1952
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On feeling frightened that life is going too well; on suffering; on the danger in believing that any particular suffering is a punishment; on all pain as contrary to God’s will; on the fate of unbelievers and our responsibility to them; and on the meaning of Christ’s descent into hell.
31 JANUARY 1952
How singular! In the last year my life also became much ‘better’ and, just like you, I often feel a little frightened. We must both distinguish (a.) The bad Pagan feeling that the gods don’t like us to be happy…(b.) The good Christian caution lest we become soft and self-indulgent and cease to recognise one’s dependence on God.
That suffering is not always sent as a punishment is clearly established for believers by the book of Job and by John IX. 1–4. That it sometimes is, is suggested by parts of the Old Testament and Revelation. It would certainly be most dangerous to assume that any given pain was penal. I believe that all pain is contrary to God’s will, absolutely but not relatively. When I am taking a thorn out of my finger (or a child’s finger) the pain is ‘absolutely’ contrary to my will: i.e., if I could have chosen a situation without pain I would have done so. But I do will what caused pain, relatively to the given situation: i.e., granted the thorn I prefer the pain to leaving the thorn where it is. A mother smacking a child would be in the same position: she would rather cause it this pain than let it go on pulling the cat’s tail, but she would like it better if no situation which demands a smack had arisen.
On the heathen, see I Tim. IV 10. Also in Matt, XXV 31–46 the people don’t sound as if they were believers. Also the doctrine of Christ’s descending into Hell and preaching to the dead: would that would be outside time, and include those who died long after Him as well as those who died before He was born as Man. I don’t think we know the details: we must just stick to the view that (a.) All justice and mercy will be done, (b) But that nevertheless it is our duty to do all we can to convert unbelievers. All blessings.
TO GENIA GOElZ, who had decided to be baptized an Episcopalian: On the joys and distresses of being an adult convert.
29 FEBRUARY 1952
Dear Mrs. Goelz (or may I, being old, and bold, and avuncular, say dear Genia?
I learn from Mrs. Van Deusen that you are ‘taking the plunge’. As you have been now for so long in my prayers, I hope it will not seem intrusive to send my congratulations. Or I might say condolences and congratulations. For whatever people who have never undergone an adult conversion may say, it is a process not without its distresses. Indeed, they are the very sign that it is a true initiation. Like learning to swim or to skate, or getting married, or taking up a profession. There are cold shudderings about all these processes. When one finds oneself learning to fly without trouble one soon discovers (usually. There are blessed exceptions where we are allowed to take a real step without that difficulty), by waking up, that it was only a dream.
All blessings and good wishes.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the blessing an uncongenial pastor can be.
29 FEBRUARY 1952
I have written to Genia. Your news is very good. In a way it is [a] good sign, isn’t it?, that the Rector should not be a person she particularly likes. I will indeed continue my prayers for her. With love to all.
TO GENIA GOELZ, who had asked Lewis for a prayer in her struggle to believe: Lewis’s prayer for a daily increase in obedience and faith.
18 MARCH 1952
Don’t bother at all about that question of a person being ‘made a Christian’ by baptism. It is only the usual trouble about words being used in more than one sense. Thus we might say a man ‘became a soldier’ the moment that he joined the army. But his instructors might say six months later ‘I think we have made a soldier of him’. Both usages are quite definable, only one wants to know which is being used in a given sentence. The Bible itself gives us one short prayer which is suitable for all who are struggling with the beliefs and doctrines. It is: ‘Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief.’ Would something of this sort be any good?: Almighty God, who art the Father of lights and who has promised by thy dear Son that all who do thy will shall know thy doctrine: give me grace so to live that by daily obedience I daily increase in faith and in the understanding of thy Holy Word, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the value of a fixed form of public worship; on the difficulty of extemporaneous public worship; and on the relationship between liturgical prayer and private prayer.
1 APRIL 1952
The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Extempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it—it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions free.
