1959
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On prayer as our best mode of helping others.
1 JANUARY 1959
I am rejoiced to hear that your grand-daughter’s eye trouble is well cleared up. Of course Genia is always in my prayers. And how wise you are to make prayers your mode of helping: for parents and in-laws and neighbours who try to help in other ways so often do harm! I am no unconditional believer in the popular theory that ‘to talk things over’ invariably mends matters. I have known it do so, and I have known it do the reverse….
We are all well. It is almost as if we had died and were in a new life. A very happy new year to you and yours.
TO EDWARD LOFSTROM: On what Lewis attempted in the Chronicles of Narnia; on the character of the man Jesus—his tenderness, ferocity, and even humor; and on the need to do one’s duty while having patience with God.
16 JANUARY 1959
1. I am afraid I don’t know the answer to your question about books of Christian instruction for children. Most of those I have seen—but I haven’t seen many—seem to me namby-pamby and ‘sissie’ and calculated to nauseate any child worth his salt. Of course I have tried to do what I can for children—in a mythical and fantastic form by my seven ‘ Narnian’ fairy tales. They work well with some children but not with others. Sorry this looks like salesmanship: but honestly if I knew anything else I’d mention it.
2. Of course. ‘Gentle Jesus’, my elbow! The most striking thing about Our Lord is the union of great ferocity with extreme tenderness. (Remember Pascal? ‘I do not admire the extreme of one virtue unless you show me at the same time the extreme of the opposite virtue. One shows one’s greatness not by being at an extremity but by being simultaneously at two extremities and filling all the space between.’)
Add to this that He is also a supreme ironist, dialectician, and (occasionally) humourist. So go on! You are on the right track now: getting to the real Man behind all the plaster dolls that have been substituted for Him. This is the appearance in Human form of the God who made the Tiger and the Lamb, the avalanche and the rose. He’ll frighten and puzzle you: but the real Christ can be loved and admired as the doll can’t.
3. ‘ For him who is haunted by the smell of invisible roses the cure is work’ ( MacDonald). If we feel we have talents that don’t find expression in our ordinary duties and recreations, I think we must just go on doing the ordinary things as well as we can. If God wants to use these suspected talents, He will: in His own time and way. At all costs one must keep clear of all the witch-doctors and their patent cures—as you say yourself.
TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO: On the secret griefs of his spiritual father, Saint Giovanni (John) Calabria.
19 JANUARY 1959
It was good of you, reverend Father, to send me this most beautiful book about the life of dearest Father John. I thank you. I hope that from reading this book I shall become better informed about many things which till now have remained obscure; for often this holy man in his letters implied that he laboured under I know not what secret grief, in the hidden counsels of God who chastises everyone whom He receives as a son.
Happily it occurs that I write to you in this Week when all who profess themselves Christians are bound to offer prayers for the reunion of the Church, now, alas, torn and divided.
TO DON HOLMES: On trying to avoid groups of thoroughly bad people but not individuals; and on the disadvantage of approaching the Bible with reverence and the readiness to be edified.
17 FEBRUARY 1957
Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter. As to your questions:
1. I think one probably should, when one decently can, avoid meeting—when they are en masse, as a group—thoroughly bad people whether they profess Christianity or not. Meeting them singly is another matter. And of course one may have particular duties (pastoral, family, pedagogic et cetera, et cetera) which oblige one to meet them. But there’s no universal rule. One has to decide in each case whether one is more likely to do good or to receive harm.
2. If my books are sometimes permitted by God to deliver to particular readers a more perceptible challenge than Scripture itself, I think this is because, in a sense, they catch people unprepared. We approach the Bible with reverence and with readiness to be edified. But by a curious and unhappy psychological law these attitudes often inhibit the very thing they are intended to facilitate. You see this in other things: many a couple never felt less in love than on their wedding day, many a man never felt less merry than at Christmas dinner, and when at a lecture we say ‘I must attend’, attention instantly vanishes.
3. If you think I can help you about any particular problem, of course write. But general correspondence—what is call ‘having a pen-friend’—is quite impossible for me. The daily letter writing is the chief burden of my life. I hope this doesn’t sound unpleasant? There are only 24 hours in a day!
TO EDWARD LOFSTROM, who seemed to be suffering from an exaggerated sense of self-consciousness and guilt: On the need to seek relief from medical professionals.
