Conversations with an Old Friend

I don’t think I’ve ever explained in these posts the significance of C. S. Lewis to me. I first encountered Lewis in a comic-book version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that appeared serially in a Sunday School magazine I once subscribed to. I was about twelve years old, and I wasn’t sure I liked the book. I was, however, sure that the title was the worst I’d ever heard!

My deeper contact with the professor occurred when I went to college and saw all the pastel-colored paperbacks from Macmillan on the bookshelves of all my Christian friends. The uniformity of the set appealed to me as much as anything else, and under the confidence that I could in fact judge a book (or set of books) by its cover, I bought a copy of the set for myself: The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and others.

Now to take a step back, while many young products of Christian homes turn sixteen and discover that they don’t believe anymore, I turned sixteen and discovered that my pastor didn’t believe anything. Churches were then divided for me into Those With Pastors Who Believe and Those With Pastors Who Don’t. Somewhat naturally thinking, “What’s the point?” about the second category, I looked for a church from the first to attend. Here were unwavering believers, and I felt more comfortable in that way. But they were also a bit . . . underinfluenced by education. It was a routine occurrence, for instance, for someone reading the Bible aloud to stumble over names and (the inevitable sequel to the tongue twisting) for everyone to join the reader in laughing the problem away breezily.

Everyone but me that is. I couldn’t figure out how people of The Book could laugh about illiteracy. But I remembered that God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and I went on, genuinely admiring their childlike faith while silently ruing their contempt for the medium through which God chose to speak to us.

But to be fair, they couldn’t figure me out, either. They were constantly telling me to get out of my head, quoting Colossians 2:8 at me, and telling me I was too educated and too knowledgeable to lead worship music.

But then I went away to college and met those new friends. These were smart people. They loved and respected education. They had interesting books on their bookshelves. Heck! They had bookshelves! And they loved C. S. Lewis. So I started reading him. And I loved him! I didn’t always agree with his theology, especially when it countered the tenets my friends at the home church drew out of the two dozen verses they knew well, but I admired him because he was intelligent.

After just three semesters I left that university (it’s an ugly story that has to do with a girl – ekkh!) and came back home. And then there I was back at the old church, with the old friends – and my new books. When I asked questions trying to deepen some common facile understanding, my friends continued to look at me as if I were from Mars and kept telling me that things were simpler than I was trying to make them and that I would be Free Indeed if I would only quit thinking. So I learned to stay quiet (well, less vocal), and at times I felt that Lewis was my only friend.

C. S. Lewis was my only friend.

There. I could have said that up front and gone on to talking about recent reading. But I needed to tell that story so that it would make some sense when I said that I’ve had good, edifying conversations with my friend over the decades. I read one of his books, think about things he says, live a Christian life, raise questions, grow in knowledge, and then come back to the same book ten or twenty years later, when I’ve forgotten the details of what he said to me in the first place. And then I find that Lewis responds to some of my new ideas. It’s a slow conversation but a good one.

No doctrine caused me more trouble in the 1970s than prayer. I’ve gone into enough detail for one post, so I’ll just say that (1) I had bad teaching in the 70s that nevertheless seemed unanswerable at the time, (2) I disagreed then with much of what Lewis had to say about prayer, especially in Letters to Malcolm (at last! the real subject of today’s post!), (3) after decades of wrestling, I came up with a better view of prayer (aided by, of all things, a football analogy?!), and (4) Letters to Malcolm made much, much more sense when I reread it last week.

Topics in this fascinating book include reasons for and against prayers written by others, places to pray (a train is good because it has just the right amount of distraction), problems with saying that our prayer changes God’s mind, how big or small an issue should be in order to be brought to God, “festoonings” of the Lord’s Prayer (is this why I did my own back in the 90s?), people thinking wrongly that it is automatically more spiritual to have transactions “opened with prayer,” determinism, the impossibility of knowing if an occurrence is an answer to my prayer or was just going to happen anyway, the good of anxieties as sharing in the sufferings of Christ (“We are Christians, not Stoics”), demythologization simply being a matter of a new mythology, the difficulty of dropping people from prayer lists as we age (that one sure strikes closer to home now more than it did fifty years ago!), holy places as reminders that every place is holy, and more.

Eventually he starts talking about the problems of prayer for people “in our condition,” i.e. intellectuals who can never take things simply. I don’t know if I thought of myself as one of the people in Lewis’s “condition” when I first read it. I may have thought his intellectual status was a quantum leap above mine with a gap between us as wide and unbridgeable as the river between the rich man and Lazarus. Now, while humbly admitting Lewis’s superiority over me in many facets of the intellectual life, I’m comfortable putting myself in the category of people “in our condition.” I mean, if Malcolm with all of his problems can be part of the in crowd, so can I! (Although I don’t believe there ever was a Malcolm corresponding with Lewis about prayer or any other topic.)

I will talk like a fool, though, and say that, for what I believe was the first time, I knew more than Lewis for one brief, shining moment. He says at one point, “We must aim at what St. Augustine (is it?) called ‘ordinate loves.’ ” Yes! I say to my old friend. Of course it’s Augustine!

The Return of Dinny

When I put together this Third Decade reading list, I thought, “I hope I like Galsworthy since I put one novel from The Forsyte Saga on each of the first nine years.” Thankfully, I do indeed like Galsworthy. These books have become a dependable treat each summer.

It’s year 8, so I’m on the eighth book of the series, Flowering Wilderness. I was glad to see Dinny Charwell (pronounced “Cherrell”) return. In the previous book, she raised questions about duty as she continually tried to help everyone, even when she couldn’t help and even when her efforts put her in bodily danger. In this novel, Dinny is the flowering wilderness of the title, a young woman who is figuring out that she might have her own life to live, not just the life of the dutiful phantom her family traditions have placed in her head. In fact, Dinny has realized that she might even make herself happy by marrying Wilfrid.

*sigh* When two people meet and fall in love near the beginning of a novel, you know they’re going to have trouble. It seems that, while traveling in the East, Wilfrid has accepted Islam at the point of a gun, and the story gets back to England just a few days after our lovebirds plight their troth. All of Dinny’s family and all the family’s friends believe that it is now impossible for Dinny to marry Wilfrid; what he has done is simply not acceptable. The catch is that no one involved is actually a Christian believer, so they can’t agree on exactly what is so wrong about Wilfrid’s conversion. Is it wrong because he betrayed an essential myth? Is it because he acted un-English? Is it because he wasn’t courageous enough to accept death?

Once again Galsworthy critiques modernism in a fascinating way. His modern characters are all very comfortable and self-assured as long as they’re attending clubs and running charity drives. But then an event comes along that shows tension between their agnostic beliefs and their vestigial Christian ethics. The intriguing conundrum plays out through strong, elegant prose presenting full-bodied characters speaking to one another in rational and emotional and absolutely essential dialog. By contrast, I’ll end today’s post with a weak, colloquial, superfluous line:

It’s so good!