“From Ghosts to Persons: C. S. Lewis’ Vision of Christianity”
©C. Baxter Kruger, Ph. D. 1997, revised 2007
Occasionally you come across a writer who speaks so clearly to the human situation that you find yourself riveted, virtually hanging on every word, as if the secret of the universe is about to be told. C. S. Lewis is such a writer. He was a brilliant man, highly educated and certainly very well read, but he was also a man in touch with his own heart. Part of the genius of Lewis, it seems to me, is the way he harnessed his mind in the service of his heart, and his heart obstinately refused ambiguity for answers to its questions. Lewis turned over every leaf until he found the truth, and not just the truth in an academic sense, but the truth that satisfies the heart. But that is only one side of the story. To this combination of intelligence, hunger and determined spirit was added another gift—very rare among intellectual giants—simplicity. Lewis had a way of putting thoughts into words, especially the mysteries that we all experience but can never say. When you add such a heart and mind to the gift of simplicity, the result is not platitudes or pat answers, and certainly not empty church jargon, neither is it high-flying academic rhetoric. The result is extraordinary and even breathtaking insight into the plight of human existence, and an equally extraordinary clarity of expression. The plain fact is that Lewis says more in a turn of phrase than many writers do in whole books.
The Attraction of Lewis
For all of these reasons, C. S. Lewis commands the attention of the hungry heart and the respect of the intelligent searcher. But there is something else about Lewis that summons our attention. It is not so much his brilliant insights or his astonishingly clear and creative way of expressing them. It is more about Lewis himself. I see something going on inside of this man that itself is extraordinary. His Christianity has not left him bored, or worn out, or dried up, or cynical. His Christianity thrills him. Lewis is a grown man, a veteran of life who has not lost his passion or joy.
In an interview with Lewis, a Mr. Sherwood E. Wirt of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association comments: “Professor Lewis, your writings have an unusual quality not often found in discussions of Christian themes. You write as though you enjoyed it.” As an initial matter, this is a pitiful commentary, is it not, on the state of Christian writing, which probably has a lot to do with the reason most people don’t bother with Christian books? But the point for the moment is that Mr. Wirt sees in Lewis what he calls the quality of ‘enjoyment.’
I think Mr. Wirt has hit the target here, but he has not yet hit the bull’s eye. For what he sees coming through Lewis’ writings is not a mere ‘quality’ per se. It is the spirit of the man. It is Lewis’ heart. And more than just his heart, it is the way serious hope and freedom reign in his heart. It may well be true, as Lewis reminds us, that we will not have real fullness of joy until we get to heaven, but I think what we see in C. S. Lewis is a mighty good dose.
Not long ago my youngest daughter, Kathryn, came waltzing down the hall toward my study. She had her favorite doll under one arm, a book under the other and an piece of candy in her hand. She was singing a home-made medley of at least five songs. I recognized a bit of a country song, some Elvis and part of a hymn that I have no idea where she heard. What struck me so was her freedom. She was in her element—alive, free, filled and joyous. Her heart was dancing. As I watched her and enjoyed her, it hit me—that is C. S. Lewis. What I saw in Kathryn—that freedom, that filled-to-the-brim and overflowing life, that simple and honest and abounding joy—is what we meet in this grown man called C. S. Lewis. It is Lewis’ spirit, his freedom for life, his joy in his humanity that speak loudest. Somehow it all gets attached to his words, travels with his books across the world and comes off the page and haunts our imaginations. And it certainly commands our inquiry into his Christianity.
Arrows From the Spirit
If we are to understand Lewis’ Christianity, we need to understand his journey, and that takes us into his life and what we might call his ‘glimpses of glory,’ and his deep and passionate and determined quest to find out what they were. When you read Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, one of the things you learn is that his discussion of human longing is really autobiographical. Very early in his life Lewis caught a glimpse of something, of another world, of something moving behind the scenes of life. He tells us about moments when this happened to him in his childhood.
As Is stood before a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s ‘enormous bliss’ of
Eden
(giving the full, ancient meaning to ‘enormous’) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past… and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again... It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
It is easy for us in modern , saturated as we are with hyperbole and exaggeration and the dazzling rhetoric of preachers and politicians and salesmen, to miss the point here.
This is a grown man speaking, a man of letters, a man who has read and remembers more books that most of us will ever read together, a man who thinks on a level we don’t even know exists, a veteran of life and of wars both within and without. Lewis is dead serious. Something broke in upon him as he stood beside that bush. Something vast and deep and ancient and beautiful. It wrapped itself around a simple memory from childhood. But it was far more than a memory. Whatever it was that he encountered was more real and weighty, more alive and beautiful than anything he had ever encountered in his life. So real and so weighty and so alive that, as he said, ‘everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant by comparison.’
