Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You are considered by many to be the world's leading C.S. lewis Scholar. I know that when they unveiled the bust of Lewis at Westminster Abbey at Poets Corner, you were the one to do the unveiling, I guess.
Do you get that title much, that distinction? How do you feel about that?
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I'm a C.S. lewis Scholar. I spend most of my working days writing and speaking and teaching about C.S. lewis and a little bit about Tolkien and Chesterton.
So yeah, I'm happy with that title. And now alas, that some much more notable Lewis scholars like Walter Hooper have left us.
People are seeming to consider me now the, the people to look to, which is a bit worrying.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: No, I think we're in good hands. Let's talk a little bit about your exposure to Lewis. I'm assuming it came through a Narnia book as a child, is that correct?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, Narnia was read to me by my parents when I was little. My two older brothers and I would jump into our parents bed on a Sunday morning. My mum would read us a chapter or two of the latest Narnia Chronicle. Then we'd all get up, have breakfast, go to church. Wow. That's a regular and happy memory from my childhood.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: And what was next, I guess in the progression there with Lewis?
[00:01:29] Speaker B: I think it would have been either the Screwtape letters or mere Christianity or possibly the Great Divorce. I know my older brother had a copy of the Great Divorce with that picture of a ladder going from hell to heaven and people being pulled off by angels or pulled up by angels and pulled down by demons. Rather terrifying picture to a nine year old or however old I was.
So I got into Lewis's other fiction and Christian apologetics.
Then I went to Oxford to do my English degree and wrote a short undergraduate thesis on Lewis for my degree.
As a result of which I was asked to do a bit of one off lecturing and tutoring after I'd graduated, which began to be a bit more than just one off.
I ended up living in Lewis's house, the Kilns for three years as a kind of warden curator type person. Had the privilege of sleeping in Lewis old bedroom and having his old study as my study, which was cool.
And then when it came time for me to do my PhD, Lewis was the obvious choice because I was already fairly expert in his writings.
And then halfway through my Ph.D. i had the idea about the Narnia Chronicles which led to my book Planet Narnia. Yes, and that's sort of, that was a kind of groundbreaking, groundbreaking book. You Might say certainly a hinge moment for my career as a Lewis scholar.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Okay, well, thank you for sharing that. Let's talk about Lewis, the man a little, you know, born in Belfast, mother died when he was 9. Very traumatic for a 9 year old, I guess, age 10. His father sent him to England, I think to a pretty poor school, actually.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Just about the worst school he could have found.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And was miserable, I think, as he describes.
And then he convinced his father to hire a tutor. And that was William Kirkpatrick.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Is that correct?
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: And this guy was rational, logical, but an atheist.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: But he did teach Lewis some valuable lessons and elaborate on that a little bit. What did he learn from this atheist tutor that he felt like helped him along the journey?
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah, well, he learned from Kirkpatrick the value of rigorous thinking and strict logic and believing a thing if you could prove it, regardless of whether you happen to like it.
So sort of intellectual clarity, intellectual honesty and hard work.
And yes, I mean, Lewis had already actually lost his childhood faith before he went to Kirkpatrick. So Kirkpatrick's atheism didn't impact Lewis's own loss of faith. He'd already lost it.
But it perhaps strengthened Lewis's rational dialectical side.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Which I think was very good for his development. Otherwise he might have been a bit too romantic and dreamy and poetic.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: But Kirkpatrick strengthened that. The left brain, is it? Or is it the right brain? I can never remember which brain it is.
But it helped equal out the two sides of Lewis.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: I know when I went to college, I had a former priest, he kind of denounced his faith. I'm not sure what happened along the way, but he knew the Bible as well as anyone I'd ever met. And early on in the semester, I was taking the Bible out of context and he really ripped me to shreds. And he said, look, if you're going to be a Christian, be a good one. If you're going to be an atheist, be a good one. How did you arrive at that conclusion? Do you really know what you believe and why you believe it? Better yet, you claim to base your life on this authoritative, divinely inspired book. Have you even read it? Cover to cover, Which I had not, which I think is the case with most young people today. But what I appreciated about that professor was he was very honest and he really just wanted me to be honest and to go where the evidence would take me. Would you say with Kirkpatrick and Lewis that that was it? He wasn't trying Lewis was already claimed to be an atheist, so it wasn't that he was trying to pile on in terms of the ridiculousness of Christianity. He really wanted him to be a scholar.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And he wanted, like your guy, he wanted Lewis to be an honest thinker, whatever conclusion he came to.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: And that's what Lewis rather interestingly portrays in his own fiction, in the character of McPhee, who is the sort of rationalist skeptic in the group of Christians in that Hideous Strength, the third book in his Ransom trilogy. McPhee is very much modeled on Kirkpatrick.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Oh, is that right? I did not realize that.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Well, let's fast forward a little bit with Lewis. So after taking the journey with Kirkpatrick, he ends up at Oxford, studies there, it's interrupted because of the First World War. He finds himself in the trenches and he battled, I guess, trench fever.
