yesterday i went out of the library pissed off because, once again, about an hour of 'writing' was totally deleted due to some kind of glitch or, more probably, due to something i did. maddening! but even worse is the fact that i feel these mystical deletions (which occurred in bunches during the end of the 8 months of hell when my howling anger/fear/outrage focused on the government 'had to' come out of my fingertips) are somehow 'done' by God...at any rate i just barely got out of here praying, "Lord help me. i am so pissed off at You. my rage against You knows no bounds! i kept crying out in this manner and went home in a pout to 'suck my thumb' by sitting down to read letters to an american lady by c.s. lewis. somehow thru those cries God helped me. but as i sit again i am in a bit of consternation. i have committed this time to God and ask that not my but His will be done thru this...if indeed there remains any 'this' when i leave.
this morning as i finished the book i could not stop crying. i'm not totally sure why. was it that these were a living illustration of lewis' belief that taking time to advise/encourage another christian was both a humbling of his talents before the Lord and also as much the work of the Holy Spirit as writing a book? was it (also mentioned in the preface) that lewis continually hews the sharpest of lines between the utter and continuous practice of christianity and our feelings...we are to DO and let our feelings be as they may? this is a remarkable testament to the practice of this in his life and such a strong encouragement in an area in which i am abysmally weak? all i know is, entertained, amused and instructed as i was, the overall xray impression at the end was the beauty of Jesus mediated thru a person. i was also deeply blessed to, for the first time, feel that i was getting to know lewis as a person. so...here goes. i probably won't get it all down but, as usual, i want to share what seems specially meaningful.
8.1.1953 (lewis 50 years old) i do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex. it's natural enough in our species, as in others, that the young birds should show off their plumage - in the mating season. but the trouble in the modern world is that there's a tendency to rush all the birds on to that age as soon as possible and then keep them there as late as possible, thus losing all the real value of the other parts of life in a senseless, pitiful attempt to prolong what, after all, is neither its wisest, its happiest, or most innocent period.
..it is good for us to be cured of the illusion of 'independence'. for of course independence, the state of being indebted to no one, is eternally impossible. who, after all, is more totally dependent than what we call the man 'of independent means'. every shirt he wears is made by other people out of other organisms and the only difference between him and us is that even the money whereby he pays for it was earned by other people. of course you ought to be dependent on your daughter and son-in-law. support of parents is a most ancient and universally acknowledged duty. and if you come to find yourself dependent on anyone else you mustn't mind...
..not that your relief had not in fact occurred before my prayer, but as if, in tenderness for my puny faith God moved me to pray with especial earnestness just before He was going to give me the thing. how true that our prayers are really His prayers; He speaks to Himself thru us. i am also most moved at hearing how you were supported through the period of anxiety for one is sometimes tempted to think that if He wanted us to be as un-anxious as the lilies of the field He really might have given us a constitution more like theirs!
i feel exactly as you do about the horrid commercial racket they have made out of christmas. i send no cards and give no presents except to children.
do you ever read montaigne? he says 'the peasants make everything easier by the names they use. to them a consumption is only a cough and a cancer only a stomachache'..
we wouldn't call alfred and egbert and all those the 'british' line. they are the 'english' line, the angles, who come from angel in south denmark. by the british line we'd mean the celtic line that goes back thru the tudors to cadwallader and thence to arthur, uther, cassbelan, lear, lud, brut aeneas, jupiter. the present royal family can claim descent from both the british and the english lines. so i suppose, can most of us: for since one has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great-grandparents, and so on, one is presumably descended from nearly everyone who was alive in this island in the year 600 ad. in the long run one is related to everyone on the planet..we are all 'one flesh'..
..by the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. if you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! i suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. aeneas and hector and beowulf, roland and lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we?
i am very puzzled by people like your committee secretary, people who are just nasty. i find it easier to understand the great crimes, for the raw material of them exists in us all; the mere disagreeableness which seems to spring from no recognisable passion is mysterious (like the total stranger in a train of whom i once asked 'do you know when we get to liverpool' and who replied i'm not paid to answer your questions: ask the guard') i have found it more among boys than anyone else. that make me think it really comes from inner insecurity - a dim sense that one is nobody, a strong determination to be somebody and a belief that his can be achieved by arrogance. probably you, who can't hit back, come in for a good deal of resentful arrogance aroused by others on whom she doesn't vent it, because they can (a bully in an elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man he dare not fight, says i'll go home and beat all my servants.) but i mustn't encourage you to go on thinking about her: that, after all, is almost the greatest evil nasty people can do us - to become an obsession...a brief prayer for them and then away to other subjects, is the thing..
i don't think we ought to try to keep up our normal prayers when we are ill and over-tired. i would not say this to a beginner who still has the habit to form. but you are past that stage. one mustn't make the christian life into a punctilious system of law, like the jewish (for) two reasons: 1. it raises scruples when we don't keep the routine, 2. it raises presumption when we do. nothing gives one a more spuriously good conscience than keeping rules, even if there has been a total absence of all real charity and faith.
..a good deal of your alarming story i didn't understand. why is cutting off one's telephone a protection against assault? it sounds to me just as much a non-sequitur as going armed in the streets to protect oneself from telephone calls!
thanks for your letter of the 2d and for the Time (magazine) cutting. my brother says the photo of me is the best ever, but another friend says it is unrecognisable. what's most impressive is the smoke from the match (a picture of lewis as he was lighting his pipe), which looks like the explosion of a miniature shell. the review is of course a tissue of muddles and direct falsehoods - i don't say 'lies' because the people who write such things are not really capable of lying. i mean, to lie = to say what you know to be untrue. but to know this, and to have the very ideas of truth and falsehood in your head, presupposes a clarity of mind which they haven't got. to call them liars would be as undeserved a compliment as to say that a dog was bad at arithmetic.
don't be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn't do. each must do his duty 'in that state of life to which god has called him'. remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing's sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically american and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view! there can be intemperance in work just as in drink. what feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one's self-importance. as macdonald says 'in holy things may be unholy greed'. and by doing what 'one's' station and its duties' does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice. just you give mary a little chance as well as martha!
what a horrid adventure. to meet unrestrained anger in any human being is in itself always very shocking. i think the effect may be partly physical. have you noticed how one angry an burst out ( say, in a crowded bus) and a tension comes over everyone? indeed one nearly becomes equally angry oneself. when one gets this shock along with injustice of course there is a compound reaction. it is at first sight so easy to forgive (especially when one knows that the anger was pathological) but then one wort of wakes up five minutes later and finds one hasn't really for given at all - the resentment is still tingling thru one's veins. and how one has to watch that 'feeling hurt' - so seldom (as one would like to believe) mere sorrow, so nearly always mixed with wounded pride, self-justification, fright, even (hiding in the corners) desire for retaliation. but obviously you know all this and have fought your best. but there remains the quite separate trouble of having lost your job (this person was regularly losing jobs). oh dear. i am sorry. surely all these church people will find some way to provide for you. (by english law it was illegal for the english to send $ to america but eventually lewis was able to have his american publisher send this correspondent a regular monthly stipend. the preface says he gave away 2/3rds of his income)..
oh dear, what a hard, frightening world it is! and yet not wholly; i am rejoiced to hear that you have some true friends who will not let you sink. and why should there be any (let alone 'too much') 'cringing inside"? we are all members of one another and must all learn to receive as well as to give...it took me a long time to see this -though, heaven knows, with the cross before our eyes we have little excuse to forget our insolvency.
the devil used to try to prevent people from doing good works, but he has now learned a trick worth two of that: he organises 'em instead..
i will never laugh at anyone for grieving over a loved beast. i think God wants us to love Him more, not to love creatures (even animals) less. we love everything in one way too much (ie. at the expense of our love for him) but in another way we love everything too little.
no person, animal, flower, or even pebble, has ever been loved too much - ie. more than every one of god's works deserves. but you need not feel 'like a murderer'. rather rejoice that God's law allows you to extend to fanda that last mercy which (no doubt, quite rightly) we are forbidden to extend to suffering humans. you'll get over this...
yes, we must not fret about not doing God those supposed services which he in fact does not allow us to do. very often i expect, the service He really demands is that of not being (apparently) used, or not in the way we expected, or not in a way we can perceive.
we all go thru periods of dryness in our prayers, don't we? i doubt..whether they are necessarily a bad symptom. i sometimes suspect that what we feel to be our best prayers are really our worst; that what we are enjoying is the satisfaction of apparent success, as in executing a dance or reciting a poem. do our prayers sometimes go wrong because we insist on trying to talk to God when He wants to talk to us. joy (lewis' wife) tells me that once, years ago, she was haunted one morning by a feeling that god wanted something of her, a persistent pressure like the nag of a neglected duty. and till mid-morning she kept on wondering what it was. but the moment she stopped worrying, the answer came thru as plain as a spoken voice. it was 'I don't want you to do anything. I want to give you something' and immediately her heart was full of peace and delight. st. augustine says 'God gives where He finds empty hands'. ..perhaps these parcels are not always sins or earthly cares, but sometimes our own fussy attempts to worship Him in our way.
remember the story in the imitation, how Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said, 'if you knew that all was well, what would you, today, do, or stop doing?' when you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. you see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. what the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. 'details, please?' is the answer.
there's an old scots version of psalm 136 (137) 8f (happy the man who repays you (babylon the destroyer) for all you did to us! happy is he who shall seize your children and dash them against the rock) which goes:
o blessed may that trooper be
who, riding on his naggie,
wull tak thy wee bairns by the taes
and ding them on the craggie.
to tell a story which puts the contrast between our feast of the nativity and , all this ghastly 'xmas racket at its lowest. my brother heard a woman on a 'bus say, as the 'bus passed a church with a crib outside it, 'oh Lor'! they bring religion into everything look - they're dragging it even into christmas now!'
we are having beautiful winter weather at present: bright, pale sunshine (paler than you ever see - joy calls it the 'arctic still air , and just that sprinkling of hoar-frost which makes everything sparkle like sugar.
we also have a siamese cat. in my heart of hearts i really prefer the great, grey bullet-headed nativ cat, but the siamese are delicate and fascinating creatures. ours adores me because i lift her up by her tail - an operation which i can't imagine i sould like if i were a cat, but she comes back for more and more, purring all the time..
what a state we have got into when we can't say 'i'll be happy when god calls me' without being afraid one will be thot 'morbid'. after all, st. paul said just the same. if we really believe what we say we believe - if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a 'wandering to find home', why should we not look forward to the arrival. ther are, aren't ther, only three things we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. the third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls 'healthy' is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all.
you surely don't mean 'feeling that we are not worthy to be forgiven'? for of course we aren't. forgiveness by its nature is for the unworthy. you mean 'feeling that we are not forgiven'. i have known that. i 'believed' theoretically in the divine forgiveness for years before it really came home to me. it is a wonderful moment when it does.
you femember the imitation says 'bear your cross, for if you try to get rid of it you will probably find another and worse one'. but there is a brighter side to the same principle. when we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
let us hope that both of us will have been given grace, amidst all this ghastly commercial racket of xmas, to enter into the feast of the nativity: the racket has nearly smothered it!
2.13.1960 (during the last 6 months of joy's life)..i am suffering from a strange condition which makes it impossible ever to stay asleep (i can go to sleep easily enough) for more than about 70 min. continuously at night, or to stay awake in the day time if i relax at all! premature senility perhaps.
do you know, i should have more hope for the young cad described in father L's letter than for many people in a quiet, cultured state of unbelief who would always speak of christianity with reverence? his very rudeness shows that he is not quite free from the fear that there 'might be something in it after all'...
things are not, or not much, worse with us, but life is very terrible. i sometimes feel i am mad to be taking joy to greece in her present condition, but her heart is set upon it. they give the condemned man what he likes for his last breakfast, i am told.
7.15.60 i've just got your letter of the 12th. joy died on the 13th. i can't describe the apparent unreality of my life since then. she received absolution and died at peace with God. i will try to write again when i have more command of myself. i'm like a sleep-walker at the moment. God bless.
as coleridge says - to be wroth with one we love doth work like madness in the brain - it's the mixture or alteration, of resentment and affection that is so very uneasy, isn't it? for the indulgence of either immediately comes slap up against the other, which then, a few seconds later comes slap up against it, so that the mind does a diabolical 'shuttle-service' to and fro between them. we've all at some time in our lives, i expect, had this experience. except possibly anxiety nothing is more hostile to sleep. one must try, i suppose, to keep on remembering that the love part of the suffering is good and purgatorial while the anger pare is bad and infernal. yet how madly one cherishes that base part as if it were one's dearest possession - dwells on everything that can aggravate the offence - and keep on thinking of things one would like to say to the other pary! i suppose all one can do is to keep on meditating on the petition 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trepass against us'. i find fear a great help - the fear that my own unforgiving ness will exclude me from all the promises. fear tames wrath. and this fear (we have our Lord's word for it) is wholly well-grounded. the human heart (mine anyway) is 'desperately wicked'. joy often quoted this in connection with the great difficulty she found in forgiving a very near and very nasty relative of her own. one has to keep on doing it over again, doesn't one?....ps. it's also useful to thing 'either x is not so bad as, in my present anger, i think. if not, how unjust i must be. if so, how terribly x needs my prayers'. (next letter, by way of further comment: 'what i was writing about last time was the pain and resntment you were feeling about some things ------ had said or done. i wasn't trying to lecture. rather, to compare notes about temptation we all have to contend with...