Theologically speaking, Lewis encountered a revelation of the Holy Spirit. As Karl Barth would put it, Lewis was addressed by the living Word of God. An arrow from the Holy Spirit was shot into his heart. But Lewis did not know that. He did not know what it was. He did not know where it came from or from whom. But he knew that it was real, and he knew that he wanted more of it.
There were other moments of revelation like this in his childhood and many more throughout his life. He called them “stabs of joy.” You can sense a certain frustration in Lewis in that these stabs of joy were never that clear or perfectly intelligible. They were faint scents, as he says, of a wonderful flower not yet known. The revelations were shy, more akin to hints than plain statements, even vague. And they were slippery, fleeting. They vanished as quickly as they came, and nothing he could do could make them stay or conjure them up again.
One of the tricks of Lewis’ fictional writing (The Chronicles of Narnia, for example) is the way his leading characters rarely get a full revelation. They get hints. The sort of hints that put them on a razor’s edge. They are not sure that what they heard or saw was from Aslan, the Lord, or merely the product of their own imaginations. A word comes, a flash of insight, and whether it is something they dreamed up or a revelation from outside of themselves, they are irresistibly placed at a crossroads and have to make a decision to follow or not.
This tension of revelation and ambiguity is straight from Lewis’ own life. It is also very familiar to all of us, which is why we relate to his characters. How many times have we cried out, “Lord, make your way clear!” and then find only hints? There are times when the map is clear but the road is hard to walk. But more often it is the map that is the problem. Lewis’ characters find their answers only as they make a decision, step forward and walk, only as they follow the hints, risks and all. The solution comes in walking. For Lewis ‘the freedom to choose,’ properly understood, is one of the chief things that makes it possible for us to be real persons and not mere robots.
The arrows of home shot by the Spirit into Lewis’ heart produced a profound longing. To get a glimpse of something vast and ancient and beautiful passes judgment, so to speak, upon our present level of experience. We may be content with hamburger, but when we get a taste of a properly cooked filet, hamburger will no longer do. We now know that it is just hamburger. Once you hear the echoes of the ancient Word from beyond time, then somehow inside you know that there is more to life, more to your life, that you were made for higher things. And you cannot go back, at least not without pain.
You certainly are free to try to pretend that you haven’t heard anything. You can try to stop up your inner ears, so that you no longer hear. But you are now fundamentally disturbed. Your life may well be normal, comfortable, perhaps even good, but it is now haunted by the rumors of glory. You now understand it as just life, just existence, not glory. That is the logic of redemption.
You are given a glimpse of something more real and full and glorious than you have ever imagined, and it passes judgment upon your present experience. It stirs uneasiness and malcontentedness within your soul. Now that the arrow of the Spirit has struck your heart, you feel empty, unsatisfied, unfulfilled. Once you hear the rumors of the far-off land, you are inevitably plagued with a sense of cosmic estrangement, a sense of exile, on the outside, as Lewis says, of the real world, on the wrong side of the door.
This is the truth about all of us. It is the human predicament. We have all been addressed. And we know that we are made for higher things. It all stirs within us, whether we are very conscious of it or not. And the stew that this stirring makes inside of us Lewis calls ‘desire,’ ‘longing’ and even ‘joy.’ He calls it ‘joy’ because even the frustration that it creates is more precious to us than anything else on earth. But his best phrase for it is ‘the inconsolable secret.’
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence…
The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.
I don’t think there is a better image of C. S. Lewis. Phrases such as ‘the inconsolable secret’ are not born in the academy; they are born in the crucible of pain, of heart-felt struggle with life and living. But ‘the inconsolable secret’ is not only the best way to describe Lewis; it is also the best way to describe you and me and our children. And it is the best way to describe modern .
In the 1600’s, Sir Isaac Newton put God in a box and reduced Him to a spectator watching the universe from a distance. With God safely tucked away somewhere up there, the Western world moved on with life, trusting that science, technology and politics could solve our problems and deliver our dreams to us. We have hoped in them now for a long time. And they have given us many things, many conveniences and comforts and freedoms. In fact, they have helped produce the most free and prosperous nation on earth—but also the most anxious. For all of their gifts, science, technology and politics have not been able to touch the soul. Neither has wealth or sports or entertainment. They have not answered the real question. The longing, the aching, the inconsolable secret, is still with us, still in us, still unanswered, and still passing judgment upon us and our conveniences, comforts and prosperity. It is still reminding us that we have not yet found the higher thing for which we all know we are made.
With Martin Luther we have a man riddled with guilt and desperately searching for forgiveness. In C. S. Lewis we have a man riddled with an inconsolable longing and desperately searching for home. Could it be that the New Reformation is not going to be about justification, but about finding home in Jesus? I suspect that it will be so. In fact, I would say that the first stirrings of the New Reformation are already happening. That is what our cultural anxiety is all about. And that is precisely why C. S. Lewis is more popular today than ever. He is the apostle of the longing heart.
