Findings

I read the library version of C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, and wasn’t able to underline and dog-ear pages. So here are a few passages I liked and may want to revisit:

There is a merely morbid and fidgety curiosity about one’s self — the slop-over from modern psychology — which surely does no good? The unfinished picture would so like to jump off the easel and have a look at itself! And analysis doesn’t cure that. We all know people who have undergone it and seem to have made themselves a lifelong subject of research.

I am, you see, a Job’s comforter. Far from lightening the dark valley where you now find yourself, I blacken it. And you know why. Your darkness has brought back my own. But on second thoughts I don’t regret what I have written. I think it is only in a shared darkness that you and I can really meet at present; shared with one another and, what matters most, with our Master. We are not on an untrodden path. Rather, on the main road.

You must admit that Scripture doesn’t take the slightest pains to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We are constantly represented as exciting the Divine wrath or pity — even as “grieving” God. I know this language is analogical. But when I say that, we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw the analogy away and, as it were, get in behind it to a purely literal truth.

There is always hope if we keep an unsolved problem fairly in view; there’s none if we pretend it’s not there.

Creation seems to be delegation through and through. He will do nothing of Himself which can be done by creatures. I suppose this is because He is a giver. And He has nothing to give but Himself.

The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest: to re-awake the awareness of that situation.

I have tried… to make every pleasure a channel of adoration.

So many things are done easily the moment you do them at all. But till then, sheerly impossible, like learning to swim.

It takes all kinds to make a world; or a church.

I still think that prayer without words is the best — if one can really achieve it. But I now see that in trying to make it my daily bread I was counting on a greater mental and spiritual strength than I really have.

One of Wendell Berry’s Sabbaths poems from 1980:

What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulchre.

The rest of the poem is here, presented antiphonally. 

Of the artistic renderings I was able to find of Good Friday, I like this one best: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Golgotha Consummatum est, 1867. Its contrasts are suggestive: the sky, half dark and half light; the people, tiny and flylike, in a vast, brooding natural setting; the apparent subject, human activity, rendered insignificant by the looming shadows off to the right. 

Last but not least, here’s a passage from C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer that meditates on the events of Good Friday:

Does not every movement in the Passion write large some common element in the sufferings of our race? First, the prayer of anguish; not granted. Then He turns to His friends. They are asleep — as ours, or we, are so often, or busy, or away, or preoccupied. Then He faces the Church; the very Church that He brought into existence. It condemns Him. This also is characteristic. In every Church, in every institution, there is something which sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. But there seems to be another chance. There is the State; in this case, the Roman state. Its pretensions are far lower than those of the Jewish church, but for that very reason it may be free of local fanaticisms. It claims to be just on a rough, worldly level. Yes, but only so far as is consistent with political expediency and raison d’etat. One becomes a counter in a complicated game. But even now all is not lost. There is still an appeal to the People — the poor and simple whom He had blessed, whom He had healed and fed and taught, to whom He Himself belongs. But they have become over-night (it is nothing unusual) a murderous rabble shouting for His blood. There is, then, nothing left but God. And to God, God’s last words are “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it…

As for the last dereliction of all, how can we either understand or endure it? Is it that God Himself cannot be man unless God seems to vanish at His greatest need? And if so, why? I sometimes wonder if we have even begun to understand what is involved in the very concept of creation. If God will create, He will make something to be, and yet to be not Himself. To be created is, in some sense, to be ejected or separated. Can it be that the more perfect the creature is, the further this separation must at some point be pushed? It is saints, not common people, who experience the “dark night.”

Poetry Friday is at Wild Rose Reader today.  

C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964) is a short book (only 124 pages). When I closed it last night and turned off my light to go to sleep, I felt disappointed. It hadn’t reached out and grabbed me by the throat, as I’ve come to expect Lewis’s books to do. But this morning, I begin to suspect that first response was misleading, because I’m still reflecting on some of its lines of thought. Perhaps this book is a seed, rather than a storm; its effects will be felt over time, rather than sweeping suddenly and dramatically onto the scene of my inner life.

As its title suggests, this is a series of letters, written to a fictitious friend named Malcolm. It’s the last book Lewis wrote before his death, and it was published posthumously. This site  provides some interesting information regarding the book’s evolution in Lewis’s mind and pen. Notably, the book was welcomed enthusiastically by its publisher, and regarded as his best effort since The Problem of Pain. (I’ve gathered some excerpts from Letters in this post.)

