Temptation and Confession: My Knowledge About and Of C. S. Lewis
In my encounters with C. S. Lewis and Paul Holmer, I have come to understand that there is a difference between knowing about something and knowing of something. Knowledge about is factual; knowledge of is deep, personal, and mortal. Knowledge about has continued existence through a medium (index card, text, videotape, and so forth). Knowledge of lives and dies with a person. Knowing of is expressed in confession and fosters meekness.
Knowing about can tempt one to show off, and it easily leads to pride. Such was my state in discussing author C. S. Lewis and his works. Given the chance, as in a class on Lewis taught by Dr. Paul Holmer, I itched to proclaim what I knew about Lewis. The temptation, partially succumbed to, but in the end resisted, with intervention, proceeded along the following manner.
About sixteen years ago, while I was in college, I encountered C. S. Lewis for the first time. The occasion, if memory serves me well, was a public review of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by Zenos Hawkinson. I read the book in preparation for that review and discussion, and I was captivated by Lewis and Narnia. Because of the witch, Narnia was a land where it was “always winter and never Christmas.” I could identify with that, though at the same time I had some sense of Christmas as part of my own being.
After encountering The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I devoured Lewis. I checked out everything in the library by C. S. Lewis. I read each book from cover to cover. I talked about Lewis with friends, rejoiced in his stories, and began what has become an annual tradition for me — reading Lewis or some related author between the Thanksgiving holiday and New Year’s Day.
That reading expanded to works about Lewis and to works of his colleagues and friends. I came across the book edited by Barfield, A Light on C. S. Lewis, and valued it especially for Walter Hooper’s bibliography. Hooper put me in touch with Lewis’s other writings — those not noted on either the publisher’s blurb or the flyleaf of Lewis’s works already on my bookshelf. I read Hooper and Greene’s biography of Lewis, as well as Humphrey Carpenter’s account of the Inklings literary group, and I moved on to J. R. R. Tolkien’s world of Hobbits, Dwarfs, Elves, and Middle Earth. I was so consumed by Tolkien that I took to wearing a green coat and imagined my wanderings along the River Road towards the University of Minnesota as some kind of latter day adventure in Middle Earth.
But mentioning my graduate school days at Minnesota gets me ahead of my story. While still an undergraduate, I pursued other material on Lewis, Tolkien, George MacDonald, and Charles Williams. I was also attracted to the writings of Dorothy L. Sayers, though she was not part of the Inklings. My literary universe was expanding, and my file folders were bulging with the secondary literature I found among the popular and scholarly periodicals.
My adventures with Lewis and Company continued beyond undergraduate days, as I bided my time in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, trying to find out what I wanted to do with my life. In the meantime, I got married, and my wife and I spent the first few summer months revelling in our new-found companionship, while I also wrestled with Lewis’s Allegory of Love. I finished reading the Allegory about the same time that my letter of acceptance came from the graduate school of Minnesota.
At the University of Minnesota, I plunged into the stacks of Wilson and Walter libraries in search of anything else by Lewis, Tolkien, or others that had escaped my earlier attentions. I rejoiced when I discovered that Minnesota Public Radio was to air the entire 26-part BBC adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Every Saturday morning at 8:00, I huddled by the radio, listening to that week’s episode while my tape recorder captured the adventure for a second (or third) listening. I am amused when I consider the arrangements I had to make to be able to record those episodes. I did not own a stereo receiver (to capture the marvelous sound effects) and, hence, had bargained with my landlord on the floor below to allow me to interrupt his Saturday morning privacy so that I could listen to and tape the week’s installment. I have never encountered an adaptation of Tolkien so faithful to the original as that done by the BBC — it is wonderfully done. Yet, even that wonder did not convince my landlord to sit and listen with me.