And then probably the most traumatic thing that happened was the event with the shrapnel and his good friend there who died beside him.
Was the friend a believer or not? Because Lewis was not at the time in the trenches. So he's one that can say, I was an atheist in the foxhole, ironically.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, indeed. He says he was once asked, were you ever frightened in the trenches? And he said, yes, all the time.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: But I never sank so low as to pray.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: So, yeah, that idea that there are no atheists in foxholes is not true.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: For Louis, at least. Right, well, but then he had this out of body experience at that moment.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Right, well, yeah, a British shell that was zooming over to the German lines fell short apparently, and landed. It's what we'd now call friendly fire.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Landed in Lewis's trench and apparently just annihilated his sergeant, Sergeant Ayres, who Lewis was very fond of.
And Lewis was hit with the shrapnel and he apparently carried bits of it around in his body from decades afterwards. It wasn't really worth extracting.
And yes, he sort of saw himself from above, or at any rate, he says that the picture occurred in my mind here is a man dying. He sort of looked at himself, or considered himself as someone who was dying when he found that he wasn't breathing or thought that he wasn't breathing.
But of course, by the mercy of God, he did not die. He survived. And he was invalided back to England and he spent about six months recovering from his war wounds. But, yeah, he cheated death by a hair's breadth.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Interesting. So then fast forward a few more Years. So he finds himself. He's done with his studies at Oxford, he's now a professor there. At Oxford. And he has two friends there, Hugo Dyson in JRR Tolkien. And as he talks about his conversion, it was this, I guess, long evening into the night conversation that he would say, then two or three weeks later perhaps led to his conversion. Talk about that a little bit.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Yeah. He says that Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human cause of his conversion to Christianity. He'd already, by that stage, become a theist.
He'd come to a belief in God in 1929.
And then thanks to this, or largely owing to this conversation with Tolkien and this other guy, Hugo Dyson said as a result of that, they helped him over the last style to Christianity.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: And he was around age 32 at this point.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: He was 32, that's right, yep. And fairly soon afterwards he wrote his first post conversion book called the Pilgrim's Regress, which is his allegorical account of how he became a Christian, based, of course, on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
And it was clearly, clearly a really.
I mean, all conversions ought to be life changing, but some seem to be more life changing than others. Yeah. And this was clearly a very, very pivotal, crucial change. You can just see it in Lewis's own letters if you read his correspondence from, say about 1927 to 1933, those six years covering his theistic and Christian conversions. He's clearly becoming a different man.
And the interesting thing is that you, the reader can see it. Yes, but he, the author of these letters is not observing it. He's just changing in front of your eyes. He's becoming more integrated, more content, more patient, more humble.
And it's fascinating to see the actual effects of a conversion on a human life.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Well, the beauty of writing it down and passing it on and that we've preserved those. It was an early letter, I think, to Arthur Greaves. Yeah, To Greaves that I think talked about the evening conversation with Dyson.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: That's right. That's how we know that it was so life changing for him.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: And so being, I guess, a medieval and Renaissance scholar, literary critic, he never claimed to be a theologian, obviously theologically astute and well read, but I think a lot of times Christians, oftentimes evangelicals, many who quote him weekly in a sermon, which. That's great. But Lewis, I think he never really claimed to be this theologian, but to go back to that, with his expertise, and I know the pagan stories, the myths, which he understood as well as anyone, and talk about that journey. Because if my memory serves correctly, it was Tolkien in particular that helped him to look at Christianity in a way that he looked at some of these myths and that. But the difference was that it. This is something that happened in real time, in a real place.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: That's right, yeah.
Lewis says that at the start of that conversation he had a great estimation, a high value put upon pagan mythology of dying and rising gods.