The First Dance: The Trinity as Our Home
But what is Lewis after? What is the object of his longing? What is the inconsolable secret? Lewis searched for 30 odd years before he found his answer. He says that he tried everything, (and I suspect that he meant it) but to no avail.
In his essay, “The Weight of Glory,” which is by far my favorite and from which I have been drawing heavily, you can discern three aspects of our human longing. The first we might call the desire to be baptized. I don’t mean baptism in the sense of water, or of the church sacrament. I mean baptism in the sense of being immersed into something to the point of being filled with it. In the essay, Lewis talks about beauty and the simple pleasure of seeing something beautiful, and about how in seeing it, we want more.
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that ‘beauty born of murmuring sound’ will pass into a human face; but it won’t.
But that is exactly what we long for. The longing is not so much about beauty as it is about being filled, baptized. But filled with what?
In Mere Christianity, Lewis notes the Biblical distinction between Bios and Zoe. Although both words are translated ‘life’ in our English Bibles, they mean two completely different things. Man, Lewis says, in his natural condition, from his mother’s womb, has Bios, biological life, but he does not have Zoe, spiritual life. The difference between the two, Lewis says, is the difference between a photograph and a real place, a statue and a real man. “This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.” The filling we long for is a filling with real spiritual life, not bios, but zoe. But what is this spiritual life? What is Zoe?
The second aspect of longing in The Weight of Glory has to do with reunion. It is a longing “to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off,” “to be acknowledged, to meet with some response.” Here Lewis shifts from the abstract to the personal and relational, from discussions of filling and fullness and life, to being heard and known—to fellowship.
But there is yet a third level. For it is not merely fellowship, but a certain kind of fellowship for which we long. In the essay Lewis talks about glory in terms of fame. Not the fame of Hollywood, “not fame,” Lewis says, “conferred by our fellow creatures” but fame of a much more profound nature, “fame with God, approval or (I might say) ‘appreciation’ by God.”
…nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised.
To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
Lewis moves from longing as the desire to be filled (baptized) to the desire to be reunited, reconnected and known (fellowship) and now to the desire of being a thrill to the heart of God. It is when you combine these three that you come very close to the soul of the universe. What we want is to be a delight to the Father’s heart, and to be so filled with His pleasure that our whole being dances in its fellowship. And with that we are a hairs’ breadth away from the Holy Trinity and the great dance of the Triune God.
Lewis was shocked at this. He said that it never crossed his mind that what he longed for was God. “No slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy.” Gradually it began to dawn on him that behind the whole universe was something very lively, not static, but personal, and more than personal.
And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.
Behind Lewis’ longing and ours is ‘the first dance,’ the original dance, the fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit. This fellowship is not boring, joyless, sad or empty. This is a living fellowship, a fellowship of passion and delight and love, of creativity and joy and glory and communion—Zoe.
Our longing, the passion of our lives is to be taken into that circle and given a place in it, to be filled with that life, to share in the very delight and pleasure that the Father has for his beloved Son, to share in their joy together in the Spirit, to live in the Spirit of Sonship. That is what we are after. As Lewis says, “The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us…”
There is a circle of glory in this universe, a great dance of life and fullness and delight, and we were made to live in it. Until we find our place in that circle and are filled with its Triune glory and fullness, we are sad creatures, empty and hollow and lonely, more akin, as Lewis would say, to statues or ghosts than to real persons.
Three points need to be noted here. First, what Lewis is saying is that nothing less than the life of God, the very life the Father, Son and Spirit have together, with all of its glory and fullness and joy, is what we are given. It is not something like the life of the Triune God that is given to us. It is nothing short of the Triune life itself.
Second, we cannot be real persons on our own. We find our personhood, our wholeness, our completeness by being filled with something outside of ourselves. We are completed by sharing in the Trinitarian life. As we share in it, as we are filled with the fellowship and love and joy of the Father, Son and Spirit, and as that fellowship and love flows out of us toward others, we become real persons. We do not lose ourselves or our identity or our individuality in the process; we find ourselves, and indeed, as Lewis says, become more truly ourselves than ever.
Third, when Lewis speaks of our longing in terms of being delighted in, as an artist delights in his work, or a child delights in being praised, we must be careful to understand this as a Trinitarian idea. When he speaks of being ‘a real ingredient in the divine happiness,’ he does not mean that we must figure out a way to please God, that we must clean ourselves up, make ourselves good, so that God will then delight in us. There is only one circle of delight in the universe. The Father loves the Son, his beloved, and in him he is utterly thrilled. “Thou art My beloved Son, in whom My soul delights” (Matthew 3: 17; 17:5). We are not to stand before such delight, and wonder how we could ever thrill the Father’s heart like Jesus does. The good news is that we are included in Jesus Christ. We have been given the gift, as Professor James Torrance says, of participation in Jesus’ very own relationship with the Father in the Spirit, and thus in the delight of the Father for His own Son.
The Father has given to us the Son and the Spirit to draw us into a life of shared communion—of participating through the Spirit in the Son’s communion with the Father—that we might be drawn in love into the very trinitarian life of God.
Is this participation in the Trinitarian life something that is yet to be? Or is this delight not already being played out in you and me, and in all creation? Is not Jesus already sharing himself with us? Is he not already giving us a place in his anointing in the Spirit, a share in his knowledge of the Father’s love and affection and delight? Is his life and delight not already moving beneath the surface of our lives and forming the core of our love and laughter and joy? To ask these questions another way, are Bios and Zoe completely separated, or is it not that Zoe is present and seeking to emerge and express itself in our Bios?
The Incarnation: The Sharing of Life
It is for this very reason that Jesus Christ has come to earth. He did not come to be our example. He came to share his own life and his own relationship with his Father in the Spirit with us. He came to share is his own experience of the Father with us, his Spirit of sonship. We are not talking about religion here. We are talking about participation, about sharing in Jesus’ relationship with his Father, about partaking of his knowledge of the Father. The fundamental difference between religion and Christianity is that religion is all about what we try to do for a distant but watching God, whereas Christianity is about Jesus sharing his own experience of his Father with us through the Spirit of sonship.
Lewis believes in the incarnation. Why would the Son of God, the beloved in whom the Father’s soul is thrilled, come to earth? “He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has…” He came to us so that the great dance of the Triune life, the delight of the Father, Son and Spirit—and nothing less—could be extended to all of us, and played out in us, indeed in the whole creation.
Now, let me make three points about Lewis’ understanding of the work of Christ. The first is really not a new point, but an underlining of what I have just said. It is one thing to see that Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It is another to see that he is the one who baptizes in the Spirit (John 1:29-33). Jesus comes not only to justify us (to take away our sin); he also comes to adopt us (to give us a place in his anointing with the Spirit). The Western Church has been too preoccupied with the taking away part (with guilt and justification), which is blessedly true, of course, but not the whole truth. Alongside the retrospective dimension of Christ’s work—the cleansing and removal of our sin—there is an equally important prospective dimension—the giving of the Holy Spirit. Lewis sees that the ultimate reason for the coming of Christ was not merely to remove our sin, but to fill us with his own life, to extend to us the circle of life he shares with his Father and Spirit.
Second, for Lewis, the incarnation is the central miracle of Christianity. Everything hinges on the fact that it was the eternal Son of God, the one who lives in the circle of Divine life with the Father and the Spirit, who became human. Without this fact, we have no access to the Trinitarian circle.
What, then, is the difference which He has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless, ‘spiritual’ life, has been done for us. Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work—the bit we could not have done for ourselves—has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us. Remember what I said about ‘good infection.’ One of our own race has this new life: if we get close to him we shall catch it from Him.
Here we have, among other things, a wonderful statement about the finished work of Christ. His mission was to extend the Triune life to us. And he did just that. He removed our alienation and brought the life of the Trinity to us.
Third, the way the life of the Trinity, in the man Jesus, gets into us is by what Lewis calls “good infection.” It rubs off on us, like being warmed when you stand by a fire. Draw near to Jesus and his life rubs off on you, his glory and joy and fellowship with the Father infect you. That is the way we move from being statues to real persons, from Bios to Zoe, from ghosts to solid people. Christ is, as T. F. Torrance says, the personalizing person. The way it works, in Lewis’ mind, is by friendship. As we know Jesus, his life infects us and we live toward others out of this ‘good infection.’
It is here, more than anywhere else, that Lewis leaves the theologian in me frustrated. Given what Lewis is saying, the question follows: Is the human race already infected by the life of Christ, or is the human race outside of Christ and in need of beginning the infection process? This is a simple, but rather huge question.
The logic of Lewis’ thought seems to be: We were created to share in the Triune life and we are restless until we find it in Jesus. That is good as far as it goes, but it seems to suggest that we are restless before Jesus Christ actually comes into our lives, as if we have this longing on our own without his work within us. I am surprised and disappointed that Lewis did not work out more clearly how his (and our) great longing was rooted in Jesus Christ and his finished work.
My point is that you cannot be homesick if you have no home. Jesus Christ has laid hold of us, cleansed us and taken us home to his Father. In him we belong to the Father, Son and Spirit. We already have a home. And the Spirit has been sent to us to tell us about it. And it is because the Spirit is shooting the arrows of home into our hearts that we are homesick, and long for home. Lewis seems to have our hearts longing for home, before Jesus has given the Spirit an arrow to shoot.
We do need to be ‘infected’ with the life of Christ. But the infection is already happening. The first fruit of the infection is longing, homesickness. Well, properly speaking, the first fruit of infection with Christ’s life is our existence, then comes the longing. And I believe that everything good in our lives, all our joys and delights, our love and all fellowship are already the first-fruits of this good infection, whether we believe it or not.
Jesus Christ is the light of the world (John 8:12). He is our true home. He has given us a place in his own world and in his own life with his Father and Spirit. Descartes was wrong. It is not, “I think, therefore I am.” It is, “Jesus Christ has made a home for me with his Father, therefore I am, and therefore I long for life in the Father’s house.” We have a home in Jesus Christ, by the sovereign grace of the Triune God. The Holy Spirit is telling us about it. Therefore we long to experience the glory and life that are ours in Christ. Therefore we are frustrated and empty and sad until we come to experience our true selves and our true life in Jesus’ relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit. Anything less leaves us empty and bored and lonely.
Creation as the Burning Bush
It is here that we come to one of the most thrilling themes in Lewis’ writings. I call it his ‘sacramental vision of creation.’
The Greek Orthodox theologian, Kalistos Ware, wrote an article on Lewis and Greek Orthodoxy. Bishop Ware says:
In one of her addresses the Anglican writer Evelyn Underhill recalled the words of a Scottish gardener who, on meeting someone newly returned from the island of Iona, remarked: ‘Ah! Iona is a very thin place.’ When asked what he meant, he answered, ‘There’s very little between Iona and the Lord.’
This is the Orthodox approach to the realm of nature. Creation is seen as a sacrament of the divine presence; the cosmos is a vast and all-embracing Burning Bush, permeated with the fire of God’s eternal glory.
Ware goes on to say that that is not just the Orthodox approach to creation; it is C. S. Lewis’.
John Calvin talks about creation as the theatre of God’s glory, the stage, so to speak, where the drama is played out. For Lewis, creation is not so much a stage as a sacrament. Everything has or can have a double meaning. A tree is merely a tree. A grapefruit is merely a grapefruit. Baseball is just a game that we play. But they can all be so much more; they can be ‘tiny theophanies.’ For the Triune God addresses us and shares life with us through them. We can encounter nothing short of the delight and glory of the Father, Son and Spirit in ordinary things like trees, grapefruits and baseball.
For the last several years my friend Charles Brady has had a box of ruby red grapefruits sent to us for Christmas. One morning back in January, I took the kids to school, came home and walked into our kitchen. As I looked across the room, a ruby red grapefruit, sitting on the window seal, caught my eye. I picked it up and started peeling it at the window. The sun was shining through the trees, and although its was January, it was a warm and altogether beautiful morning. As I tasted the grapefruit, unsummoned tears welled up in my eyes. At first the tears frightened me, as I had no idea what was happening. But then it began to dawn on me that a deep gratitude was stirring in my heart. I thought, “Lord you didn’t have to make me. You did not have to give me hands and feet and eyes. You did not have to give me taste buds or food to eat, not to mention food that only nourishes my body, but food like this grapefruit that makes me smile, but you did. You took the time to think it all through and work it out, every detail. And here I stand, a man, your creation, not empty and sad and lonely, but full.” The goodness of it all overwhelmed me. The only words I could speak were “Thank you.”
There is more going on in this universe than meets our blind eyes. What we encounter and love on the baseball field—the passion, the joy, the fellowship, the camaraderie, the spirit—or in the simple act of eating a grapefruit—is not merely human. It is the great dance of the Trinity breaking through and filling the earth with its joy and glory.
Three points must be highlighted here if we are to understand Lewis’ sacramental universe. We must realize first that the Father, Son and Spirit are not spectators, up there somewhere in heaven watching us and the creation from a distance. Lewis was no deist and he did not believe in the absence of Jesus Christ. He believed in the presence of Jesus Christ. And the present Jesus is not confined to the church building. This world belongs to the Triune God and it is permeated with the Trinitarian life.
Second, we must not get the Trinity too tangled up with creation itself, with trees and baseball and people. The Triune life is present, but it does not reside in things, such that to have the thing is therefore to have the life of the Triune God. To play baseball is not necessarily to participate in the Triune life. One can eat a grapefruit and miss the glory of the Trinity altogether. The delight of the Father, Son and Spirit does not reside in the beauty of a sunset, or in the smile of a little girl, or in the romance between a man and a woman. It permeates them, comes through them, and expresses itself through them, but the Trinitarian life always remains other, distinct.