18 FEBRUARY 1959
I certainly had not realised from your previous letter how distressing the problem was. My allusion to the psychotherapists was a fling at the increasing modern habit of seeing all personal difficulties in terms of disease and cure, and so reducing things that are really moral or intellectual or both to the pathological level. In your own case there certainly does seem to be a pathological element. And of course it is ‘proper’ to make all efforts after relief. I wrote under the false impression that, like a good many people, you were regarding as a peculiar medical condition of your own things which were in fact the common infirmities of us all. Now I know better. I need not say you have my sympathy.
But I dare not advise. Amateur advice in such cases is unlikely to do good and may do harm. You must go to the professionals. All you can get from me is my prayers, and these you shall have.
TO EDWARD LOFSTROM: On his need to think less and to fulfill his daily duties with charity and justice.
8 MARCH 1959
I very much doubt if any book, least of all a book by me, would much help anyone in the condition you describe. For a book can offer only thoughts and thoughts are not what such a person, perhaps, needs most. One can argue against egoism, but then egoism is not his trouble. If he were a real egoist he would be either blissfully unconscious of the fact or else fully convinced that egoism was the rational attitude. You, on the other hand, suffer from a more than ordinary horror of egoism which you share with us all. And therefore, as you will see, the thing you need is not to think more or better about it but to think less: to act unselfishly—that is, charitably and justly—and leave the state of your feelings for God to deal with in His own way and His own time. And this of course you know better than I do.
But how to do it? For the very effort to forget something is itself a remembering of that something! I think, if I were in your shoes I should try to regard this sense of self-imprisonment not at all as a sin but as a mere tribulation, like rheumatism, to be endured in the same way. It has no doubt its medical side: diet, exercise, and recreations might all be considered. And, though this is a hard saying, your early upbringing may have something to do with it. Great piety in the parents can produce in the child a mistaken sense of guilt: may lead him to regard as sin what is really not sin at all but merely the fact that he is a boy and not a mature Christian. At any rate, remember: ‘I cannot turn one hair black or white: but I can brush my hair daily and go to the barber at regular intervals.’ In other words we must divert our efforts from our general condition or frame of mind (which we can’t alter by direct action of the will) to what is in our power—our words and acts. Try to remember that the ‘bottomless sea’ can’t hurt us as long as we keep on swimming. You will be in my prayers.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the different experience of time as one anticipates something dreadful and as the dreadful thing recedes.
16 MARCH 1959
Oh, I am sorry. Operations are horrid things. I will indeed have you all in my prayers. May the time seem as short as possible till the blessed time when the event is a day further away each morning instead of a day nearer. ‘Time and the hour ride through the roughest day.’ God bless and strengthen both of you.
TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO: On Lewis’s need for prayer as he began The Four Loves.
28 MARCH 1959
With a grateful heart I salute you and yours on this solemn and serious day on which the Lord preached to the souls in prison. I and mine are well.
Now I am writing a little book on The Four Loves, i.e., in Greek: Storgé, Philia, Eros, and Agapé—I use these words because there are no names for them in Latin.
Pray for me that God grant me to say things helpful to salvation, or at least not harmful. For this is a work ‘full of dangerous hazard’.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On how one responds to the diagnosis of serious illness and on four strategies for coping.
10 APRIL 1959
I have just had Sister Hildegarde’s letter. My heart goes out to you. You are now just where I was a little over two years ago—they wrongly diagnosed Joy’s condition as uremia before they discovered cancer of the bone.
I know all the different ways in which it gets one: wild hopes, bitter nostalgia for lost happiness, mere physical terror turning one sick, agonised pity and self-pity. In fact, Gethsemane. I had one (paradoxical) support which you lack—that of being in severe pain myself. Apart from that what helped Joy and me through it was 1. That she was always told the whole truth about her own state. There was no miserable pretence. That means that both can face it side-by-side, instead of becoming something like adversaries in a battle-of-wits. 2. Take it day by day and hour by hour (as we took the front line). It is quite astonishing how many happy—even gay—moments we had together when there was no hope. 3. Don’t think of it as something sent by God. Death and disease are the work of the Devil. It is permitted by God: i.e., our General has put you in a fort exposed to enemy fire. 4. Remember other sufferers. It’s fatal to start thinking ‘Why should this happen to us when everyone else is so happy.’ You are (I was and may be again) one of a huge company. Of course we shall pray for you all we know how. God bless you both.
TO VERA GEBBERT: On the significances of the cross.
8 MAY 1959
Well yes of course the Cross is a sad thing, but are we not to be reminded that there is in it a sad significance as well as a symbol of a victory?
