1963
TO MRS. LEON EMMERT, who had written Lewis from the Congo: On a mature sense of one’s parents; and on sexual morality.
2 JANUARY 1963
Thank you for your kind and most interesting letter. Yes—how one’s view of one’s parents begins to change when one has discovered the beam in one’s own eye! I have had that experience too. And when one has grasped the right view of marriage, how all the current gabble about ‘ sexual morality’ is reduced!—as if it did not consist almost entirely in applying to sexual behaviour the same principles of good faith and unselfishness which have to be applied to all behaviour.
A good many of my books might not interest you. Write for the list to…MacDonald is nearly all out of print.
You are all facing a terrible situation out there; may God support and protect you.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the need to take care of oneself and not of things.
8 JANUARY 1963
I don’t mind betting that the things which ‘had to be done’ in your room didn’t really have to be done at all. Very few things really do. After one bad night with my heart—not so bad as yours, for it was only suffocation, not pain—my doctor strictly rationed me on stairs, and I have obeyed him. Of course it is hideously inconvenient: but that can be put up with and must. What worse than inconvenience would have resulted if you had left those ‘things’ undone? Do take more care of yourself and less of ‘things’!
Still snow-bound.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On the strange and terrifying things that happen to us and are really for our benefit.
8 FEBRUARY 1963
I’m not surprised at Son Suez’s [a cat] reaction. She couldn’t possibly know that this inexplicable arrest, exile, and imprisonment had a kind intention. It suggests the comforting thought that the strange and terrifying things which happen to us are really for our benefit. That’s an old platitude of course: but seeing it the other way round, in relation to the cat, somehow brings it to life.
Still snow!
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On Lewis’s nonchalance and even humor in the face of death.
19 MARCH 1963
I’m sorry they threaten you with a painful disease. ‘Dangerous’ matters much less, doesn’t it? What have you and I got to do but make our exit? When they told me I was in danger several months ago, I don’t remember feeling distressed.
I am talking, of course, about dying, not about being killed. If shells started falling about this house I should feel quite differently. An external, visible, and (still worse) audible threat at once wakes the instinct of self-preservation into fierce activity. I don’t think natural death has any similar terrors.
I am thrilled to hear that Son Suez has a sweater! Is this part of the demarché [formal presentation] (it’s in all our papers) which a body of American women are making to the President to get animals properly clothed ‘in the interests of decency’? Can it be true? If so, not only what insanity, but also (as in all super-refinements) what fundamental foul-mindedness! But also, what fun! The elephant looks as if he wore trousers already, but terribly baggy ones. What he needs is braces [suspenders]. The Rhino seems to wear a suit much too big for him: can it be ‘taken in’? What sort of collars will giraffes wear? Will seals and otters have ordinary clothes or bathing suits? The hedgehog will wear his shirts out terribly quickly, I should think….
Yes, private communions (I shared many during Joy’s last days) are extraordinarily moving. I am in danger of preferring them to those in Church.
TO MRS. DUNN, who seems to have asked about Jesus’ destruction of the fig tree in Matthew 21:19: On the purpose of death in the natural world.
3 APRIL 1963
Yes, a very puzzling passage. I think it is a moral allegory enforced by an actual miracle. It would be shocking if a man, or even a beast, were destroyed just to point a moral. But a vegetable? After all, every tree that dies (and they all die) anywhere in the world does so by God’s will. ‘Not a sparrow falls to the ground et cetera’. Mustn’t we face the fact that He wills deaths as well as lives? He has made the natural world to depend partly on death—‘ unless a seed die’. At least, that is how I look at it.
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD, sj: On the evil of Christian disunity; and on prayer and cooperation in works of charity as the means of reunion.
6 MAY 1963
Dear Padre,
You ask me in effect why I am not a Roman Catholic. If it comes to that, why am I not—and why are you not—a Presbyterian, a Quaker, a Mohammedan, a Hindu, or a Confucianist? After how prolonged and sympathetic study and on what grounds have we rejected these religions? I think those who press a man to desert the religion in which he has been bred and in which he believes he has found the means of Grace ought to produce positive reasons for the change—not demand from him reasons against all other religions. It would have to be all, wouldn’t it?
Our Lord prayed that we all might be one ‘as He and His Father are one’. But He and His Father are not one in virtue of both accepting a (third) monarchical sovereign.