He mentions those of Adonis and Bacchus and Boulder. Elsewhere he talks about the Khorne gods and all these pagan deities who die and go down into the underworld and their death somehow achieves or reveals something back here on earth in the coming of spring, say, or the new life in the crops, or the sunrise.
And he had always found them to be, he said, profound and suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp, even though he couldn't say in cold prose what they meant. But then he didn't want to sort of explain them. He was just content to rest in them imaginatively.
Whereas with Christianity at that stage, he said he was puzzled by what it meant.
He was focusing in on doctrines of sanctification and propitiation and all these sorts of theological explanations about the Christian meaning, the meaning of the Christian gospel.
But Tolkien and Dyson said to him, well, that's sort of putting the cart before the horse. It's letting the tail wag the dog. That doctrines, though important, are not what Christianity is really about.
The doctrines are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the lived language of Jesus Christ, of a real man in a real time, in a real place, doing real things, incarnated teaching, being crucified, rising, ascending, sending his spirit. All those things are the more adequate language. And that's what Christianity means, not the after the fact conceptualizing of it in doctrinal categories.
Those doctrines have their place and they're actually very important. And Lewis and Tolkien and Dyson were certainly not anti intellectual, of course, some of the most intellectual men of their generation.
But Dalkin and Dyson said, get things the right way around.
The thing that Christianity principally means is itself is its actual sequence of events as a story happening to characters in times and places.
The difference is that with Christianity, this dying and rising God has a good deal of historical validation, definable historical consequences, which you can't say with Adonis and Bacchus and Boulder. They happen. Nobody knows where, nobody knows when, nobody's even really trying to claim they were historical. But with Christianity you can claim that and you ought to claim it because it's true.
So you get all the redolent, suggestive profundities of pagan mythology, but all the reality of actual historical characters. So Christianity, Lewis came to believe was the true myth.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: It was mythic in the sense that it was a story of characters and events. It was a narrative. That was its chief meaning.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: But it was historical.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: And that's when he shifted, I guess, from theist with belief in God to belief in Christ.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: And the personal relationship with Christ.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: And so age 32 and then moving forward, you know the movie Shadowlands, I know you and I have talked about this in the past and most recently in England this summer. It was so great. So you asked my 14 year old, what did you think of the movie, Jake? Because we had just watched it and we were going to be visiting with you and he said, if you recollect, he said, I didn't envision Louis that way. I don't think that's how he really was. Which we hadn't talked about that. And then you said in response, well, you're right, Jake, that's not how he really was. And as much as I love Hopkins and playing in that role, let's talk about it a little bit because it is a great movie. It's beautiful. The spires of Oxford and just everything.
But talk about maybe the portrayal of Lewis that fell short there. And then from there, I'd like to talk a little bit about the way the movie portrayed his view of suffering.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So Shadowlands was based on a screenplay by William Nicholson. He previously made it as a stage play and before that as a TV film for the BBC. So it had gone through a series of iterations and it had started out biographically fairly accurate and then had become progressively more sort of stylized and more and more artistic license had been taken.
So by the time of the feature film with Anthony Hopkins, directed by Richard Attenborough, it was. I mean, it was still recognisably Lewis's story, but there were a lot of changes. And indeed Hopkins own portrayal was. Was not an attempt to register the real Lewis. Hopkins has said that the way he prepares, or at least for most of his roles, is just to read the script dozens and scores and even hundreds of times. I might read a script as often as 200 times.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: Just so my mind is completely in the words and the nuances, what the screenwriter has said.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: And he says, I don't usually go behind the screenwriter to do historical research.
So all that Hopkins was channeling was the words of William Nicholson, not authentic historical C.S. lewis. And it's a great performance, as a performance of this character who happens to be called C.S. lewis, but it's important to distinguish that character from the real man.
I went to the premiere of Shadowlands in Oxford with Walter Hooper, who I just mentioned, who had been Lewis's secretary in the last few months of Lewis's life.
And when we came out of the cinema afterwards, I said to him, because I'd been quite impressed by this performance, I thought it was quite accurate. And I said to Walter, did Hopkins remind you of C.S. lewis? No. Oh, what? Not even for a moment? No.
