Surprised by Joy

Posted on March 21, 2023 by Barbara Harper

I’ve read a few biographies of C. S. Lewis and recently watched The Most Reluctant Convert, based on his journey from atheism to theism to Christianity. It occurred to me while watching the latter that I had never read Lewis’ testimony in his own words, Surprised by Joy. So I got the audiobook version of his book.

I thought that, since these other sources all quoted heavily from this book, I’d be familiar with most of it. Much was familiar, but there was a lot I didn’t know. There were also some incidents missing that I thought came from this book.

Lewis writes that this book is not an autobiography of his whole life til that point. He focuses mainly on everything that led to his conversion. That story encompasses much of his early life and what went into his becoming the personality and type of thinker he was. As he goes on, the focus narrows to just his spiritual movement.

One fact that I don’t remember reading before was that both Lewis and his brother had only one workable joint in their thumbs. Trying to make models of things or cut cardboard with scissors ended in frustration and tears. Games at school were the bane of his existence because he could never play them well. He could write and draw, though, and he liked solitude, which factors led to his creating stories about “dressed animals” in what he called “Animal Land.” His brother drew and wrote stories about India and trains and ships. Eventually they combined their imaginary worlds into what they called Boxen.

It was quite interesting to follow all that made Lewis into the man he became, from being unable to reason with his father, to (mostly negative) experiences at school, to his time with a private tutor (the “Great Knock”) who demanded that he be able to defend every opinion he expressed. Then the books he read and people he came across and conversations he had with them at various junctions all led step-by-step to his becoming a Christian. His journey was driven by philosophy more than emotion.

Surprised by Joy was written after the majority of Lewis’ other books were published. He said he wrote the book partly to answer questions he regularly received and partly to correct some misconceptions. Some of his detractors assumed he came from a Puritanical background, but Lewis assures them that the family he grew up in was not religious at all. Then when he came to make his own choice about religion, he turned against it though he did not tell his father. It was only many years and much reading later, after he began his career, that he came to believe. He likened it to a chess game where God knocked down his objections and false beliefs one by one by one.

The joy in Lewis’ title was what he described as a feeling of longing. It first came upon him when his brother brought in a toy garden he had made in the lid of a tin. It was something beautiful but ineffable, a small glimpse into something greater. “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” (p. 86, Kindle version). At times through his life, he sought to recreate that feeling. After he became a Christian, he realized that what he thought of as joy was not an end in itself, but a signpost to point him to God.

A few quotes from the book that stood out to me:

The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life” (p. 137).

[Of his tutor, Kirk] Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment. After being knocked down sufficiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner (p. 167).

I knew very well by now that there was hardly any position in the world save that of a don in which I was fitted to earn a living, and that I was staking everything on a game in which few won and hundreds lost. As Kirk had said of me in a letter to my father (I did not, of course, see it till many years later), ‘You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else. You may make up your mind to that.’ And I knew this myself; sometimes it terrified me (p. 224).

I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. (p. 288).

There’s a verse of “Just As I Am” by Charlotte Elliott that is not as well known as the rest of the hymn, but seems to sum up Lewis’ journey of faith:

Just as I am, Thy love unknownHas broken every barrier downNow to be Thine, yea, Thine alone,O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

I’m grateful God pursued Lewis and “broke every barrier down,” both for Lewis’ sake and our own. What a gift Lewis has been to us, even so many years after he lived. But his example gives me hope that God will do the same for dear ones I pray for.

Laudable Linkage

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Barbara Harper

Though still not caught up with the blogs I usually read, I got to a lot of them this week—as you can tell by my long list of links to share. Perhaps one or two will be as thought-provoking to you as they were to me.

January’s for Reflecting, not Resolving, HT to Challies. “Maybe part of the reason why so many resolutions fail by February is that they were early. Maybe the resolutions weren’t wrong; they were just underdeveloped. Maybe, they needed an extra month or two in the oven.”

Holy Prayers from Rocking Chairs, HT to the Story Warren. A lovely poem about mothers’ middle of the night sessions.

A Legacy of Love: Passing Down the Gift of Spiritual Discipline to Your Children. “Because of the legacy my mom passed to me, I have a vision that goes beyond serenity and candles. I want my children to see a mother desperate for Jesus, willing to do whatever it takes to be at His feet.”

Make Christianity Hard Again, HT to Challies. “The way of Jesus is the way of the cross. So don’t talk about it like we just need to be nice people. Here are three commands that have challenged me, with practical trails we can follow.”

“I Must Decrease” . . . But How? HT to Challies. “It’s pretty clear: the world’s loud, incessant voice tells me that in order to be happy, I need to spend more of my time, money, and attention on myself. You’ve probably heard the same message about your need for this, as well.”