Lewis defined his audience as recent converts with no regular habit of prayer. He felt that existing books about prayer were written for more mature Christians, and he tries in this volume to address what he sees as the most basic obstacles. A few examples: How do you picture God? How do your mental pictures function in prayer? Why ask for things if God already knows? How do you imagine what’s happening when a finite being talks to an infinite Being? What about emotion? Should I use my own words or someone else’s? And so on.

Lewis does a pretty good job of tailoring his ideas to his audience. I was struck here, as I usually am in reading Lewis, by his humility. For a member of the intelligentsia, and surely one of its more brilliant stars, to want to write for laymen at all is noteworthy, and his overriding desire to communicate rather than show off is always evident. He’s not preachy, though at times he tosses off Latin phrases and references to a breadth and depth of reading that, though commonplace to him, won’t be shared by his audience. And although the book is “practical” in the sense that it keeps its focus on prayer, it delves deeply into theology in the course of addressing practical questions.

In my personal valuation of the book, what I appreciate most is the way it views God and his creation (including people) as connected in an ongoing creative act. This was put forth in The Problem of Pain too. Without belaboring a long and ineffective paraphrase of Lewis’s thought, I’ll just say that he has a way of providing imaginative categories for understanding spiritual realities that has the potential to revolutionize one’s prayer life far more than any single argument on a particular point can do.

I’m glad I read this, and I would recommend it to anyone else who may have run aground in the attempt to maintain a meaningful prayer life. When all is said and done, I don’t close the book with a checklist (”The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Prayers,” or “Things to Do to Make God Do What I Want,” or “Heavenly Incantations”). I do close the book with a few very slight alterations in thinking — alterations at the deep level, where the rudder can change the course of the becalmed vessel in such a way as to pick up a whiff of welcome breeze.

There’s no gender in God; there’s no maleness or femaleness in God. Whatever is in the maleness that’s different from the femaleness, and whatever’s in the femaleness that’s different from the maleness — whatever that is it’s all in Him but it’s not separated into male and female. That’s down here, for you and me.

This excerpt from a sermon by Dennis Kinlaw is part of his discussion of the church, which includes males and females, as “the bride of Christ.” To me his comments raise the stakes for marriage. “Gender roles,” Mars and Venus, specialized vocabularies in the name of “good communication skills…” All these seem devised to help us equitably demarcate our separate incompleteness as males or females. What place does any of that have in drawing us together “in Christ”?

One of the parts I liked in The Problem of Pain was Lewis’s discussion of that word “in” in scripture. ”This word, again and again in the New Testament, is used in senses we cannot fully understand,” Lewis writes.

That we can die ‘in’ Adam and live ‘in’ Christ seems to me to imply that man, as he really is, differs a good deal from man as our categories of thought and our three-dimensional imaginations represent him; that the separateness — modified only by causal relations — which we discern between individuals, is balanced, in absolute reality, by some kind of ‘inter-animation’ of which we have no conception at all.

The separateness between male and female would count as one of the illusions that’s corrected in Lewis’s “absolute reality.” When we’re faced with one of those formidable gender chasms, instead of persisting in the attempt to bridge it and meet somewhere in the middle, this notion arises of a Third Party that draws both expressions of humanity into Itself. (If God is both male and female, I have no clue what the proper pronoun is!) There are aspects of God I won’t ever know if I’m preoccupied with the differences between the sexes. But the alternative, when we enact self-surrender instead of self-will, is nothing short of the kind of unity the Creation knew before the Fall.

Here’s one more passage from Kinlaw (This Day With the Master) that relates to the rest of this inconclusive jumble:

The clothing that Yahweh made for Adam and Eve after they sinned is analogous to the veil in the temple that divided the holy place from the Holy of Holies. Neither was there simply to cover up that which was beautiful; rather, each existed to protect the beautiful from defilement. Adam and Eve needed clothing only when love had turned into lust and they began to see each other as distinct objects to be used. The garments were not to cause separation; they were to protect from the results of the separation caused by sin. The curtain in the temple was not to separate the people from Yahweh, but to protect them from thinking that they had found him and could control him.

All of these link the marriage relationship with the relationship between humanity and God. All of them suggest that separateness is not our true state, not the state we were made for, but a result of distorted perspective when we’re “in” sin. I suppose in practical terms it means the healthiest reponse we can have when we feel isolated from either each other or God is to accept it, and pray for grace to accept it with love… We might find ourselves at peace in ways we don’t expect.