TO RICHARD LADBOROUGH: On how to cope with a truly boring colleague who deserved to be kept in employment and to have his benefits increased.
3 JUNE 1959
Remembering that (spoken) words are winged, I thought it might be useful to repeat in writing what I said, or think I said, or would now wish to have said, to you about P.W. this evening.
1. I think well of him. He has given us good service without counting the cost and he seems to me to be a friendly, decent, straightforward sort of person.
2. I have come to feel—I did not feel at first—that he is a very great bore. I am not sure that I know anyone whose conversation fatigues and dejects me more.
3. In view of the services we have already accepted from him, I think it would be ungrateful or even dishonourable—in view of the services he may still do us in the future I think it would be foolish—to allow any decisions we make about him to be at all influenced by his boringness. It would be useful to retain him. If we do, it would be proper to increase his dining rights.
I feel very strongly that to suffer bores patiently—‘gladly’ may be impossible—is a plain duty, and that it is even plainer when we owe them some gratitude.
Anyway, it really comes under the Golden Rule. Each of us, no doubt, is a bore to some people. I should like those whom I bore to treat me kindly and justly and therefore I must be kind and just to those who bore me.
He is, so far as I am concerned, the only bore at our High Table. Can one expect to have less than one? We are being let off very lightly.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how often one’s inner state differs from external circumstances; and on the proper attitude toward death and dying.
7 JUNE 1959
I am sorry to hear that so many troubles crowd upon you but glad to hear that, by God’s grace, you are so untroubled. So often, whether for good or ill, one’s inner state seems to have so little connection with the circumstances. I can now hardly bear to look back on the summer before last when Joy was apparently dying and I was often screaming with the pain of osteoporosis: yet at the time we were in reality far from unhappy. May the peace of God continue to infold you….
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 thought ‘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? There are, aren’t there, 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.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On whether we dare hope that dying is like having a tooth extracted; on purgatory; and yet more on forgiveness and the feeling of being forgiven.
7 JULY 1959
…You seem to have had a very nasty experience. I can see why you describe it as ‘looking into the face of death’: but who knows whether that face, when we really look at it, will be at all like that? Let us hope better things. I had a tooth out the other day, and came away wondering whether we dare hope that the moment of death may be very like that delicious moment when one realises that the tooth is really out and a voice says ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ ‘This’ of course will be Purgatory….
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.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On living in the present moment; on the difference between hope and hopes; and on one of Lewis’s often recommended books, Symbolism and Belief.
7 JULY 1959
I am glad to hear that the news is at any rate ‘so far, so good’. As my wife and I discovered during our terrible time two years ago, the great thing, both for the patient and for the lover of the patient, is to live it day by day, in the present endurance and the present case, giving as little of one’s mind as possible to fears or hopes ( hopes beget fears)—as animals live, and soldiers, and, I expect, saints….
I am so glad you liked Edwin Bevan’s book. It does clear things up, doesn’t it?
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On why we are not to know what is coming next.
3 AUGUST 1959
I have your letter of 30 July. It has puzzled me. I understood that you were going to the doctors for heart trouble. How and why do the psychiatrists come into the picture? But since they have come, I am glad to hear they are nice.
I sympathise most deeply with you on the loss of Fr. Louis. But for good as well as for ill one never knows what is coming next. You remember 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.
We are all well here though I am frantically busy: and though I get no more tired now than I did when I was younger, I take much longer to get un-tired afterwards. All blessings and sympathy.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN. On what really matters in the education and formation of a schoolboy.
6 SEPTEMBER 1959
Your italic typewriter is very pleasant to the eye. I have prayed for Paul and his Headmaster. Do not attach too much importance to the latter! I think headmasters’ influence on—and even knowledge of—their own schools is greatly exaggerated by a kind of romanticism. What really matters, for learning, is of course the immediate teacher. What matters for happiness and morals is the other boys.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN: On the distinction between belief and imagination and the difficulty of imagining the things we believe; and a word of correction about the way she torments herself and her daughter in their religious disputes.
8 SEPTEMBER 1959
No one, I presume, can imagine life in the glorified Body. On this, and on the distinction (in general) between belief and imagination, I have said all I can in Miracles [Chapters 10 and 16]. Lor’ bless me, I can picture very few of the things I believe in—I can’t picture will, thought, time, atoms, astronomical distances, New York, nor even (at the moment) my mother’s face….
By the way, is it necessary to salvation, to charity, or to affection, that you and Genia should achieve precise verbal agreement on these points? If not, why worry? Live and let live. ‘Take life easy as the leaves grow in the tree.’ There is, if you will forgive me for saying so, a self-tormenting and a mutually tormenting element in both of you.
TO EDWARD LOFSTROM. 20 September 1959
I think your comparison between the self and the telescope is singularly accurate. The instrument vanishes from consciousness just in so far it is perfected. But until then we must attend to it: otherwise we shall be like the man who mistakes a smudge on the glass for a gigantic animal on the Moon. You are still in my prayers.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the return of Joy’s cancer.
18 OCTOBER 1959
Will you redouble your prayers for us? Apparently the wonderful recovery Joy made in 1957 was only a reprieve, not a pardon. The last X Ray check reveals cancerous spots returning in many of her bones. There seems to be some hope of a few years life still and there are still things the doctors can do. But they are all in the nature of ‘rearguard actions’. We are in retreat. The tide has turned. Of course God can do again what He did before. The sky is not now so dark as it was when I married her in hospital. Her courage is wonderful and she gives me more support than I can give her.
The dreadful thing, as you know, is the waking each morning—the moment at which it all flows back on one.
TO RHONA BODLE: On the difficulties of godparenting.
18 OCTOBER 1959
It was nice to hear from you again. Of course you will have my friend’s prayers—you always have—in the extremely delicate and important work you are doing. God-children are a terrible problem. One seems to have promised what, if the parents are the wrong sort, one cannot perform.
Will you also pray for me? My wife (I married in 1957) has cancer.
TO SIR HENRY WILLINK, whose wife had just died: On bereavement and grieving.
3 DECEMBER 1959
Dear Master,
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt one, those who keep silence hurt more. They help to increase the sense of general isolation which makes a sort of fringe to the sorrow itself. You know what cogent reason I have to feel with you: but I can feel for you too. I know that what you are facing must be worse than what I must shortly face myself, because your happiness has lasted so much longer and is therefore so much more intertwined with your whole life. As Scott said in like case, ‘What am I to do with that daily portion of my thoughts which has for so many years been hers?’
People talk as if grief were just a feeling—as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. I, to be sure, believe there is something beyond it: but the moment one tries to use that as a consolation (that is not its function) the belief crumbles. It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.
You are probably very exhausted physically. Hug that and all the little indulgences to which it entitles you. I think it is tiny little things which (next to the very greatest things) help most at such a time.
I have myself twice known, after a loss, a strange excited (but utterly un-spooky) sense of the person’s presence all about me. It may be a pure hallucination. But the fact that it always goes off after a few weeks proves nothing either way.
I wish I had known your wife better. But she has a bright place in my memory…. She will be very greatly missed—on her own account, quite apart from any sympathy with you—by every fellow of this College.
…I shall not be at the funeral. You can understand and forgive my desire, now, to spend every possible moment at home. Forgive me if I have said anything amiss in this letter. I am too much involved myself to practise any skill.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN. On the drawbacks of living inside a tragedy.
8 DECEMBER 1959
I am very glad to hear all your good—indeed excellent—news. So is my brother, who has read your letter.
My news is very difficult. The last X-ray check-up which Joy had was the first which we approached without dread: she seemed so obviously in complete health. The photographs told a different tale. The disease is returning. Not in one place but in many. It is true that the situation is not (yet) as bad as it was in the spring of ’57 when her life was not worth six weeks’ purchase. But her recovery then was seemingly miraculous. Dare one hope again? Have we ever heard of a miracle repeated? At present she is to all appearance quite well: we shouldn’t know she had cancer if we didn’t know. The condemned cell looks like an ordinary and comfortable sitting room. I know we shall have your prayers. Forgive me for writing so egotistical a letter. One of the drawbacks about living in a tragedy is that one can’t very well see out of the windows. Pray particularly that our faith may grow stronger and stronger.
TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO: Almost a prayer for those in declining health.
15 DECEMBER 1959
I send you my cordial thanks for your kind letter.
Be assured that your House is daily named in my prayers. And do you persevere in prayers for us. For now, after two years’ remission, my wife’s mortal illness has returned. May it please the Lord that, whatever is His will for the body, the minds of both of us may remain unharmed; that faith unimpaired may strengthen us, contrition soften us and peace make us joyful.
And that, up till now, has happened; nor would you readily believe what joys we sometimes experience in the midst of troubles. What wonder? For has He not promised comfort to those who mourn?