That unity of rule, or even of credenda [things to be believed], does not necessarily produce unity of charity is apparent from the history of every Church, every religious order, and every parish.
Schism is a very great evil. But if reunion is ever to come, it will in my opinion come from increasing charity. And this, under pressure from the increasing strength and hostility of unbelief, is perhaps beginning: we no longer, thank God, speak of one another as we did over 100 years ago. A single act of even such limited co-operation as is now possible does more towards ultimate reunion than any amount of discussion.
The historical causes of the ‘ Reformation’ that actually occurred were (1.) The cruelties and commercialism of the Papacy (2.) The lust and greed of Henry VIII. (3.) The exploitation of both by politicians. (4.) The fatal insouciance of the mere rabble on both sides. The spiritual drive behind the Reformation that ought to have occurred was a deep re-experience of the Pauline experience.
Memo: a great many of my closest friends are your coreligionists, some of them priests. If I am to embark on a disputation—which could not be a short one, I would much sooner do it with them than by correspondence.
We can do much more to heal the schism by our prayers than by a controversy. It is a daily subject of mine.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how to rehearse for death and how to diminish fear.
17 JUNE 1963
Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair-shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Remember, though we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round—we get afraid because we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you ‘Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?’
Of course, this may not be the end. Then make it a good rehearsal.
Yours (and like you a tired traveller near the journey’s end)
Jack
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On why God might delay death so that the dying might finish the spiritual work they were meant to do; and on the spiritual work the dead might do for us.
25 JUNE 1963
Tho’ horrified at your sufferings, I am overjoyed at the blessed change in your attitude to death. This is a bigger stride forward than perhaps you yourself yet know. For you were rather badly wrong on that subject. Only a few months ago when I said that we old people hadn’t much more to do than to make a good exit, you were almost angry with me for what you called such a ‘bitter’ remark. Thank God, you now see it wasn’t bitter: only plain common sense.
Yes: I do wonder why the doctors inflict such torture to delay what cannot in any case be very long delayed. Or why God does! Unless there is still something for you to do. As far as weakness allows I hope, now that you know you are forgiven, you will spend most of your remaining strength in forgiving. Lay all the old resentments down at the wounded feet of Christ. I have had dozens of blood transfusions in the last two years and know only too well the horrid—and long—moments during which they are poking about to find the vein. And then you think they’ve really got in at last and it turns out that they haven’t. (Is there an allegory here? The approaches of Grace often hurt because the spiritual vein in us hides itself from the celestial surgeon?) But oh, I do pity you for waking up and finding yourself still on the wrong side of the door! How awful it must have been for poor Lazarus who had actually died, got it all over, and then was brought back—to go through it all, I suppose, a few years later. I think he, not St. Stephen, ought really to be celebrated as the first martyr.
You say too much of the very little I have been able to do for you. Perhaps you will very soon be able to repay me a thousand-fold. For if this is Good-bye, I am sure you will not forget me when you are in a better place. You’ll put in a good word for me now and then, won’t you?
It will be fun when we at last meet.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how to be very ill; and on Christian hope.
28 JUNE 1963
It was anaemia that endangered my life the winter before last, but of course trifling compared with yours. I think the best way to cope with the mental debility and total inertia is to submit to it entirely. Don’t try to concentrate. Pretend you are a dormouse or even a turnip.
But of course I know the acceptance of inertia is much easier for men than for women. We are the lazy sex. Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.
TO JOCELYN GIBB, who had asked Lewis how he wanted Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, described on the book jacket: On Lewis’s sense of his vocation as writer.
28 JUNE 1963
I’ve thought and thought about the blurb but find I just can’t write it—apparently I can hardly write the words either! I’d like you to make the point that the reader is merely being allowed to listen to two very ordinary laymen discussing the practical and speculative problems of prayer as these appear to them: i.e., the author does not claim to be teaching.
Would it be good to say ‘Some passages are controversial but this is almost an accident. The wayfaring Christian cannot quite ignore recent Anglican theology when it has been built as a barricade across the high road’?
I wouldn’t stress your point about my not having given tongue very recently. It can’t feel like that to the public. They must get the impression that I bring out a book once a fortnight. And your denial, however true in fact, will, like the sculptor’s fig-leaf, only draw attention to what it would fair conceal.
I enclose a new passage for the last letter. This will make that letter unusually long but that legitimate in a finale. Anyway, I like the new bit.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE, whose difficulties with her daughter and son-in-law continued: On the experience of forgiving; and on the tedium of dying.