Third, there are two extremes to avoid here. One is the confusion of the life of the Trinity with creation, such that to see a sunset is to see the Triune God. The other is their separation, such that to see a sunset is just to see a sunset. It is one of the chief tricks of the evil one to confuse us at this point so that we merge the life of the Trinity with some part of creation itself or with some idea. We confuse the Trinitarian joy with baseball itself, with a sunset, with romance, with music or a person, or as Lewis would say, with a good memory, and off we go pursuing baseball, sunsets and romance or music or moments in our past—as if they have in themselves what we want. They become goals rather than mediums, ends rather than the means to the end. They then become idols, false gods, false saviors. What we get in our pursuit is just baseball, just a sunset, just romance, just music, and not the life and joy and fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit for which we long. And our pursuit inevitably leaves us empty, not to mention what it does to our relationships with others and with creation.
These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the heart of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Think of a man who confuses the life of the Trinity with his wife (of course this works the other way around as well). He thinks that his wife is the answer to the riddle of his longing, that getting married, that romance and sex are the real prizes that his soul craves. For a while things seem to be working beautifully. But in time that old sadness and longing stir within his soul. He longs for the joy and the fullness of the Triune God and he is demanding it from his wife. But she does not have it to give. The Trinitarian life comes through her but it does not reside in her. She does not possess it. The wife, of course, only feels incredible pressure from her husband to produce something that is well beyond her personal capabilities. No matter what she does, it can never be enough. It is impossible for her to please him, because what he is actually demanding from her is the life and fullness of the Triune God. And she is not the Trinity. Until we get this straight, it is a miracle that we do not destroy one another, demanding from each other the reality that none of us possesses to give.
One of my favorite characters in Lewis is the unforgettable Mrs. Fidget.
I am thinking of Mrs. Fidget, who died a few months ago. It is really astonishing how her family have brightened up… Mrs. Fidget very often said that she lived for her family. And it was not untrue. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it. ‘She lived for her family,’ they said, ‘what a wife and mother!’ She did all the washing; true, she did it badly, and they could have afforded to send it out to a laundry, and they frequently begged her not to do it. But she did. There was always a hot lunch for anyone who was at home and always a hot meal at night (even in midsummer). They implored her not to provide this. They protested almost with tears in their eyes (and with truth) that they liked cold meals. It made no difference. She was living for her family… Mrs. Fidget, as she so often said, would ‘work her fingers to the bone’ for her family. They couldn’t stop her. Nor could they help. Indeed they were always having to help. That is, they did things for her to help her do things for them which they didn’t want done…
This is Lewis at his insightful best. Here is a fascinating picture of how things go terribly wrong. Mrs. Fidget confused the life of the Trinity, for which she longed, with being a mother. She thought that what she wanted was in motherhood itself, and not just motherhood itself, but in a non-relational image of motherhood. She was driven by her notion of the ideal mother. She became enslaved to it. In the process she became less and less a real mother in relationship with her children, lost her joy, and became more and more of what Lewis’ calls a ‘ghost.’ Moreover, she drug her family into her confusion through shame and manipulation.
What a terrifying irony. Mrs. Fidget’s pursuit of an ideal motherhood turned her into a non-relational imposer. She was not in dialog with her children and their dreams and wishes. She imposed her vision upon them, so much so that when she died, her family ‘brightened up.’
The drawn look has gone from her husband’s face; he begins to be able to laugh. The younger boy, whom I had always thought an embittered, peevish little creature, turns out to be quite human. The elder, who was hardly ever at home except when he was in bed, is nearly always there now and has begun to reorganise the garden. The girl, who was always supposed to be ‘delicate’ (though I never found out what exactly the trouble was), now has the riding lessons which were once out of the question, dances all night, and plays any amount of tennis. Even the dog who was never allowed out except on a lead is now a well-known member of the Lamp-post Club in their road.
It may not be motherhood with you, but more than likely there is some false savior in your life. Perhaps the secret prize is the image of a successful business person, perhaps it is being a certain kind of sportsmen, or having money, or driving a particular kind of car, or living in a special house in the right part of town, or being a member of a particular group or church, or heading up a church program. Whatever it is, your pursuit of it is leaving you frustrated and empty, and it is reaping destruction in your relationships. For like Mrs. Fidget, you are imposing your quest upon those around you.
You were made to be filled with the great dance of the Triune God. This Trinitarian life is by nature relational. It is not to be identified with status or things or possessions or power, such that to have these things or to achieve them is to have the Trinitarian life itself. Quite the opposite.
The other error, the separation of the life of the Trinity from our humanity or from creation, is equally disastrous. While the Triune life of God is not be confused with baseball itself or with sunsets or romance or husbands and wives, or motherhood or painting or fishing, neither is it to be separated from them.