We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”

So writes C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain. And so he got me to laugh at myself for being guilty as charged. By the end, I was prepared to reconsider my version of the ideal universe. Though I tend to think of nonfiction as bad-tasting medicine that has to be swallowed from time to time so I can get back to the good stuff, I was ready for this book. So ready. Lately my usual mental strategies for noting cruelty and suffering in the world, and pressing on, have been on the verge of collapse, and I needed a bracing conversation with a challenging thinker who could give me some new categories.

This book certainly filled the bill. It’s not long, but it packs a punch. Lewis’s aim, he says, is simply to “show that the old Christian doctrine of being made ‘perfect through suffering’ is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.” In the process he confronts not just human pain, but animal pain; not just finite experience, but questions of justice related to hell and heaven. He deals with popular charges against God, such as that he somehow didn’t know what he was doing when he made the world, or was surprised by sin, or is cruel or contradictory, or missed some better options. In dealing with these things Lewis writes accessibly, for laymen (and women). His brilliance is tempered by real humility. I come away with plenty to think about, and a clearer and more powerful lens for examining such questions. (More on Lewis’s strategy in this post.)

I value this book for its confirmation of my sanity. There aren’t any questions that were really pressing on me that Lewis didn’t address fairly. I imagine reading it was similar to sitting on the proverbial therapist’s couch and pouring out the soul to an intent ear. But instead of responding, as the joke goes, with, “What do you think the answer is?” Lewis guides the reader down various instructive lines of reasoning and alternative ways of seeing. I don’t close the book feeling any happier about cruelty or suffering, but I have the sense that my complaints have been heard, affirmed, and challenged by a mind I respect.

God is an artist, and we are works of art, says Lewis at one point. The Artist isn’t going to be content until his masterpiece has the character he intends for it, in accordance with his love (which Lewis distinguishes from mere kindness). “It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.” It’s a tribute to the hunger for meaning that a book arguing convincingly for purposefulness, rather than the removal of suffering, can bring so much solace. 

The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

So begins C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain, a title I’ve long been familiar with but never read. Feeling like the time has come, I checked it out of the library today and am really, really glad I did. I’m going to just collect several key points so far in Lewis’s words. All I’ll say at this point about my own reaction is that I feel refreshed.

This book isn’t going to be an argument trying to prove the existence of God from Nature:

Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform. At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never made. Religion has a different origin.

He suggests four stages in the development of a religious mind in humanity: the Numinous; the moral law; the uniting of the two, so that the “haunter of Nature becomes the author of the moral law”; and, in Christianity, the historical event (Christ with his claims). Christianity is ”a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity.” His intent is to put the problem of pain in its right context, not to make a case for Christianity’s truth.

I love that we’re not going to try and deduce God from nature. I’m so ripe for some new categories! 

Here’s the problem of pain that Lewis is going to work through, stated most simply:

If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.

This isn’t where I am spiritually right now, but I do find my mind running on this track (if that makes any sense). When I try to grapple with what I’m seeing and feeling about the world, the only tools in my box seem to be this line of reasoning, which I know is somehow incomplete… My own reasoning and data seem to veer away from things I know to be true sometimes. It looks like Lewis is going to be my knight in shining armor! (He looks weary already, doesn’t he?)

I’ve been struck lately by the uniqueness of the experience of reading the Bible as compared to reading other books. Normally I hate the term “strategy,” but in the same way Lucy goes into the silent and mysterious upstairs of the wise magician’s house in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader armed with a plan for finding what she needs in his book, I need to get a few principles into words.