Wasn’t My Body, but It Was My Baby, HT to Challies. “Abortion isn’t just about a mother’s choice. It’s also about a father’s responsibility. Perpetuating the lie that men need to stay out of the abortion debate isn’t just untrue—it’s catastrophic for the generations to come.”

Don’t Women Need Access to Abortion for Rape? “‘You don’t have the right to tell my fourteen-year-old daughter she has to carry her rapist’s baby.’ That’s what Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, recently argued when he interviewed Seth Dillon, owner and CEO of the satire website The Babylon Bee. How would you respond to that argument? Here are three arguments to consider.”

The Murderer Who Crushed a Worm. “We get hard through the steps of an unperceived process.” This is a different kind of hardness from the article above.

C. S. Lewis an Mrs. Moore: Relationship of Sin or Sanctification? HT to Challies. “Every biographer of C. S. Lewis must face ‘the Mrs. Moore question’ and decide what to make of the relationship the beloved writer had with a woman more than 25 years his senior who remained a major part of his life from the time he returned from the trenches of the Great War until her death in 1951.” I especially like the concluding paragraphs of how God uses difficult people in our lives.

God Plans Your Stops, HT to Challies. “If God plans our steps, it means He plans our stops as well. And if you sit with it for a minute, there’s comfort in that.”

Unraveling the Riddle of Rejoicing Always, HT to Challies. “Several years ago, while meditating on Philippians 4:4, the Lord helped me glimpse why it makes sense to always rejoice—even in hard times—and how it is possible to give thanks in everything.”

A Family Vacation, a Broken Transmission, and a God Who Is With Us, HT to Challies. A neat story about God’s provision in a crisis.

Caregiving As a Calling and Ministry, HT to Challies. “At the time I didn’t see it as a ministry, and I didn’t understand that I had been called. I saw caregiving as a giant disruption to everything in my life and a burden that was forcing me to ‘step out of ministry’ to do this caregiving thing that I hadn’t signed up for. Over time, God has shown me that caregiving wasn’t a disruption; it was God’s plan for me all along.”

How Should I Dispose of an Old Bible, HT to Challies. Though the sacredness of the Bible comes from what it says and Who gave it to us, not the pages and ink, we still want to treat it with respect. This has a good suggestion.

The Pilgrim’s Regress

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Barbara Harper

The Pilgrim’s Regress was the first fiction book written by C. S. Lewis after his conversion to Christianity. Lewis’ book is not a retelling of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: Lewis just borrows the allegorical format.

The book’s protagonist is John, a young man from a land called Puritania. The country is ruled over by a Landlord who is reportedly very good and kind but who will throw anyone who disobeys him into a black hole.

One day John catches a glimpse of a beautiful island through a window. The sight, sounds, and smells raise an ineffable longing to see the island again and even visit it.

John journeys towards the island, but instead finds different philosophers and detractors. He meets a “brown girl,” who assures him she’s what he really wanted. But she represents lust, and John eventually finds he’s dissatisfied with her. (This article makes a good case that Lewis was neither racist or misogynistic by designating lust as a brown girl).

John continues on and meets Mr. Enlightenment, the Spirit of the Age, Mother Kirk, Mr. Sensible, Mr. Neo-Angluar, Mr. Humanist, History, Reason, and others. Some say his island is an illusion. Others offers various suggestions for how to get there. Some argue for or against the against the existence of the Landlord. History tells John the landlord sent truths about himself in the form of various pictures. But many interpreted the pictures the wrong way.

Finally John understands the way to the island. Wikipedia says, “The Regress portion of the title now comes into play as John journeys back home and now sees everything in a new light and sees how the road he took is a knife’s edge between Heaven and Hell.”

In a preface to the third edition of the book, written ten years after it was originally published, Lewis apologized for the book. Although he hadn’t intended the book to be strictly autobiographical, he hadn’t realized that not everyone’s journey was quite like his.

On the intellectual side my own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity. I still think this a very natural road, but I now know that it is a road very rarely trodden. In the early thirties I did not know this. If I had had any notion of my own isolation, I should either have kept silent about my journey or else endeavoured to describe it with more consideration for the reader’s difficulties.

He says that in the new edition (online here), he added headlines before the different sections. He apologizes for doing so, but the headlines would have been a great help if I had read rather than listened to the book.

I think I would have gotten more out of the book of I had read an annotated edition, which explained more about the different references and philosophies (one GoodReads reviewer recommended C. S. Lewis and Narnia for Dummies as an aide). But I got the gist of the story and understood most of the discussions between characters. To me, this book illustrates what Lewis said in Mere Christianity:

Once Upon a Wardrobe

Posted on June 29, 2022 by Barbara Harper

In Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan, Megs Devonshire is a college student at Oxford in the 1950s. Her 8-year-old brother, George, has a heart condition and is not expected to live long.

George has become enamored with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. George wonders often if Narnia is a real place. If not, where did it come from? When he learns that the author of the book is a professor at Megs’ school, George begs her to ask Lewis about Narnia for him.