6 JULY 1963
All one can say about Lorraine is that if she is really so brainwashed as you think, she is then no more morally responsible than a lunatic. I fully admit that as regards her husband you have been set as difficult a job in the forgiving line as can well be imagined.
Do you know, only a few weeks ago I realised suddenly that I at last had forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I’d been trying to do it for years: and like you, each time I thought I’d done it, I found, after a week or so it all had to be attempted over again. But this time I feel sure it is the real thing. And (like learning to swim or to ride a bicycle) the moment it does happen it seems so easy and you wonder why on earth you didn’t do it years ago. So the parable of the unjust judge comes true, and what has been vainly asked for years can suddenly be granted. I also get a quite new feeling about ‘If you forgive you will be forgiven.’ I don’t believe it is, as it sounds, a bargain. The forgiving and the being forgiven are really the very same thing. But one is safe as long as one keeps on trying.
How terribly long these days and hours are for you. Even I, who am in a bed of roses now compared with you, feel it a bit. I live in almost total solitude, never properly asleep by night (all loathsome dreams) and constantly falling asleep by day. I sometimes feel as if my mind were decaying. Yet, in another mood, how short our whole past life begins to seem!
It is a pouring wet summer here, and cold. I can hardly remember when we last saw the sun.
Well, we shall get out of it all sooner or later, for
even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Let us pray much for one another.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On treating one’s doctors with understanding (and Lewis’s humor at who will die first!).
9 JULY 1963
I can well understand with what mixed feelings you received what is obviously, in the ordinary medical sense, very ‘good’ news. Aren’t you a trifle fierce about the doctor? It can’t be much fun attempting to explain the details to 100 bio-chemical patients who have no knowledge of bio-chemistry and who, one knows, won’t really understand, however hard one tries. I was always only too glad to let mine off with the merest skeleton account of my own state—I found it such a boring subject. Also, aren’t your doctors (like ours) hideously overworked? I know my specialist, when I was in hospital, had a working day which had begun at 8.30 a.m. and was still going on at 9.45 p.m. Doesn’t leave much elbow room.
Our hearts, by the way, must be different. When yours is worst you have to lie flat. When mine was worst I had to sit up—night and day for months.
By the way, as you come out I may possibly go in. Swollen ankles—the Red Light for me—have returned. I see the doctor about this to-morrow. My fear is that he will forbid me to go to Ireland on Monday as I had arranged, and put me back in hospital.
Our friends might really get up a sweepstake as to whose train really will go first! Blessings.
TO RUTH BROADY: Lewis’s last letter to a child about Narnia.
26 OCTOBER 1963
Many thanks for your kind letter, and it was very good of you to write and tell me that you like my books; and what a very good letter you write for your age!
If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you may always do so. I’m so thankful that you realized the ‘hidden story’ in the Narnian books. It is odd, children nearly always do, grown ups hardly ever.
I’m afraid the Narnian series has come to an end, and am sorry to tell you that you can expect no more.
God bless you.
TO MR. YOUNG: Lewis’s last letter of direction—on the virgin birth; on the glorified body of the risen Christ; on atonement theories; and on the wrath of God.
31 OCTOBER 1963
1. I believe in the Virgin Birth in the fullest and most literal sense: that is, I deny that copulation with a man was the cause of the Virgin’s pregnancy.
2. It is not easy to define what we mean by an ‘essentially human body’. The records show that Our Lord’s Risen Body could pass through closed doors, which human bodies can’t: but also that it could eat. We shall know what a glorified body is when we have one ourselves: till then, I think we must acquiesce in mystery.
3. When Scripture says that Christ died ‘for’ us, I think the word is usually 
(on behalf of), not 
(instead of). I think the ideas of sacrifice, ransom, championship (over death), substitution et cetera are all images to suggest the reality (not otherwise comprehensible to us) of the atonement. To fix on any one of them as if it contained and limited the truth like a scientific definition would in my opinion be a mistake.
4. All associations of human passions to God are analogical. The wrath of God: ‘something in God of which the best image in the created world is righteous indignation’. I think it quite a mistake to try to soften the idea of anger by substituting something like disapproval or regret. Even with men real anger is far more likely than cold disapproval to lead to full reconciliation. Hot love, hot wrath….
Your questions are not in the least offensive.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis