Confessions About His Own Struggles
Struggling with chronic temptations
To Mary Neylan January 20, 1942
I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptations. It is not serious provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc. doesn’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes are in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present to us: it is the very sign of His presence.
(CL 2, 507)
A poem on his self-doubts as a Christian apologist
(An apologist is one who offers a defense of the faith)
To Sister Penelope July 29, 1942
As for my “special needs,” which you kindly ask for, this “Apologist’s Evening Hymn” I’ve just completed, will tell you.
From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories I have seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth in Thy behalf,
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who would’st give no sign, deliver me.
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, the thumb-worn image of Thy head;
From every thought, even from my thoughts of Thee,
Oh thou fair Silence! fall and set me free.
Lord of the straight way and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.
(CL 2, 527)
On interruptions of one’s “real life”
To Arthur Greeves December 20, 1943
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time . . .
Isn’t it hard to go on being patient, to go on supplying sympathy?
(CL 2, 595)
The rule of the universe is doing for others
To Arthur Greeves July 2, 1949
Thanks for your most kind and comforting letter—like a touch of a friend’s hand in a dark place. [Lewis continues by recounting his brother Warren’s struggles with alcohol abuse.]
Don’t imagine I doubt for a moment that what God sends us must be sent in love and will all be for the best if we have grace to use it so. My mind doesn’t waver on that point: my feelings sometimes do. That’s why it does me good to hear what I believe repeated in your voice—it being the rule of the universe that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and one can paddle every canoe except one’s own. That is why Christ’s suffering for us is not a mere theological dodge but the supreme case of the law that governs the whole world: and when they mocked him by saying “He saved others, himself he cannot save”* they were really uttering, little as they knew it, the ultimate law of the spiritual world.
*Matthew 27:42
(CL 2, 952–953)
What right have I to expect the peace of God?
To Warfield M. Firor December 5, 1949
I am concerned about that at present, chiefly as a result of reading William Law.* It’s all there in the New Testament, though. “Dying to the world”—“The world is crucified to me and I to the world.” And I find I haven’t begun: at least not if it means (and can it mean less than) a steady and progressive disentangling of all one’s motives from the merely natural or this-worldly objects: like training a creeper to grow up one wall instead of another. I don’t mean disentangling from things wrong in themselves, but, say, from the very pleasant evening which we hope to have over one of your hams tomorrow night,** or from gratification at my literary success. It is not the things, nor even the pleasure in them, but the fact that in such pleasures my heart, or so much of my heart, lies. Or to put it in a fantastic form—if a voice said to me (and one I couldn’t disbelieve) “you shall never see the face of God, never help to save a neighbor’s soul, never be free from sin, but you shall live in perfect health till the age of 100, very rich, and die the most famous man in the world, and pass into a twilight consciousness of a vaguely pleasant sort forever”—how much would it worry me? How much compared with another war? Or even with an announcement that I should have to have all my teeth out? You see? And what right have I to expect the Peace of God while I thus put my whole heart, at least all my strongest wishes, in the world which he has warned me against?
Well, thank God (for there is still part of me, a tiny little infantine voice somewhere amidst all the strong, confident natural voices, which can just thank Him, or perhaps only thank Him for being able to wish to thank Him) we shall not be left to the world. All His terrible resources (but it is we who force him to use them) will be brought against us to detach us from it—insecurity, war, poverty, pain, unpopularity, loneliness. We must be taught that this tent is not home. And, by Jove, how terrible it would be if all suffering, including death itself, were optional, so that only a very few voluntary ascetics ever even attempted to achieve the end for which we are created. A propos—dare we gloss the text “Strait is the way and few there be that find it”*** by adding “And that’s why most of you have to be bustled and badgered into it like sheep—and the sheepdogs have to have pretty sharp teeth too!” I hope so.
*William Law: author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729)
**The correspondent was an American admirer of Lewis who often sent him hams and other gifts.
***Matthew 7:13–14
(CL 2, 1007–1008)
On feeling he would outlive his literary fame
To Warfield M. Firor December 20, 1951
I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown—like Christian [in Pilgrim’s Progress] going down into the green valley of humiliation. Which is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly—a matter I think and pray about a good deal. One thing is certain: much better to begin (at least) learning humility on this side of the grave than to have it all as a fresh problem on the other. Anyway, the desire which has to be mortified is such a vulgar and silly one.
(CL 3, 150)
Dealing with estrangement from one’s father
To Rhona Bodle March 24, 1954
Oh how you touch my conscience! I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious. . . .
Feelings of affection are not at the command of the will and perhaps the very attempt to produce them has the opposite effect. I have been astonished at the ease (and even the affection) with which I have been able to treat in other old men the very same characteristics I was so impatient with in my Father. I wonder can something be done along those lines?—by remembering how merely funny, how endearing in a whimsical way, the things that divide you from your Father would seem if he were a casual acquaintance. By voluntarily standing further off might one in effect come closer? Part of the difficulty, I fancy, is heredity—a deep awareness that what one likes least in our parents has been bequeathed to oneself and, in oneself, needs to be resisted. While my Father was alive I was shocked when I caught myself acting or speaking like him: now I am amused, and not hostilely. At any rate, work now for the night cometh.*
*John 9:4
(CL 3, 445)
Momentary joy that transfigures the past
To Phyllis Elinor Sandeman December 11, 1952
(Author of Treasure on Earth, a memoir about spending Christmas in her childhood at Lyme Park, the family country estate.)
You will notice when you reread your book in a different mood that it doesn’t really give the impression of a very happy childhood. Ecstatic, yes: shot through with raptures and tingling delights, but not very secure, not very consoled. And that, I believe, is absolutely true: I fancy happy childhoods are usually forgotten. It is not settled comfort and heartsease but momentary joy that transfigures the past and lets the eternal quality show through. (I sometimes eat parsnips because their taste, which I dislike, reminds me of my prep-school, which I disliked: but those two dislikes don’t in the least impair the strange joy of “being reminded.”)
(CL 3, 263)
Equally hard to believe and to disbelieve in the afterlife
To Phyllis Elinor Sandeman December 11, 1952
Yes, people do find it hard to keep on feeling as if you believed in the next life: but then it is just as hard to keep on feeling as if you believed you were going to be nothing after death. I know this because in the old days before I was a Christian I used to try.
(CL 3, 744–745)
The pitfalls of constantly defending one’s faith
To Mary Van Deusen June 18, 1956
I envy you not having to think any more about Christian apologetics. My correspondents force the subject on me again and again. It is very wearing, and not very good for one’s own faith. A Christian doctrine never seems less real to me than when I have just (even if successfully) been defending it.
(CL 3, 762)