I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents any service getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the preoccupation of the moment (a war, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the extempore method can help becoming provincial and I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.
TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA: On the death of his spiritual director, Father Adams; and on his prayer for Christian unity.
14 APRIL 1952
You were and are much in my prayers and thank you for your letters. And do you pray for me, especially at present when I feel very much an orphan because my aged confessor and most loving father in Christ has just died. While he was celebrating at the altar, suddenly, after a most sharp but (thanks be to God) very brief attack of pain, he expired; and his last words were, ‘I come, Lord Jesus.’ He was a man of ripe spiritual wisdom—noble minded but of an almost childlike simplicity and innocence….
‘That they all may be one’ is a petition which in my prayers I never omit. While the wished-for unity of doctrine and order is missing, all the more eagerly let us try to keep the bond of charity: which, alas, your people in Spain and ours in Northern Ireland do not.
Farewell, my Father.
TO “Mrs. LOCKLEY,” who had asked if she could, as a Christian, divorce her adulterous husband: On divorce and re marriage; and on divorce as an act of charity toward the children of the adulterous relationship.
13 MAY 1952
In Bishop Gore’s The Sermon on the Mount…I find the view that Christ forbade ‘ divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage’. The question is whether He made an exception by allowing divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage when the divorce was for adultery. In the Eastern Church re-marriage of the innocent party is allowed: not in the Roman. The Anglican bishops at Lambeth in 1888 denied re-marriage to the guilty party, and added that ‘there has always been a difference of opinion in the Church as to whether Our Lord meant to forbid re-marriage of the innocent party in a divorce’.
It would seem then that the only question is whether you can divorce your husband in such a sense as would make you free to re-marry. I imagine that nothing is further from your thoughts. I believe that you are free as a Christian woman to divorce him especially since the refusal to do so does harm to the innocent children of his mistress: but that you must (or should) regard yourself as no more free to marry another man than if you had not divorced him. But remember I’m no authority on such matters, and I hope you will ask the advice of one or two sensible clergymen of our own Church.
Our own Vicar whom I have just rung up, says that there are Anglican theologians who say that you must not divorce him. His own view was that in doubtful cases the Law of Charity should always be the over-riding consideration, and in a case such as yours charity directs you to divorce him.
TO GENIA GOELZ, who had just been confirmed as an Episcopalian and who, in the first fervor of her conversion, had challenged Fred Hoyle, the Cambridge astronomer: On the need to expect that the first excitement of being a Christian will be replaced by the hard work of believing without the support of one’s feelings; and on temptations to pride and the need to temper one’s enthusiasms with discipline.
15 MAY 1952
Thanks for your letter of the 9th. All our prayers are being answered and I thank God for it. The only (possibly, not necessarily) unfavourable symptom is that you are just a trifle too excited. It is quite right that you should feel that ‘something terrific’ has happened to you (It has) and be ‘all glowy’. Accept these sensations with thankfulness as birthday cards from God, but remember that they are only greetings, not the real gift. I mean, it is not the sensations that are the real thing. The real thing is the gift of the Holy Spirit which can’t usually be—perhaps not ever—experienced as a sensation or emotion. The sensations are merely the response of your nervous system. Don’t depend on them. Otherwise when they go and you are once more emotionally flat (as you certainly will be quite soon), you might think that the real thing had gone too. But it won’t. It will be there when you can’t feel it. May even be most operative when you can feel it least.
Don’t imagine it is all ‘going to be an exciting adventure from now on’. It won’t. Excitement, of whatever sort, never lasts. This is the push to start you off on your first bicycle: you’ll be left to [do] lots of dogged pedalling later on. And no need to be depressed about it either. It will be good for your spiritual leg muscles. So enjoy the push while it lasts, but enjoy it as a treat, not as something normal.