..as for the bug-bear of Old Peoples' Homes, remember that out ignorance words both ways. just as some of the things we have longed and hoped for turn out to be dust and ashes when we get them, so the things we have most dreaded sometimes turn out to be quite nice. if you ever do have to go to a home, Christ will be there just as much as in any other place.
..but i'm afraid as we grow older life consists more and more in either giving up things or waiting for them to be taken from us...the only certain thing is that your acceptance (if you accept) or your refusal (if you refuse) must be made with perfect charity and courtesy. may god's grace give you the necessary humility. try not to thing - much less, speak - of their sins. one's own are a much more profitable theme! and if, on consideration, one can find no faults on one's own side, than cry for mercy: for this must be a most dangerous delusion...
probably the safe rule will be 'when in doubt what to do or say, do or say nothing'. i feel this very much with my stepsons. i so easily meddle and gas: when all the time what will really influence them, for good or ill, is not anything i do or say but what i am. and this unfortunately one can't know and can't much alter, though god can.
..i hope your vet is not a charlatan? psychological diagnoses even about human patients seem to me pretty phoney. they must be even phonier when applied to animals. you can't put a cat on a couch and make it tell you its dreams or produce words by 'free association'. also - i have a great respect for cats - they are very shrewd peopld and would probably see thru the analyst a good deal better than he'd see thru them..
humans are very seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. their moods change, their motives are mixed and they are often themselves quite mistaken as to what their motives are...i know it's easy for me to give good advice to others in situations which i probably could not face myself. but that can't be helped; i must say what i think true. surely the main purpose of our life is to reach the point at which 'one's own life as a person' is at an end one must in this sense 'die', become 'naught', relinquish one's freedom and independence. 'not i, but Christ that dwelleth in me...but you know all this quite as well as i do...
4.21.1961 i've got some sort of virus into me which has kept me from being quite well all this spring, never quite awake by day and never quite asleep by night (and never without unpleasant dreams), so don't expect much from me..
..i have nothing to say but things you know already quite as well as i do. we must beware of the Past, mustn't we? i mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and susally bad for us. notice in dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! not so the saved. this is one of the dangers of getting, like you and me, old. there's so musch past, now, isn't there. and so little else. but we must try very hard not to keep on endlessly chewing the cud. we must look forward more eagerly to sloughing that old skin off forever - metaphors getting a bit mixed here, but you know what i mean.
in your position i myself would prefer a 'Home" - or almost anythign - to solitude. your view reminds me of a dipsomaniac retire major i once knew who refused the suggestion that he should try A.A. on the ground that 'it would be full of retired majors'! i am better, but that only means more nearly ripe for a big operation...
5.1962 ..but i am permanently a semi-invalid on a low-protein diet (it must be good for my soul when ther are things i really like for dinner and i mustn't have them!) like you i have to reduce stair-climbing to the minimum. it does make life complicated, doesn'
t it? there's no going back upstairs for something you have forgotten, so that every time one goes down one has to think of everthing as if one were planning an expedition to the north pole or central africa. but one learn!
yes, we do seem to be having a certain amount of experience in common! perhaps if we had done more voluntary fasting before God would not now have put us on these darn diets! well, the theologians say that an imposed mortification can have all the merit of a voluntary one if it is taken in the right spirit..
i have a notion that, apart from actual pain, men and women are quite diversely afflicted by illness. to a woman one of the great evils about it is that she can't do things. to a man (or anyway a man like me) the great consolation is the reflection 'well, anyway, no one can now demand that i shold do anything'. i have often had the fancy that one stage in purgatory might be a great big kitchen in which things are always going wrong - milk boiling over, crockery getting smashed, toast burning, animals stealing. the women have to learn to sit still and mind their own business: the men have to learn to jump up and do something about it. when both sexes have mastered this exercise, they do on to the next...
no doubt, as i know only too well, the knowledge that one's acts have, contrary to one's intention, led to all sorts of dreadful consequences, is a heavy burden. but it is a burden of regret and humiliation, isn't it?, rather than of guilt..............................................................................................i close! all the computers just went down and i lost another hour of typing....i'm not retyping again.
it's weird how a person can read a book that is so full of things they want to share with others. maybe God is telling me to stop sharing things from books and probably (if anyone would improbably wade thru all the above to get to actually read this) the reader would concur...'if i wanted to read 'letters to an american lady' i would have gotten the book!
i have read and still read so many words that are empty to me....the percentage of them, out of the whole, grows daily it seems, and hence, wish there was some way to share what sparkles and provokes thots with others. frustrating. my own words look and feel so tiresome that it is nice to escape them for others that seem much more worthwhile. maybe i'm just supposed to be quiet and live.
hope you have a good week. love, dad
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