Megs demurs. First, she explains to George, Oxford is made up of different colleges, and Lewis doesn’t teach at the one she attends. Plus, Megs studies math and physics and is not much for stories. She prefers logic and black and white answers. Of course Narnia is just a figment of the author’s imagination, she insists.

But George keeps asking, and Megs loves him. So she finds a way to meet Mr. Lewis.

Lewis is very hospitable. But he doesn’t answer Megs’ question directly. Instead, he tells her a series of stories about his life over several visits.

George enjoys the stories. But Megs is frustrated that she can’t get a straight answer. And their mother wonders if George is spending too much time thinking about an imaginary world.

There are three levels, or threads, to this story. One is Megs and George and their family. One is Lewis’ biography. And another is Megs’ learning the value of stories. Having read On Stories by Lewis, I recognized a lot of his points in this novel. He’s not saying that the world doesn’t need logic and math and facts. Rather, “Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning” (p. 52).

The middle section of the book seemed a little formulaic. Megs’ point of view is written in the first person. She’d visit Lewis and come back with a story for George. As she begins to tell it, the point of view switches to George’s, but in the third person. Then, as if the scene is unfolding in George’s imagination, a section of Lewis’ story is told in the third person.

In the final third or so of the book, the action picked up and there were no more switches, so it was easier to get caught up in the story.

The scenes with C. S. and his brother, Warnie, made me feel like I was there in their room with the fireplace going, listening in. Callahan had studied Lewis’ life for her first book, Becoming Mrs. Lewis, and I am not surprised another book about him grew from all that research. The details shared showed a familiarity with Lewis’ home and school without overpowering the story.

Callahan writes in her note after the story that she wasn’t interested in “ascribing logic, facts, and theory to the world of Narnia,” as that has been done by so many others. But she wanted to explore how Narnia changes readers and how, as Lewis said, “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what needs to be said.”

I’ve read many biographies of Lewis, so most of his story was familiar to me. There were parts that surprised me, though. For instance, I knew he took some children from London into his home during the Blitz, but I had never heard anything about them until this book. It also occurred to me that, though I had read much about Lewis, I had never read his book about himself: Surprised by Joy. I’d seen that book quoted in anything else I’d read about him, so I thought I knew it. But I should read it some time.

There were a couple of places the theology was a little wonky. I wasn’t sure whether these were from the author’s beliefs or a character’s.

But overall, this was a sweet and touching story.

I listened to most of the book via audiobook, read nicely by Fiona Hardingham. But I had also gotten the Kindle version on sale and looked up many sections there.

The Four Loves

Posted on June 28, 2022 by Barbara Harper

In The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis, he says that when he contemplated writing about love, he thought there were two types: Need-Love and Gift-Love. Need-love is that of a child for its parents, who meet its needs and comfort when frightened. Gift-love is that of a man who works hard for the well-being of his family. Lewis was going to propose that the latter is more like God because He gives and needs nothing. Need-love, however, seemed totally selfish and not deserving of the name “love.”

But, he reasoned, no one thinks a child is selfish for looking to its parents for comfort or an adult selfish for wanting the companionship of friends. And man’s love to God is almost totally Need-love.

It would be a bold and silly creature that came before its Creator with the boast ‘I’m no beggar. I love you disinterestedly.’ Those who come nearest to a Gift-love for God will next moment, even at the very same moment, be beating their breasts with the publican and laying their indigence before the only real Giver. And God will have it so. He addresses our Need-love: ‘Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden,’ or, in the Old Testament, ‘Open your mouth wide and I will fill it’ (pp. 3-4).

Lewis also differentiates between Need-pleasures and Appreciation-pleasures. One quote stood out to me here because I see this in online discussions all the time.

We must be careful never to adopt prematurely a moral or evaluating attitude. The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize (pp. 14-15).

Next he writes a chapter titled “Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human”—about love of nature, home, family, country. There’s much to contemplate here, but I’ll just share this one quote from this chapter: “All natural affections, including this, can become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service” (p. 30).

Then Lewis determined that there were four loves and dedicated a chapter each to each one.

First is Affection, or storge in the Greek (“two syllables and the g is ‘hard,'” p. 41). He describes Affection as “a warm comfortableness . . . satisfaction in being together . . . the least discriminating of loves” (p. 41). Affection is “the humblest love. It gives itself no airs” (p. 43). Affection can be in combination with the other loves or not.

Next comes friendship. You’d think that would be part of Affection. But Affection can be felt for pets and even people we don’t like very much. If I understand it rightly, it’s not as deep as friendship.

This chapter contains Lewis’ famous quote, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one'” (p. 82).

“To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it” (pp. 72-73). This book was published in 1960 and its elements were first shared in a series of radio talks. I don’t know if Lewis would say the same today. However, I am sure he would emphasize even more in our day that “It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual” (p. 76).