Of course, none of us have ‘any right’ at the altar. You might as well talk of a non-existent person ‘having a right’ to be created. It is not our right but God’s free bounty. An English peer said, ‘I like the order of the Garter because it has no dam’ nonsense about merit.’ Nor has Grace. And we must keep on remembering that as a cure for Pride.
Yes, pride is a perpetual, nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head but don’t be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud one is safe from the worst form of pride.
If Hoyle answers your letter, then let the correspondence drop. He is not a great philosopher (and none of my scientific colleagues think much of him as a scientist), but he is strong enough to do some harm. You’re not David and no one has told you to fight Goliath! You’ve only just enlisted. Don’t go off challenging enemy champions. Learn your drill. I hope this doesn’t sound all like cold water! I can’t tell you how pleased I was with your letter.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS: On the workings of grace in the lives of those who are homosexual.
28 MAY 1952
The stories you tell about two [ homosexuals] belong to a terribly familiar pattern: the man of good will, saddled with an abnormal desire which he never chose, fighting hard and time after time defeated. But I question whether in such a life the successful operation of Grace is so tiny as we think. Is not this continued avoidance either of presumption or despair, this ever renewed struggle, itself a great triumph of Grace? Perhaps more so than (to human eyes) equable virtue of some who are psychologically sound.
I am glad you think Jane Austen a sound moralist. I agree. And not platitudinous, but subtle as well as firm.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On psychiatry as a science and as a philosophy; on why strangers can be advisers when one’s self and family members cannot; and on another dimension of vicariousness (Lewis was referring here to “The Practice of Substituted Love,” a chapter in Charles Williams’s He Came Down from Heaven).
10 JUNE 1952
I think psychiatry is like surgery: i.e., the thing is in itself essentially an infliction of wounds but may, in good hands, be necessary to avoid some greater evil. But it is more tricky than surgery because the personal philosophy and character of the operator come more into play. In setting a broken ankle all surgeons would agree as to the proper position to which the bones should be restored, because anatomy is an exact science. But all psychiatrists are not agreed as to the proper shape of the soul: where their ideas of that proper shape are based on a heathen or materialistic philosophy, they may be aiming at a shape we should strongly disapprove. One wants a Christian psychiatrist. There are a few of these, but nothing like enough.
If I can successfully say to Genia what you have often said in vain, that is not because of any quality in me but depends on a general (and at first sight cruel) law: we can all ‘take’ from a stranger what we can’t ‘take’ from our own parents. I listen with profit to elderly friends saying the very same things which I neglected or even resented when my father said them. Nay more: I can obey advice from others which I have often given myself in vain. I suppose this is one aspect of the vicariousness of the universe: Charles Williams’s view that every one can help to paddle every one else’s canoe better than his own. We must bear one another’s burdens because that is the only way the burdens can get borne: and ‘He saved others, himself He cannot save’ is a fundamental law.
Yes: ‘things’ continue almost alarmingly ‘better’ with me. God bless you all.
TO GENIA GOELZ: On the reality of our individuality in the body of Christ; and on the five sources of discernment: the scripture, the church, Christian friends, books, and meditation.
20 JUNE 1952
Thanks for yours of the 10th. I would prefer to combat the ‘I’m special’ feeling not by the thought ‘I’m no more special than anyone else’ but by the feeling ‘Everyone is as special as me.’ In one way there is no difference, I grant, for both remove the speciality. But there is a difference in another way. The first might lead you to think, ‘I’m only one of the crowd like anyone else’. But the second leads to the truth that there isn’t any crowd. No one is like anyone else. All are ‘ members’ (organs) in the Body of Christ. All different and all necessary to the whole and to one another: each loved by God individually, as if it were the only creature in existence. Otherwise you might get the idea that God is like the government which can only deal with the people as the mass.
About confession, I take it that the view of our Church is that everyone may use it but none is obliged to. I don’t doubt that the Holy Spirit guides your decisions from within when you make them with the intention of pleasing God. The error would be to think that He speaks only within whereas, in reality, He speaks also through Scripture, the Church, Christian friends, books et cetera.
