhood. In childhood, there is no cankering care: in youth, no despairing thought. It is only when experience has taught us the realities of the world, that we lift from our eyes the golden veil of early life; that we feel deep and abiding sorrow; and in the Picture, the gloomy, eclipse-like tone, the conflicting elements, the trees riven by tempest, are the allegory; and the Ocean, dimly seen, figures the end of life, which the Voyager is now approaching. The demon forms are Suicide, Intemperance and Murder, which are the temptations that beset men in their direst trouble. The upward and imploring look of the Voyager shows his dependence on a Superior Power; and that faith saves him from the destruction that seems inevitable.”

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