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest (p. 77).

Friendship is also not just between two people, though it can be. A group of friends enhances the friendship of each with the other. “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets” (p. 77).

Friendship also has its good and bad sides. There is a certain exclusiveness to friendship–we can’t be as close to everyone as we are with our closest friends. But that can turn to snobbishness or cliqueishness. It can also form an “us against the world” attitude where we close off criticisms or efforts to point out problems or disagreements. Friendship must “invoke the divine protection if it is to remain sweet” (p. 111).

The third love, Eros, is what Lewis calls romantic love. I’ve always heard the Greek word eros meant sexual, physical love, but Lewis call that Venus. People can experience Eros and Venus together or just one or the other.

Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved. The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one’s own body. . .

Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give (p. 120).

Eros, like Friendship, can have good and bad sides. Our fallen nature can corrupt any good thing.

The last of the four loves, according to Lewis, is Charity or agape in Biblical Greek. Lewis warns many times that our natural loves can act as rivals to the love of God. But he also warns that love of God does not erase or demean our naturals loves. Rather, His love infuses them to be what He created them to be.

Lewis gives an example from Augustine (which, in the providence of God, I just finished reading). Augustine had a dear friend, Nebridius, whose death plunged him into despair and desolation. “This is what comes, [Augustine] says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God” (p. 153). Therefore, he concludes we shouldn’t love other people so much. “If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away” (p. 153). Lewis responds:

Of course, this is excellent sense. . . I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’ To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less (p. 153-154).

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken (p. 155).

The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. . . Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness (p. 155).

We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it (pp. 155-156).

Lewis then goes on to a good discussion of what it means when God says He loved Jacob but hated Esau, or what God meant when He tells us we can’t be His disciples without hating mother, father, etc., which He tells us in other places to love. One helpful quote from this section:

To hate is to reject, to set one’s face against, to make no concession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil. A man, said Jesus, who tries to serve two masters, will ‘hate’ the one and ‘love’ the other. It is not, surely, mere feelings of aversion and liking that are here in question. He will adhere to, consent to, work for, the one and not for the other (p. 157).

But then we’re called to show this agape kind of love to others. And when we try, we quickly see it’s not in us naturally.

The invitation to turn our natural loves into Charity is never lacking. It is provided by those frictions and frustrations that meet us in all of them; unmistakable evidence that (natural) love is not going to be ‘enough’— . . . But in everyone, and of course in ourselves, there is that which requires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness. The necessity of practising these virtues first sets us, forces us, upon the attempt to turn—more strictly, to let God turn—our love into Charity. These frets and rubs are beneficial (p. 173).

These can be raised with Him only if they have, in some degree and fashion, shared His death; if the natural element in them has submitted—year after year, or in some sudden agony—to transmutation (p. 174).

Even though this is an overly long review, I still feel I’ve only scratched the surface of the book. And even though I gleaned much from the book, I can already tell I’ll need to read it again some time.

I like to read whole chapters of this kind of fiction at a time so I can follow and hopefully retain the author’s thoughts all the way through. But with only six chapters in a 192-page book, the chapters are long. It wasn’t until the last chapter that I hit on the idea of taking it in much shorter bits and chewing on that for a while before moving on. I’ll have to try that through the whole book next time.

As always, Lewis has a way of stating and illustrating some things in a way to make them startlingly clear and convicting.

I’ll close with one last quote sharing the need for surrendering to God:

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’ (pp. 167-168).

I’m counting this book for the Nonfiction Classic in the Back to the Classics Challenge.

C. S. Lewis: Christian Reflections

Posted on December 15, 2021 by Barbara Harper

Reading C. S. Lewis’ nonfiction is always a stretch for the brain muscles. Even Elisabeth Elliot, a deep thinker herself, said that she could follow his line of reasoning but couldn’t always reproduce or explain it.

Lewis’ writings for the general population, like Mere Christianity, are accessible–I would not want to scare anyone away from them.

However, I checked out Lewis’ Christian Reflections several month ago–and laid them aside several times. I was about to give up on them completely when I decided to try once more, praying for understanding and discernment. And then I was able to follow the gist of what he was saying.

This book is a collection of Lewis’ essays on various topics pertaining to Christianity or from a Christian point of view. They were assembled and published by Walter Hooper, Lewis’ longtime secretary, after Lewis’ death. In Hooper’s preface, he shares which of the essays had been previously published or never before published. Many were written for Lewis’ peers, which explains the elevated level of philosophic thought (and the plethora of unfamiliar Latin phrases. I wished I had read this in my Kindle app, where at a touch I could get the translations).

There are fourteen essays in all, touching on topics like Christianity and Literature, Christianity and Culture, ethics, church music, and the psalms. Others delve into things like subjectivism and historicism and de futilitate. I’ll try to give a sentence or two about each:

“Christianity and Literature.” These first two were the ones I was most looking forward to, but they were also the most difficult. I can’t really sum them up in a short sentence or two. I think I need to come back and read them again some time in the future to get more out of them. This blogger has created a helpful outline of the essay.