TO RHONA BODLE: On the magnificence of her work with deaf children.
22 JUNE 1952
It was a great joy to hear from you again. You have been daily in my prayers for a long time and, needless to say, will remain. I shall be grateful for a place in yours.
The work you are engaged in is a magnificent one (much in my mind because, as it falls out, I’ve just been reading Helen Keller’s book): hard, no doubt, but you can never be attacked by the suspicion that it is not worth doing. There are jolly few professions of which we can say that. The translation of great stories into a limited vocabulary will, incidentally, be a wonderful discipline: you will learn a lot about thought and language in general before you are done. I hope you will sometimes let me know how you get on. God bless you.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN, who seems to have mentioned a commendation from a Kemper Hall concerning acceptable rituals and devotions that another person, P. A. Wolfe, has criticized strongly: On the use of incense and the praying of the Hail Mary; and on how to deal with difficult people. Lewis’s “new trouble” is his brother’s alcoholism.
26 JUNE 1952
Incense and Hail Marys are in quite different categories. The one is merely a question of ritual: some find it helpful and others don’t, and each must put up with its absence or presence in the church they are attending with cheerful and charitable humility.
But Hail Marys raise a doctrinal question: whether it is lawful to address devotions to any creature, however holy. My own view would be that a salute to any saint (or angel) cannot in itself be wrong any more than taking off one’s hat to a friend: but that there is always some danger lest such practices start one on the road to a state (sometimes found in Roman Catholics) where the Blessed Virgin Mary is treated really as a deity and even becomes the centre of the religion. I therefore think that such salutes are better avoided. And if the Blessed Virgin is as good as the best mothers I have known, she does not want any of the attention which might have gone to her Son diverted to herself.
It seems, nevertheless, quite clear that the Spirit of God is, or is more strongly with Kemper Hall than with P. A. Wolfe. In him you describe a type I know. I think we may accept it as a rule that whenever a person’s religious conversation dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people’s religions, he is in a bad condition. The fact that he shakes your faith is significant. Pray for him but not, I should say, with him. If he insists on talking religion to you ask him for positive things: ask him to tell you what he knows of God.
All blessings. My ‘new trouble’ is still there: but I have much to be thankful for.
TO MISS REIDY, who had misunderstood the point of Lewis’s poem, “The Pilgrim’s Problem”: On blaming the map for our being lost.
28 JUNE 1952
The point was that as foolish people on a walk, when by their own errors they are off the course, think the map was wrong, so, when we do not find in ourselves the fruits of the Spirit which all our teachers promise, it is not that the promise was false, but that we have failed to use the Grace we have been given. The ‘map’ can be found in almost any Christian teaching.
TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA: On hope and joy even in evil times; and on love and tending to our work while we await the return of the Lord.
14 JULY 1952
Thank you, dearest Father, both for the tracts of your Congregation and for your letter dated July 7th.
The times we live in are, as you say, grave: whether ‘graver than all others in history’ I do not know. But the evil that is closest always seems to be the most serious: for as with the eye so with the heart, it is a matter of one’s own perspective. However, if our times are indeed the worst, if That Day is indeed now approaching, what remains but that we should rejoice because our redemption is now nearer and say with St. John: ‘ Amen; come quickly, Lord Jesus.’
Meanwhile our only security is that The Day may find us working each one in his own station and especially (giving up dissensions) fulfilling that supreme command that we love one another.
Let us ever pray for each other.
Farewell: and may there abide with you and me that peace which no one can take from us.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On changing one’s style of prayer; on continuing an old friendship with someone who does not share one’s spiritual values; and on the freedom of the will and predestination.
14 JULY 1952
I think you are perfectly right to change your manner of prayer from time to time and I should suppose that all who pray seriously do thus change it. One’s needs and capacities change and also, for creatures like us, excellent prayers may ‘go dead’ if we use them too long. Whether one should use written prayers composed by other people, or one’s own words or own wordless prayer, or in what proportion one should mix all three, seems to me entirely a question for each individual to answer from his own experience.