And that's. I mean, Walter didn't know CS Lewis that well, but even three months acquaintance with Lewis was enough to make him think this is not the real man at all. So I think people should approach Shadowlands as a movie and really has almost nothing to do with the real C.S. lewis.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Very helpful. I mean, I think it's worth watching, but to have that context, I think it's good. What about the portrayal of suffering? I know there's this lecture, I think it was in the Radcliffe Camera, and Lewis is there and he says, we're like blocks of stone and God is.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: The sculptor who carves the forms of men.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: The blues of his chisel which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Right. Or that pain is God's megaphone to awaken, arouse a deaf world.
That's actually in his writings.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Yes. That phrase is from the Problem of Pain.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Let's talk about his view of suffering a little bit. It seems like, especially in the context of the world stage, now there's more of it. Depression rates are higher, suicide rates are higher.
I know for me, I turn to Lewis quite often in addition to the Scriptures, just for encouragement of his insight. And it's as if he was ahead of his time in so many ways. But it's particularly his view just of suffering and a longing for something which this world can never satisfy. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong with the quote of if I find in this world that nothing can satisfy, ultimately I was made for another world.
Talk about that a little bit.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Yeah. So the Shadowlands movie is sort of premised on two of Lewis's works. The Problem of Pain, which is sort of philosophical, argumentative about, is trying to defend the idea that it's not irrational to believe in a good and all powerful God despite the presence of evil and suffering in the world.
And it's very intellectual. It's an avowedly academic approach to the subject.
And indeed, Lewis had said that he wanted to publish the book anonymously because he said, I'm going to have to make statements in this argument of such apparent fortitude that they would appear ridiculous if anybody knew that it was me, C.S. lewis, who was making them.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: And are you thinking of the Inklings in particular or just anyone?
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Anyone who happened to know him would say, yeah, well, you try living that idea. It may work on paper, but how easy is it actually to live up to those ideals?
But although he requested anonymity for the book or pseudonymity, the publisher said no. It's part of a series by lots of different authors, and the other authors are not going to be under noms de plume, so you can't be either.
However, you can write a preface in which you confess that you don't live up to your own principles. The disclaimer.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: Right, okay.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: And he says, that exhilarating program I am now carrying out, he says in the preface. Yeah.
So the. I'm saying all this in order to explain Shadowlands. Yes, because the Problem of Pain is an avowedly intellectual book and it doesn't deal with all the actual emotions and moral complexities from within.
It's very Kirkpatrick like.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: It's intellectual, it's a strong arm of ideas, and we've worked out that this is true, and therefore we believe it because it's true.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: So for the skeptic, would you recommend that book as one of the best? I mean, I know so many have pointed to mere Christianity, but.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: Well, I would and I wouldn't. It depends on the skeptic. If the skeptic has not suffered much and is just wrestling with the ideas intellectually, then yes, this intellectual engagement makes a. Makes a lot of sense.
But if you've suffered and you want a more sort of holistic and grounded and humane approach, it can actually be a very annoying book, I think.
And that's why, I think, in part, Lewis wrote this second work, a grief observed, 20 or so years later, after his wife died.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: It was 20 years after she died.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: No, it was 20 years after he wrote the Problem of Pain.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: Oh, I see.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: Okay. He wrote the Problem of pain in 1940.
His wife died in 1960, and a grief observed came out in 1960.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: It was him working through the grief.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: Yes, It's a journal like account of his bereavement, and it's very, very, very different from the Problem of Pain because whereas the Problem of Pain is giving you all the intellectual answers to the problem of Suffering.
A Grief Observed is giving you all the reality of what it's like to suffer.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: And he was very, very forthright.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah.
He presents.
Well, the interesting thing is that the Grief Observed is published anonymous. Was published anonymously under the pseudonym NW Clark. Clark, yeah, or clerk. Americans would say clerk, but it's clerk in English.
So a clerk is just a writer. And NW stands for Nat Wilk, which in Anglo Saxon means I know not whom. So here we have a Clark, I know not who it is. That's the reason behind the pseudonym.
And Lewis had sometimes used the initials NW when publishing poetry. Okay.
So partly released by the anonymity, Lewis was able to sort of splurge onto the page all the darkest and most difficult questions about what it's like to suffer, especially when you're a Christian and God doesn't seem to be coming to your rescue right now. Shadowlands is basically structured to take us from the CS Lewis who writes the Problem of Pain to the CS Lewis who writes A Grief Observed, and to sort of slightly critique the former as sort of just a brain on a stick and applaud the latter for his emotional honesty. He's humanized now, and that works brilliantly for the trajectory of the story. That's why Shadowlands is such a powerful and affecting movie. But I don't think it's really historically accurate because the man who wrote the Problem of pain in 1940 had already suffered. His mother had died when he was nine, he fought in the First World War, he'd been nearly killed, he'd seen plenty of other people die, and he knew a lot by then by the time you wrote the Problem of Pain, so he was already very emotionally engaged with the question. It's just that for the purposes of that book, he didn't think it was relevant. It was not that kind of work.