1. It disallows reading with “an open mind” (and thus debunks the fallacy that such a thing as an “open” and uncommitted mind is even possible). ”Without faith it is impossible to please Him,” says Hebrews 11, “for he who comes to God must first believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” The scriptures yield their riches to a seeking mind, but they’re not really designed to be a set of rational proofs one way or the other. If we’re not coming prepared to believe, we can expect to resemble the dwarves in The Last Battle, who ingest a magnificent feast and experience it as straw and dung. 
2. It is “living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). Don’t come to this book expecting it to be subordinate to your methods of analysis. Rather, expect it to lay you open. God created the world through “the Word” (John 1), making a series of finer and finer distinctions through the act of speaking. This identifies the incarnate Word with the written Word. It must be understood in terms of this claim to be dynamic, the creative Source of all things — including our tools of analysis, and our finite minds themselves.
3. Questions can be productive or defensive. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, “If God’s circle is our square, then we have no basis on which to relate.” Or something like that. We’re made in His image, and He’s not threatened by our questions because they’re evidence of that family stamp. He welcomes any expression of seeking, and will satisfy some questions; for others He insists upon faith. In reading the Bible, I have to remember the difference between questioning as a means of seeking, and questioning as a means of playing intellectual games, or fending off the necessity for faith. That line is probably different for everyone.
4. His logic is more often the logic of paradox than of sequential reasoning. Often in scripture His answers seem like non sequiturs: Job asks, “Why are You causing me to suffer?” God responds, but not with an answer to that question. He offers something immeasurably more wonderful: a glimpse of his face, and a poem about His power. It’s enough to satisfy Job: “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees Thee. I repent.” I don’t believe that’s God scolding Job for questioning Him. I believe it’s God enlarging and redefining Job’s question, a powerfully compassionate move on God’s part that enables Job to live in truer relatedness to Him. Jesus does the same thing quite often, when he’s asked one question but answers (seemingly) another.
5. Getting the questions right may be more important to God than answering them. I don’t mean this at all in the way the intellectual in The Great Divorce means it; I don’t mean that God wants us to play mind games and give up our burning curiosity about Him in exchange for the worship of impressive questions. I mean that He is larger than we can grasp, and getting our questions aimed at the right phenomena, and mapped out in words that rightly measure the size and complexity of the mysteries that attract us, yield abundantly more insight into who He is and what His intentions are toward us than holding firm to small criteria that suffocate the Truth out of the eternal God.

That’s all for now. But I’m thinking of the feeling of apprehension and fear that we have for Lucy as she reads, of the power of the book to play with reality, of its literal responsiveness, and of its beauty. We should all be so lucky — to come to the book alone, and leave with the Lord himself padding beside us.

I read a review of Lewis’s Great Divorce today, and it brought back that excellent book that’s been so important to me. It may be time to read it again, hoping to grasp what I missed the first 4 times.

To me the genius of that book is the way it fleshes out the reality of choice. It’s about a bus ride from hell to Heaven. Anyone can choose to stay if they want, and undergo the arduous process of learning to walk on Real grass, breathe Real air, drink Real water that’s so dense a rain shower would crush the unReal shadows visiting from hell. Agreeing with God means becoming more solidly who He made you. Only then can you withstand Heaven, which isn’t for the meek and fainthearted.

I think Lewis got some grief for suggesting choices can be revised after death, but I doubt he was intending the book as a tightly-argued theological treatise so much as an imaginative exploration of will and time and eternity. Most of the spirits choose against Heaven. They’ve become so attached to their sins that they refuse to give them up. (Then there’s a trick ending that drops you and leaves you feeling cheated, but it’s okay after having been given so much of worth.) 

I taught the book to my freshman writing students the semester before I launched into parenting. It wasn’t a Christian college, but I figured since it was my last semester I’d risk being an aggressive Christian. (Ironic how careful I was not to force my beliefs on anyone, when all around me were aggressive agenda-pushers of other varieties. What a chicken I was.)

The book changed those kids. We reserved it for Fridays, a chapter a week, and they looked forward to Fridays with equal parts dread and eagerness. It challenged them to think hard, and to think about their lives and their direction. They liked and hated that. But at the end, I remember one girl telling me about how she’d realized she needed to view her mother differently, because she was afraid she was being shaped by bitterness. Another boy saw pushy drivers at the mall fighting over a parking space, and imagined them as characters in the story. There were other proofs that the story was getting through to them too. And the papers were by far the best freshman papers I’d seen in 10 years of teaching.

It’s not an exciting book if you’re looking for adventure. It’s basically a series of dialogues. But they’re wonderfully revealing, provocative dialogues that pave the way for conversations about the gospel. They forever changed the way I see my life. I’m glad to be reminded of this book today, when I’m not making the best choices from an eternal point of view. :-/

“Why, if we can get back to our own world by jumping into this pool, mightn’t we get somewhere else by jumping into one of the others? Supposing there was a world at the bottom of every pool.” (Digory)

I found this one here (where it’s a background for a game I’ve never played).

In keeping with my longstanding fascination with the Wood between Worlds (since college, as my friend Ruth recently reminded me), I’m instituting a new blog tradition: one picture a week, on Mondays, that depicts (to me, if not to the original artist!) some aspect of the Wood. (The hard part will be choosing which one, since I have quite a storehouse of them now.) I’ll try to avoid much commentary, and let the pics speak for themselves.

Wood for the Week #1 is a photograph taken by Frances S. and Mary E. Allen. It’s called “Forest Pool.” It’s taken somewhere around 1905-1911, and there’s more information about its photographers here. (I also ran across it in a blog, discussed as a “Wood between Worlds,” here.) Follow the links to see the picture.