I myself find prayers without words the best, when I can manage it, but I can do so only when least distracted and in best spiritual and bodily health (or what I think best). But another person might find it quite otherwise.
Your question about old friendships where there is no longer spiritual communion is a hard one. Obviously it depends very much on what the other party wants. The great thing in friendship as in all other forms of love is, as you know, to turn from the demand to be loved (or helped or answered) to the wish to love (or help or answer). Perhaps in so far as one does this one also discovers how much love one should spend on the sort of friends you mention. I don’t think a decay in one’s desire for mere ‘society’ or ‘acquaintance’ or ‘the crowd’ is a bad sign. (We mustn’t take it as a sign of one’s increasing spirituality of course: isn’t it merely a natural, neutral, development as one grows older?)
All that Calvinist question—Free-Will and Predestination, is to my mind undiscussable, insoluble. Of course (say us) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes, (say they) but the fact of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arrives as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. The difference between Freedom and Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter on purpose and just finding them chattering with cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk of human love (leaving out the erotic kind). ‘Do I like him because I choose or because I must?’—there are cases where this has an answer, but others where it seems to me to mean nothing. When we carry it up to relations between God and Man, has the distinction perhaps become nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not ‘voluntary’, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about? I’d leave it all alone. Blessings.
TO MRS. JOHNSON, who had asked Lewis thirteen questions: On the nature of purgatory; on the efficacy of the prayers to false gods or to a poorly conceived God; on the salvation of unbelievers (Lewis had finished the story of Emeth in The Last Battle the previous March); on how to read the Bible; on the commandment not to murder; on capital punishment; on revenge; on pacifism; on the presence in heaven of our earthly beloved; and on the story of his barber.
8 NOVEMBER 1952
I am returning your letter with the questions in it numbered so that you’ll know which I am answering.
(1.) Some call me Mr. and some Dr. and I not only don’t care but usually don’t know which.
(2.) Distinguish (A) A second chance in the strict sense, i.e., a new earthly life in which you could attempt afresh all the problems you failed at in the present one (as in religions of Re-Incarnation). (B) Purgatory: a process by which the work of redemption continues, and first perhaps begins to be noticeable after death. I think Charles Williams depicts B, not A.
(3.) We are never given any knowledge of ‘What would have happened if…’
(4.) I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow. In the parable of the Sheep and Goats ( Matt. XXV 31 and following) those who are saved do not seem to know that they have served Christ. But of course our anxiety about unbelievers is most usefully employed when it leads us not to speculation but to earnest prayer for them and the attempt to be in our own lives such good advertisements for Christianity as will make it attractive.
(5.) It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e., for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.
(6.) Kill means murder. I don’t know Hebrew: but when Our Lord quotes this commandment he uses Gk phoneuseis (murder)
[(7.)] The question of what you would ‘want’ is off the point. Capital punishment might be wrong though the relations of the murdered man wanted him killed: it might be right though they did not want this. The question is whether a Christian nation ought or ought not to put murderers to death: not what passions interested individuals may feel.
(8.) There is no doubt at all that the natural impulse to ‘hit back’ must be fought against by the Christian whenever it arises. If one I love is tortured or murdered my desire to avenge him must be given no quarter. So far as nothing but this question of retaliation comes in ‘turn the other cheek’ is the Christian law. It is, however, quite another matter when the neutral, public authority (not the aggrieved person) may order killing of either private murderers or public enemies in mass. It is quite clear that our earliest Christian writer, St. Paul, approved of capital punishment—he says the ‘ magistrate’ bears and should bear ‘the sword’. It is recorded that the soldiers who came to St. John Baptist asking, ‘What shall we do?’ were not told to leave the army. When Our Lord Himself praised the Centurion He never hinted that the military profession was in itself sinful. This has been the general view of Christendom. Pacificism is a very recent and local variation. We must of course respect and tolerate Pacifists, but I think their view erroneous.
(9.) The symbols under which Heaven is presented to us are (a) a dinner party, (b) a wedding, (c) a city, and (d) a concert. It would be grotesque to suppose that the guests or citizens or members of the choir didn’t know one another. And how can love of one another be commanded in this life if it is to be cut short at death?
(10.) Whatever the answer is, I’m sure it is not that (‘erased from the brain’). When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. If you and I ever come to love God perfectly, the answer to this tormenting question will then become clear, and will be far more beautiful than we could ever imagine. We can’t have it now.
(11.) Thanks very much: but I haven’t a sweet tooth. (12.) Not that I know of: but I’m the last person who would know.
(13.) There is a poor barber whom my brother and I sometimes help. I got up one day intending to go to him for a hair-cut preparatory to going to London. Got a message putting off London engagement and decided to postpone hair-cut. Something, however, kept on nagging me to stick to it—‘Get your hair cut.’ In the end, said ‘Oh damn it, I’ll go.’
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE, who had become a Roman Catholic: On the closeness in the body of Christ of those who are at the heart of their own denomination; on how close we are to real believers in any religion rather than to the modernists within them; and on prayer as the most reliable work we can do for Christian reunion.
10 NOVEMBER 1952
It is a little difficult to explain how I feel that though you have taken a way which is not for me I nevertheless can congratulate you—I suppose because your faith and joy are so obviously increased. Naturally, I do not draw from that the same conclusions as you—but there is no need for us to start a controversial correspondence!
I believe we are very near to one another, but not because I am at all on the Rome-ward frontier of my own communion. I believe that, in the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes. I would even carry this beyond the borders of Christianity: how much more one has in common with a real Jew or Muslim than with a wretched liberalising, occidentalised specimen of the same categories.
Let us by all means pray for one another: it is perhaps the only form of ‘work for re-union’ which never does anything but good. God bless you.
TO MRS. D. JESSUP, who had written Lewis about her domestic crisis: On the need to persevere through spiritual aridity and even desolation as a normal experience, even for Jesus, while not rejecting consolation when God gives it; and on Lewis’s lack of interest in public affairs.
13 NOVEMBER 1952
Yes, of course I will—for all six of you. I am very sorry to hear that your (temporal) news is so grim. Your spiritual news is perhaps better than you think. You seem to have been dealing with the dryness (or ‘the wall’ as you well name it) in the right way. Everyone has experienced it or will.
It is clearly what George MacDonald meant when he said ‘Have pity on us for the look of things, When desolation stares us in the face. Although the serpent-mask have lied before, It fascinates the bird.’
It is very important to remember that Our Lord experienced it to the full, twice—in Gethsemane when He sweated blood, and next day when he said ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ We are not asked to go anywhere where he has not gone before us. The shining quality may come back when we least expect it, and in circumstances which would seem to an outside observer (or to ourselves) to make it most impossible. (We must not reject it, as there is an impulse to do, on the ground that we ought, in the conditions, to be miserable.)
What is most re-assuring to me, and most moving, is your sane and charitable recognition that others have as great, or worse, trials: one of those things which no one else can decently say to the sufferer but which are invaluable when he says them to himself. And of course there was no ‘conceit’ or ‘ selfishness’ in your writing to me: are we not all ‘ members of one another’. (I can’t reply about Eisenhower. I am no politician. I should suppose that the diverse views of his election taken in England depend entirely on the different ways in which our own political parties think they can make capital out of it. As you know public affairs seem to me much less important than private—in fact important only in so far as they affect private affairs.)