“Christianity and Culture.”

“Religion: Reality or Substitute?” This essay discusses faith vs. reason and whether religion is a substitute for reality.

“On Ethics.” Lewis discusses whether “the world must return to Christian ethics in order to preserve civilization, or even in order to save the human species from destruction” p. 44).

“De Futilitate.” Lewis debunks the idea that we can’t really know anything so therefore everything is futile. Doesn’t that sound depressing?

“The Poison of Subjectivism.” This sounds a lot like the postmodernism of our era: maybe the seeds of it began here. “There are modern scientists, I am told, who have dropped the words truth and reality out of their vocabulary and who hold that the end of their work is not to know what is there but simply to get practical results” (p. 72). Indignation against another person’s or country’s morality . . .

is perfectly groundless if we ourselves regard morality as a subjective sentiment to be altered at will. Unless there is some objective standard of good, over-arching Germans, Japanese and ourselves alike whether any of us obey it or no, then of course the Germans are as competent to create their ideology as we are to create ours. If ‘good’ and ‘better’ are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each people, then of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than one another. Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring (p. 73).

“The Funeral of a Great Myth” takes a look at evolution not in the scientific sense but in the sense of society. Lewis says the thought of humanity continually getting better has been around longer than Darwin but at no point has been witnessed or proven true. Rather, just the opposite seems to be the case. Nor does the complex arise from the simple, but the complex often offers the seed of the simple.

“On Church Music.” In Lewis’ day, church music “glorifies God by being excellent in its own kind; almost as the birds and flowers and the heavens themselves glorify Him. In the composition and highly-trained execution of sacred music we offer our natural gifts at their highest to God, as we do also in ecclesiastical architecture, in vestments, in glass and gold and silver, in well-kept parish accounts, or the careful organization of a Social” (p. 95). “But in most discussions about Church Music the alternative to learned music is popular music” (p. 95) which he says can be shouted and “bellowed” as well as sung. Either one can be done to the glory of God—or simply because it’s what people like. Each one could be done with pride and condescension. Or, the musician “of trained and delicate taste” can “humbly and charitably sacrifice his own . . . desires and give people the humbler and coarser fare than he would wish” (p. 96), and the the less musically learned could “humbly and patiently, and above all silently, listen to music which he . . . cannot fully appreciate, in the belief that it somehow glorifies God (p. 96). To both, “Church Music will have been a means of grace; not the music they have liked, but the music they have disliked. They have both offered, sacrificed, their taste in the fullest sense” (p. 97) for love of others, the glory of God, and the good of the church.

“Historicism.” ““What I mean by a Historicist is a man who asks me to accept his account of the inner meaning of history on the grounds of his learning and genius” (p. 101). He doesn’t have a problem with those who find “causal connections between historical events” (p. 100), a work belongs to historians. “The mark of the Historicist, on the other hand, is that he tries to get from historical premises conclusions which are more than historical; conclusions metaphysical or theological or (to coin a word) atheo-logical” (pp. 100-101).

“The Psalms.” I’ve always appreciated the psalms for their humanness, their depth of emotion. So I was a little surprised Lewis called them “shockingly alien,” until he described his religious experience of “Anglican choirs, well laundered surplices, soapy boys’ faces, hassocks, and organ, prayer books” (p. 114). He has an interesting discussion on the call for justice in the psalms, “not something that the conscience-stricken believer fears but something the downtrodden believer hopes for” (p. 123), “the continual hope of the Hebrews for ‘judgement’, the hope that some day, somehow, wrongs will be righted” (p. 124). I would disagree with his view of imprecatory psalms, but I admit I don’t always know how to interpret them.

“The Language of Religion.” Lewis begins by discussing different kinds of language: ordinary (his example: “It was very cold.”), scientific (“There were 13 degrees of frost.”), and poetic, with several lines from Keats. He discusses how each type conveys some level of accuracy and elicits some degree of emotion, yet each has its failings. Then he applies this to apologetics, which he compares to trying to convey a certain shade of color to a blind man who has never seen color.

“Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer.” Lewis struggles here with the difference between biblical promises that we receive whatever we ask for in faith vs. Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane that the cup be removed, yet “not my will but Yours be done.” He doesn’t have a problem with a loving providence saying no. But he seems to have a problem with so many promises of answers to prayers of faith for what one asks, even of mountains being moved (acknowledging the metaphorical aspect), that it would seem that Jesus did not pray with that kind of faith. But I think Jesus did pray with that kind of faith–faith that the Father’s will would ultimately be done. To me, the mystery is that Jesus prayed that the cup would be removed when that cup was the very reason He came, as He said earlier. I’ve only been able to conclude that this shows the human side of our Lord. And it shows that deep dread of a coming crisis in the will of God is not necessarily sin. Jesus had planed and prepared for this before creation–it was His own will (I lay down my life, no on can take it from me) as well as the Father’s. Yet His human side shrank from it. That gives me great comfort.

“Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism.” This essay was not only fairly easy to follow, it was delightful. Lewis takes on the problem of modern theologians who “ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves” (p. 157). These Biblical critics “seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading” (p. 154). “I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this [the Biblical text]” (p. 155).

Lewis speaks not as a theologian, but as a “sheep telling shepherds what only a sheep can tell them” (p. 152). He claims some authority on the basis of how people have wrongly evaluated his writings and that of his friends, assuming things about the background and meaning which weren’t true. A longer quote:

A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia—which either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes–if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects (p. 153).

Those effects, Lewis goes on to say, would be to look elsewhere for spiritual truth or to become an atheist.

“The Seeing Eye.” Lewis here refers to the Russian astronauts who said they had not found God in space. He replies, ‘It is not in the least disquieting that no astronauts have discovered a god of that sort. The really disquieting thing would be if they had” (p. 167).

Space-travel really has nothing to do with the matter. To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find Him on earth are unlikely to find Him in space. (Hang it all, we’re in space already; every year we go a huge circular tour in space.) (p. 171).

He then discusses various scenarios of what kinds of other creatures we might find on other worlds and how we’d likely respond to them. He explored this to a degree in his science fiction series.

In the end, I was glad I persevered. I did enjoy and benefit from several of the essays, though it would take multiple readings to really grasp everything Lewis was saying in some of them. But it’s good to give one’s brain a workout.

I’m counting this book for the essay category for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge.

Laudable Linkage

Posted on June 12, 2021 by Barbara Harper

Here are some of the noteworthy reads discovered recently.

What Changed After C. S. Lewis Came to Christ? We think mostly of Lewis’ intellect, but other areas of his life changed as well. “Lewis was always submitting his life to Christ to be changed. He was always renewing his mind. He understood the New Testament concept of the atonement as involving dying with Christ. He continually submitted habits and attitudes to be killed . . . “

Why I Stopped Calling Parts of the Bible Boring. The theologian she quotes is not my favorite, but otherwise I like this. “Scripture is history, drama, and art. And more importantly, it is the surprisingly simple story of God redeeming his creation. But if in our simplifying or systematizing we end up relegating entire portions of Scripture to boring irrelevancy, we have lost the plot of a God who chose to reveal himself to us in the form of a breathtaking story.”

Helping Our Kids Put On the Armor of God, HT to The Story Warren “Every parent yearns for their child to stand in the face of peer pressure, evil enticements, false claims, and even amidst their own disappointments and losses. Fitting them in these six pieces of spiritual armor will help equip and enable them to stand.”

Cinderella, Strong Women, and the Courage to Be Kind, HT to The Story Warren. “Most of us are strong in ways that go unlauded, and maybe we don’t see our daily routine as strength because of it, or we think we have to be fighting for something—whatever that might look like. But we are strong women when we practice virtues like kindness, when we are patient, when we show compassion and turn away wrath.”

Biblical Submission Does Not Justify Abuse (Or Even Permit It). “Her submission is not your responsibility. Loving her like Christ loved the Church is your responsibility, and abusing her in action or word is a gross violation of the direct command that God has given you. Demanding submission as a cover for acting abusively is a loathsome sin and God notices.”

Midlife, Christ Is. “In midlife, Christ is a consolation for all the things I wish I’d done differently. He doesn’t change my past, but he can redeem it. . . . In midlife, Christ is a companion through all the worries and stresses.”

God Loves Your Perimenopausal Body. “To tell you the truth, the shock as this reality began to dawn in my life left me feeling as though my body might have heard the gospel for the first time even though my heart, mind, and soul had been committed to Jesus since I was a teen. All that time, I’d gotten the message at church that my body was a problem, not a gift.”

Awesome June Activities for Kids, HT to The Story Warren. When school is out and boredom creeps in, here are lots of great things to do.

Just in time for Father’s Day, HT to The Story Warren: a “Try not to Laugh” challenge involving dad jokes:

Happy Saturday!

Preparing for Easter with C. S. Lewis

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Barbara Harper

Preparing for Easter: Fifty Devotional Reading from C. S. Lewis. is a compilation of selections from his writings.

C. S Lewis is one of the most quotable Christians to have lived, maybe second to C. H. Spurgeon. In fact, I have a book titled The Quotable Lewis. So any book of quotes by him will have value.

By the title of this book, you’d expect an arc of quotations on the subject and application of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, leading up to Easter Day. If there was such an arc, I didn’t detect it. The book just seemed more like a random collection.

Of course, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ touch everything in the Christian life, so, in one sense, any subject within Christendom could be related. Yet many selections in this volume didn’t seem to fit the theme. For instance, one had to do with the value of myths. Did the compiler feel that any part of the true Easter story was a myth? Or was he applying this quote to the bunnies and eggs part of Easter? I don’t know.

The book is set up to begin about six and a half weeks before Easter, with the last reading for Easter Day. The readings aren’t numbered in the book, but I numbered them in my notes. I was confused when I ended up with forty-seven. Then I remembered some day’s readings contained two short selections. So, as the title says, there are fifty readings, but not over fifty days. I started a week late, so I ended the Sunday after Easter.

Some readings are familiar quotes, such as those from the Narnia series or Mere Christianity. Others are from more obscure sources, like private letters. I’m always amazed at how literary Lewis sounds even in a letter. I wonder if he was a perfectionist who made several copies of a letter until it sounded just right? Or did such prose just flow from him? I remember reading somewhere that his books did not need much editing, so perhaps the latter is true.

Though some of the selections were easy to grasp, some suffered from the loss of their context.

I was also reminded that, though I love much of what Lewis wrote, I don’t agree with him on every little point of doctrine. I have several of those places marked, but I don’t think I’ll list them all here for the sake of time and space.

So, all told, I was more than a little disappointed in this volume. Nevertheless, as I said, there are always rich nuggets in his writing. Here are a few I found:

Our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions (p. 7, originally from The Four Loves).

I think that many of us, when Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two sins that were an obvious nuisance, are inclined to feel (though we do not put it into words) that we are now good enough. He has done all we wanted Him to do, and we should be obliged if He would now leave us alone. As we say, ‘I never expected to be a saint, I only wanted to be a decent ordinary chap.’ And we imagine when we say this that we are being humble. But this is the fatal mistake. Of course we never wanted, and never asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us into. But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us. He is the inventor, we are only the machine. He is the painter, we are only the picture. How should we know what He means us to be like? (p. 14, originally from Mere Christianity).

We may be content to remain what we call ‘ordinary people’: but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility: it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is obedience (p. 15, originally from Mere Christianity).

A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven (p. 58, originally from Mere Christianity).

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same (pp. 60-61, (p. 58, originally from Mere Christianity).

If the new Self, the new Will, does not come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically (p. 72, originally from Present Concerns).

The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars (p. 72, originally from Present Concerns).

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing (p. 80, originally from Mere Christianity).

Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in (p. 212, originally from Mere Christianity).

One of the most poignant passages to me was a letter from Lewis to a Warfield Firor about facing the ramifications of aging (including compulsory retirement and rheumatism) and letting those “begin . . .to loosen a few of the tentacles which the octopus-world has fastened on one” and remind that “what calls one away is better” (pp. 138-139). (A portion of the letter is here.)

Though I doubt I’ll reread this book in coming Lenten seasons, I was blessed by some of its pages. I was also encouraged to reread Mere Christianity some time and to look up The Letters of C. S. Lewis.

Book Review: Becoming Mrs. Lewis

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Barbara Harper

I did not start reading anything by or about C. S. Lewis until about twenty years ago. Something I read then indicated that his marriage was just one of convenience so his American wife could stay in England. Since then I’ve read varying accounts of his relationship with his wife, Joy. Patti Callahan asserts that the woman whom Lewis mourned in A Grief Observed and who inspired Til We Have Faces had to have been more than just a dear friend. The letters between the two have been lost, but Patti researched all of the other pieces of Joy’s and Lewis’ writings she could find plus biographies of them to get to know Joy. Based on her findings, she crafted a fictional story titled Becoming Mrs. Lewis: The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis.

Joy was something of a child prodigy, graduating from high school and college early and earning a master’s degree by age twenty. She was Jewish, an atheist, and, for a brief time, a Communist. She married William Gresham in 1942 and had two sons, but the marriage was troubled almost from the start. Bill was an alcoholic with some seeming mental issues after his military service. In one incident when Bill was drunk, despairing, and talking of suicide, Joy dropped to her knees and prayer to a God she did not believe in – and felt something of an encounter. It was enough to change her perspective and start her searching for answers. She had read and respected C. S. Lewis and knew he had converted to Christianity from atheism, so she wrote to him.

They corresponded for three years. In the meantime, due to health issues and a need for more answers, Joy took a trip to England, where she stayed with a friend, rested, wrote, and finally met Lewis, who asked her to call him Jack. By this time, Joy’s marriage was seriously crumbling, and she was beginning to have feelings beyond friendship for Jack. But she wanted to keep her friendship with Jack pure. She determined to try to save her marriage – until she learned that her husband and cousin were having an affair. Then she asked for a divorce.