We long to share in the life of the Triune God. We cannot do that alone, without others, without things like baseball, sunsets and romance, motherhood and music and work. This is the way the Triune God has set up the kingdom. The life and joy, the fullness and delight of the Trinity meet us in our humanity—through our relationships, through our motherhood and fatherhood, in our playing and working, in our gardening and cooking and cleaning and painting. If we fail to see this, then we leave marriage and romance behind, we leave work and baseball, cooking and sunsets at the door, and wander off into an abstract, non-relational world to find God beyond our humanity.
Someone ask me recently, “what is God doing in your life?” If you could have heard the way he said God, you would have known that his question was loaded. As soon as he asked it a feeling of inferiority swept through my heart. For I knew that he was asking me what supernatural, what grand and astonishing thing had God done in my life recently. And I knew that if I didn’t have a rather grandiose story to tell that my spirituality would be questioned. “Well,” I said, “He gave me a ruby red grapefruit, two daughters, a son, baseball, fishing lures, friends and a wife to dance with.” Many Christians, in their proper pursuit of Zoe, spiritual life, leave behind their Bios, natural life, as if they can have the one without the other.
If we separate the life of the Trinity from our humanity then we fall into a wholesale de-valuing of the natural, the ordinary things of life. The dignity of our work vanishes. For what is managing a hardware store or running a bread route or making fishing lures compared to being a spiritual person in the pursuit of God?
When the life of the Trinity is separated from creation, our pursuit of spiritual life then leads us to discount ordinary things, to look over ordinary people and beyond ordinary events in our quest for God. While the great dance of the Trinity is not to be reduced to creation; we have no access to it without it. The life of the Triune God permeates creation and it is within creation that we experience it.
The farmer and writer from Kentucky, Wendell Berry, is deeply troubled by the way Americans treat the land. He traces the problem to its source; “perhaps the great disaster of human history is one that happened to or within religion: that is the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from the creation.” When you separate the life of the Trinity from the earth, then the earth is not important in your pursuit of the divine life. In this way of thinking you can ignore the earth, pollute it or even destroy it if you so desire, for it has nothing to do with God’s relationship with you or your’s with God. But if creation is the very thing that shouts the glory of God to us, if creation is the way that that Trinitarian life reaches out to us and touches us, speaks to us, then to destroy it is a singular disaster, the folly of fools.
The same is true with people, with marriage, family and children, with work, with cooking and cleaning, with music and art and baseball and cookouts. They are sacraments. The glory of the Holy Trinity reaches us through them. Jesus Christ extends the circle of the Triune life to us through ordinary people and ordinary things and ordinary events (which, of course, means they are far from ordinary). To ignore them, to look over them, to pollute them or destroy them or to walk away from them is sheer madness.
The longing within C. S. Lewis and within us is not just for a share in the life and joy and delight of the Father, Son and Spirit. It is for a share in their Triune life as it integrates with our humanity, as it gathers up our marriages and our baseball and our cooking, our work and painting and music and fills them all. As Lewis says, “who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?” Who really wants a halo and to spend their time sitting on a cloud? What we want is incarnation. We want the life and fellowship and glory of the Triune God filling our humanity and the whole range of our human existence, and indeed all the earth.
Someone referred to C. S. Lewis as the most converted man they had ever met. They were not talking about the depth of his religious fervor. They were talking about the way Lewis’ Christianity lit up his whole life. “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” And that is exactly what we meet in C. S. Lewis, a man who sees all of life as a sacrament of the abounding philanthropy of the Triune God, a man who is thrilled to be in the middle of it all, whose heart abounds with serious joy, whose spirituality does not lead him to deny his humanity but to embrace it, to celebrate it, to glory in it, to love it and cherish it and to enjoy it.
Out of the Shadowlands
Meantime, for Lewis, the human race has a serious problem on its hands—we cannot see properly. We are, as Chaucer says, like a drunk man who knows he has a house but can’t find his way home. We know we are made for higher things, be we cannot see how to get there, and we keep making a mess of things in the process. Lewis was a master at bringing us face to face with the problem of our spiritual blindness. The story of the Dwarfs and their inability to see Narnia at the end of his classic tale, The Chronicle of Narnia, is a case in point. But in his novel, Till We Have Faces, which he liked best of all his works, Lewis sets forward his most vivid picture of spiritual blindness.
The tale revolves principally around two sisters—Orual and Psyche. They are princesses in the Kingdom of Glome. All is well in the kingdom until there are a series of famines and the Priest of the goddess Ungit comes to the King with the horrible news that Psyche must be sacrificed to the goddess.
Within a few short days, Psyche is drugged, and the whole kingdom forms a holy processional to the sacred tree, to which Psyche is chained and left to be eaten by the shadowbrute. Several days later Orual goes to the sacred tree determined to give Psyche’s remains a proper burial. At length she gets there only to discover no sign of Psyche. There is no blood, no bones, no torn fragments of clothing, nothing. She wanders away toward the river grieving. There she discovers Psyche’s ruby ring. While trying to understand what the ring may mean she hears a voice. She looks up, and there, just across the river, stands Psyche.