You are quite right (though not in the way you meant) when you say I needn’t ‘work up’ sympathy with you! No, I needn’t. I have had enough experiences of the crises of family life, the terrors, despondencies, hopes deferred, and wearinesses. The trouble is that things go on so long, isn’t it? And one gets so tired of trying! No doubt it will all seem short when looked at from eternity. But I needn’t preach to you. You’re doing well: scoring pretty good marks! Keep on. Take it hour by hour. Don’t add the past and the future to the present load more than you can help. God bless you all.
TO MRS. D. JESSUP: On the necessity to thank God when God answers prayers; and on remembering the times when God answers prayers.
17 NOVEMBER 1952
Thanks be to God for your good news. There is a comic, but also charming, contrast between the temperance with which you bore a great fear and the wild excess of your apologies for a wholly imaginary offence in writing that letter. You did perfectly right and there is nothing whatever for me to forgive. And I should be very sorry if you carried out your threat (made, I know, from the best motives) of never writing to me again. You are not the kind of correspondent who is a ‘nuisance’: if you were you would not be now thinking you are one—That kind never does.
But don’t send me any newspaper cuttings. I never believe a word said in the papers. The real history of a period (as we always discover a few years later) has very little to do with all that, and private people like you and me are never allowed to know it while it is going on. Of course you will all remain in my prayers. I think it very wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved.
Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones that they forget. Like the others who find proof for a superstition by recording all the cases in which bad luck has followed a dinner with 13 at table and forget all the others where it hasn’t. God bless you. Write freely whenever you please.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the difference between wordless prayer and the practice of the presence of God (the spirituality of the seventeenth century Carmelite, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection); on loving others too much; and on what time of day to pray.
25 NOVEMBER 1952
No, by wordless prayer I didn’t mean the practice of the Presence of God. I meant the same mental act as in verbal prayer only without the words. The Practice of the Presence is a much higher activity. I don’t think it matters much whether an absolutely uninterrupted recollection of God’s presence for a whole lifetime is possible or not. A much more frequent and prolonged recollection than we have yet reached certainly is possible. Isn’t that enough to work on? A child learning to walk doesn’t need to know whether it will ever be able to walk 40 miles in a day: the important thing is that it can walk to-morrow a little further and more steadily than it did to-day.
I don’t think we are likely to give too much love and care to those we love. We might put in active care in the form of assistance when it would be better for them to act on their own: i.e., we might be busybodies. Or we might have too much ‘care’ for them in the sense of anxiety. But we never love anyone too much: the trouble is always that we love God, or perhaps some other created being, too little.
As to the ‘state of the world’ if we have time to hope and fear about it, we certainly have time to pray. I agree it is very hard to keep one’s eyes on God amid all the daily claims and problems. I think it wise, if possible, to move one’s main prayers from the last-thing-at-night position to some earlier time: give them a better chance to infiltrate one’s other thoughts.
TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN, who had sent Lewis a copy of her book, Treasure on Earth: A Country House at Christmas. Page 83 tells the story of how she, as an unhappy little girl, takes refuge in a dark gallery: “But almost at once, breaking in upon her grief with a gentle but increasing pressure, she seemed to detect a sympathy in the surrounding atmosphere as if unseen presences thronging about her were offering their love and consolation.”:
10 DECEMBER 1952
I have read Treasure on Earth and I don’t believe you have any notion how good it is. You have done a most difficult thing…. I’ve never seen the hushed internal excitement of a child on Christmas Eve better done. That is something we can all recognise….
The only page that I can’t enter into at all is p. 83. I can’t conceive not being afraid, as a child, of those unseen presences. I should have behaved like little Jane Eyre in the Red Room when she dried her tears for fear a ghostly voice should awake to comfort her. One would rather be scolded by a mortal than comforted by a ghost.
You will notice when you re-read 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 job of ‘being reminded’.)
One could go on meditating on these things indefinitely—Very many thanks for the book: it is that rare thing (rare at our age) a present one really likes. The illustrations are good too, as much of them as the coarse printing and paper has not murdered, but don’t believe anyone who says you draw better than you write. The reverse is true. With much gratitude and all good wishes.