Joy returned home as soon as she was able and returned to England with her boys. She and Lewis visited often. She and the boys even stayed with Lewis and his brother, Warnie, for several weeks. They read and edited each other’s writing, walked, ate, drank. Joy fell hard for Jack, but he treasured the philea (brotherly, friendly) type of love they had. He felt he was too old to start thinking about romance, and, besides, in the eyes of his Anglican church, she was still married. When Joy had to face leaving the country due to bureaucratic regulations, Jack offered a civil marriage and bought her a house. When Joy was diagnosed with cancer, Jack realized his true feelings for her and married her in earnest.

Joy was an intelligent, complicated woman. She reminds me very much of the woman at the well in John 4, “looking for love in all the wrong places,” as the saying goes. Early in her life, she was made to feel that she could never “measure up.” Her father punished her for besmirching her A report card with a B. Her mother compared her unfavorably to her prettier, more graceful cousin. She sought for acceptance and assurance of her worth in a string of sexual encounters. She came to learn that sex in itself does not equal love.

Joy is also a reminder that true Christians don’t always fit in a nice, neat box. Really, we have to look no further than our Bibles to know that. Almost every major figure in the Old Testament had serious family and/or personal issues, and the NT epistles dealt with issues in churches that we scratch our heads over these days. Yet even in the messiness of her life both before and after salvation, and the up and down pattern of her growth, there’s a steady trajectory of growing in grace and knowledge.

I must know when it is enough. And I must trust God — again and again I was learning and relearning to trust the truth who had entered my sons’ nursery. The rusty and decrepit habit of trusting in only myself, only abiding in my own ability to make things happen, died hard and slow (Chapter 40).

Much of what I’d done — mistakes, poems, manipulations, success and books and sex — had been done merely to get love. To get it. To answer my question: do you love me? . . . From that moment on, the love affair I would develop would be with my soul. [God] was already part of me; that much was clear. And now this would be where I would go for love — to the God in me. No more begging or pursuing or needing. Possibly it was only a myth, Jack’s myth [Til We Have Faces], that could have obliterated the false belief that I must pursue love in the outside world — in success, in acclaim, in performance, in a man.

The Truth: I was beloved of God.

Finally I could stop trying to force someone or something else to fill that role (Chapter 44).

Jack: I’ve spent all my life in an attempt to find Truth and moral good and then to live it. I can’t discard my moral habits for feelings, which are just that — feelings (Chapter 42).

I enjoyed getting to know Joy and seeing Jack as a normal person in everyday mode. And I loved the truths quoted above that Patti incorporated into the story.

However, even given Joy’s penchant for looking for love through sex at first, there seems to me to be more of a sensual aspect of the story than needed to convey Joy’s misdirection. Even a hill is unnecessarily described as appearing “like the breast of a woman in recline.” Another friend mentioned the preponderance of alcohol in the story. Even allowing that different Christians have different convictions about whether and how much a Christian can consume, alcohol seems the major drink of choice for any occasion here. It’s mentioned even when we really have no need to know what the characters are drinking. I’m left wondering why. I don’t know how much of these things are the author’s choices and how much of it is integral to Joy’s story. Because of these issues, this book won’t appeal to everyone. While I don’t endorse everything in the book, I think if one can set aside some of the objectionable elements, Joy’s growth as a person, as a Christian, and her impact in Jack’s life and work can be seen and appreciated. The choice whether to read it or not must be left to individuals.

Linda is currently hosting a four-week book club to discuss this book. Week one’s discussion is here: week two is here. Week three is here., just posted today, with one more session coming next week. So it’s not too late to join in if the discussion if you’d like.

Linda also pointed us to a couple of nice videos. In this one, the author shares her thoughts and shows photos of Jack and Joy and videos of Jack’s house, the Kilns.

This one shows aspects of Oxford, integral to both Jack and Joy:

An interview with the author is here (HT to Linda).

(Sharing with Carole’s Books You Loved)

Laudable Linkage

Posted on June 2, 2018 by Barbara Harper

Here’s my latest round-up of noteworthy reads on the Web:

How to Shipwreck Your Theology. ““What is the most brilliant theology good for if it is to be shipwrecked in one’s own house?”

Maybe Women are Some of the Worst Offenders.

9 Things to Know About a Widow’s Grief.

Love Letter to a Lesbian, HT to True Woman, from a former lesbian.

“Let Me Know How I Can Help!” (This Will, Because They Won’t), HT to Linda. Practical ways to ask for or offer help in a time of need.

How Breastfeeding Changed My View of God, HT to True Woman. “God’s love for us is no Hallmark sentiment. This image is not primarily a celebration of our newborn cuteness…Rather, this verse reveals God’s hard-won, self-giving, dogged commitment to our good, a refusal to let us go—however frustrating we become, an insistence on seeing his image in us—and a painful provision for our most desperate need.”

C. S. Lewis’s Wonderful Letters to Children. I love his manner with them.

A Pathway to a Full Life.

This is cool and somewhat mesmerizing to watch: magnetism in slow motion, HT to The Story Warren:

Happy Saturday!