While at the University of Minnesota, however, my captivation about Lewis (to borrow from Paul Holmer) began to be broken up by a language of Lewis — and it came from something totally outside the Lewis canon. It happened while I was walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge. That particular day happened to be an anniversary, of sorts, which was noted by the campus newspaper, the Minnesota Daily. It was the anniversary of John Barryman’s suicide. Barryman, a poet at the “U,” had decided to end his life by jumping off the same Washington Avenue Bridge that I was at that moment crossing. The account of Barryman’s death so gripped me that I wandered to the edge of the bridge and peered down at the coal flats, where I imagined that Barryman’s body had finally come to rest. It was an awe-full experience.
Now, I have never contemplated suicide. Mine is a happy life. But the thought of Barryman’s death led me back into Lewis’s writings in a different way. I still continued to pursue my interest in Lewis, but my interest had a different edge to it. In the course of some years, I have visited the Wade Collection at Wheaton College, sat at Lewis’ desk, seen the wardrobe, and admired the map of Narnia. I have even taken my interest across the sea and have seen the Kilns (now enclosed by development), sat in the Bodleian, walked the “High,” had beer in the Eagle and Child, visited Headington parish, and pondered the saying at Lewis’s grave: “Men must endure their going hence.” But all of this came with a new edge, a glorying not so much in Lewis and his world, although I find these things enjoyable still, but more in what Lewis had to say, what his meaning was, and how he lived his life on a deeper plane — his sense of “further up and farther in.”
It is by this route that I have come to resist the temptation to talk merely about Lewis. My confession here is less about the Lewis canon as an entity than it is of Lewis’s sense of Christianity as an education of a lifetime.
For what Lewis says and how he lived all came diving back to me in December of 1992, not in the form of anything he wrote or in what we may have said about him over the course of past discussions, but in a package sent from an attorney’s office.
The package contained the last will and testament of a close friend who had died one month earlier, in November, 1992, of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was 51 years old. The presence of that will and testament brought my grief crashing back down upon me. It rekindled my anger and rewet my tears, and plunged me back into a sorrow I had been trying to escape. Along with that grief came recollection.
It was a recollection of happier days, of cocktail parties in his apartment, of meaningful meetings and shared work — and especially of one particular memory and my later response.
We were in his apartment enjoying whiskey and wine following the completion of a successful conference. As our spirits warmed, our conversation moved towards religion. Maybe it was unfortunate that we focused on what, to my friend, were provincial concerns of the Covenant church. He, who grew up a Norwegian Lutheran but later threw away his faith, stopped our discussion cold with the remark, “Who the hell cares?”
“Who the hell cares?” It is a question I have kept just below the surface of my being. I kept it there when my friend was first diagnosed with lymphoma. I kept it there when he went through his first rounds of chemotherapy. I kept it there when the cancer was in remission. I kept it there when the cancer, more hideous than ever, reappeared and the final war for his body began. I kept it there when I visited him in the hospital or when I talked to him on the telephone. I kept it there even when I was overcome with the news of his passing.
Who the hell cares? In the end, my response to the question came not from Lewis, but from Mozart. It came from the words of the Requiem:
Lacrymosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandis homo reus;
Huic ergo parce, Deus!
Pia Jesu, Domine,
Dona eis requiem!
Lamentable is that day
On which guilty man shall
Rise from ashes to be judged;
Spare then this one, O God!
Merciful Lord Jesus
Grant them rest!
Amen.
It is about the only Latin I know. And it was the only way I could respond, the only way I could make sense of my friend’s undying question — Who the hell cares?
I have a sense that this is what Lewis meant, what Lewis is. My extensive reading about Lewis, at the moment, means little, except for one thing: It has helped me understand what it means “to be still, and know that I am God.” If I am, indeed, in enemy-occupied territory, if the objective state of affairs is fraught with danger, so be it. I am commanded to be still, and I am commanded to know. However I understand that command, I must obey. Or be torn apart. I think that Lewis would understand and that he would appreciate a capacity in me that he was instrumental in providing.