Astonished, Orual cannot wrap her mind around what she sees. Could it be Psyche? No, it must be a ghost. But no, it is Psyche, radiant and beautiful, indeed more beautiful than ever. But it must be a dream, a terrible trick of the gods. Psyche is dead, eaten by the horrible shadowbrute.
Orual crosses the river and runs to embrace Psyche. It is not a dream. Psyche is alive and well. After a long embrace, Psyche tells Orual her story of how the god of the west wind saved her from the shadowbrute and brought her to be his bride and to live in his grand palace. Orual, so thrilled to have Psyche back, and assuming that the trauma has deluded Psyche, listens to her story as a mother listens to the tall tale of her son.
Psyche led Orual a few yards away to sit in the heather. Ever the warmest of host, she serves a glass of wine to Orual, the choicest of wine and in the most exquisite goblet. She asked Orual if she likes the goblet. Orual nods in agreement, and Psyche gives her the goblet as a gift. But the truth, however, is that instead of choice wine and a gorgeous goblet, Orual only sees Psyche cup her hands and give her a drink of water from a pool nearby. She still believes Psyche is traumatized and is so thrilled to have her back that she plays along. But Psyche’s tale about gods and palaces and being dressed in beautiful gowns continues on and on. Orual sees no palace, no finery, only Psyche dressed in rags.
‘Psyche! …I can’t bear this any longer. You have told me so many wonders. If this is all true, I’ve been wrong all my life. Everything has to be begun over again. Psyche, is it true? You’re not playing a game with me? Show me. Show me your palace.’
‘Of course I will,’ she said, rising ‘Let us go in…’
“Is it far?’
Psyche gave Orual a quick, astonished look. ‘Far to where?’ she asked.
‘To the palace, to this god’s House!’
‘Orual,’ Psyche said, beginning to tremble, ‘what do you mean, is it far?’
…With this Orual became frightened, though she still had no notion of the truth. ‘Mean?’ she said. ‘Where is the palace? How far have we to go to reach it?’
Psyche began to cry. Through her tears and trembling she stared hard into Orual’s eyes. ‘But this is it, Orual! Can’t you see it? You are standing on the stairs of the great gate.’
There the two of them stood. Together, beyond all dreams and against all odds. Psyche was real enough. She was no dream. But Orual saw no palace, no great stairs, no wine, no goblet, no gowns, only trees and heather and a pool and a few odd stones.
In deference to the rules of the gods, Orual had to camp across the river for the night. Just at dark, while having a last drink at the river, she looked once again into the mist across the water. And then, she says, “I saw that which brought my heart into my throat.” There stood the palace, vast and ancient and beautiful, “wall within wall, pillar and arch and architrave, acres of it, a labyrinthine beauty.”
But the glimpse does not last, the great palace disappears from her sight and Orual falls back into the ‘sanity’ of her natural vision. In the end, in spite of her brief vision of the beautiful palace and in spite of her clear knowledge of Psyche’s radiance, Orual decides that Psyche is mad and she goes back to Glome.
This is vintage C. S. Lewis. Behind the universe is the abounding life and beauty and glory and fellowship and joy of the Triune God. It has all come to us in Jesus Christ and through Him it permeates the whole creation. It is ours, and we belong to it. Like Orual we could not possibly be any closer to it than we already are. But also like Orual, we are blind. We cannot see the present kingdom.
The drunk man may well turn down a dark alley, but instead of recognizing it as a dead end, he is likely to spend years trying to make a home out of it. So it is with us. In our blindness we cling to things, to people, to opinions, to impressions. We try desperately to make something out of them. But they are, in themselves, empty. And because they are empty, the longer we cling to them as the source of life, the more empty and ghostly we become.
The question is, how do you see? How do you escape the shadowlands of your own blindness? How do you turn things around so that you are moving from being a ghost into becoming a real person? If you ask Lewis these questions, he gives three groups of answers.
First, Lewis tells us pretty standard stuff—listen, pray, read, think, talk to real persons.
Second, he tells us don’t quit, don’t accept substitutes, don’t be half-hearted creatures who are content with next to nothing when infinite joy has been promised us, persevere, press on. The very reason Lewis is Lewis is because he refused to throw in the towel and give up the search. He saw the palace, but unlike Orual, when the vision died out, he did not decide that it was all madness. He kept searching. He kept asking the hard questions. Once in the hunt for joy, he turned over every leaf and steadfastly refused to accept anything less than the truth.
The last answer is not advice but a question, and a question that Lewis leaves you with almost on every page. It is the same question that Jesus posed in John’s Gospel to the discipl |
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