And when he comes to write a grief observed 20 odd years later, it's not like he's given up on the intellectual ideas. He still believes that philosophically, but that's not relevant for this kind of work that he's now writing after the death of his wife.
So on both accounts, really, Shadowlands subtly misrepresents him as sort of immature emotionally for the former book and sort of having given up on his Christian philosophy with the latter book.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: That's why it's actually, you know, quite a. If you take it as an accurate biographical portrait, it's very, very misleading.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: I'm glad you've explained it to us.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: But it's a brilliant and beautiful and Moving film. Yes.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: So with Lewis's works, again, I mentioned earlier, so many point to Mere Christianity was pivotal in helping them just understand Christianity. Who is Christ?
For those that maybe aren't as familiar with Lewis and his. In his writings, what is your favorite book or books by Lewis? Because I'm assuming it's probably not Mere Christianity.
[00:27:45] Speaker B: No, it's not. And I don't think. I mean, Mere Christianity is a classic work, a brilliant piece of apologetics, but in a way, it's not a very representative work of CS Lewis's own personal thought.
It was a commission. The BBC asked him to give some talks and then a few more talks, and Lewis was thinking, well, what can I do to help my fellow Brits during the Second World War?
And so he. He shifted into a very sort of public preaching, evangelizing, apologetic mode and did so fantastically. It's a classic work. And indeed, my next project is to write a guide to Mere Christianity. Okay, so don't. Nothing I'm saying here is meant to downgrade the book. All I'm saying is that if you want the heart of Lewis's own personal thinking and what resonated with him most at a personal level, it's probably in other works.
You know, Lewis himself said that his. His best book, or at least his best work of fiction, was Till we have Faces, his last novel, but most people haven't even heard of that, let alone read it. But it is very deep and meaningful work which clearly connects with some of the deepest thoughts and ideas that Lewis had personally connecting with, indeed, suffering again, but also love and how love can go wrong in the face of suffering. Love can curdle and get embittered, can turn to complicated forms of hatred while still calling itself love. And all this is dramatized in this novel, and very effectively so. I mean, it sounds like I'm making the book out to be a study in human wretchedness, and in a way it is. But it's the sort of human wretchedness that everybody ought to be able to recognize about their own moral failings and how you can become possessive when you love people and how you can become bitter when you lose people you love.
There's so much going on in the.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: Book, and obviously his writings, including that one, had a profound impact on your own personal journey intellectually but also spiritually.
At what point, I think you said seven or eight years ago, that you kind of felt this call to the priesthood, correct?
[00:30:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I became a Catholic priest in 2018, and I had become a Catholic in 2012, after a lifetime of being an Anglican.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: And what was it in particular that caused that shift for you?
[00:30:37] Speaker B: Well, it was a very long and complicated process. It was a 20 year decision.
It's not something I made overnight by any means.
And to give you a sort of adequate answer would take another hour.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: We don't have that.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: When people say, why did you become a Catholic? The quick answer is the Holy Spirit of God.
And I don't mean that in a trite way. I became a Catholic because I felt I was called to become one and that my Christian life necessitated becoming one.
And I'm very glad I did. It's the best thing I have done in my Christian life.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: What has changed since? Anything? I mean, obviously you're at Oxford and you lecture and I know you teach in many places and here you are in Florida to speak this evening and you're so kind to sit down with me to visit and have this podcast. But since you've been in, the Catholic Church has much changed in terms of day to day for you, in terms of parish responsibilities or even your approach to scholarship or. I mean, Tolkien being Catholic, Lewis was not with your own reading, the ones that now you are reading. I know we've talked about Brandt Petrie, you know, someone we both admire, a Catholic writer. Are there some other writers that you would recommend to all Christians?
[00:32:08] Speaker B: Yeah, well, Brant Pitry is great. He's got a couple of excellent books on the Eucharist and on Mary.
John Saywood, he's a Catholic priest. In fact, it was he who received me into the Catholic Church in Oxford. And he's got many excellent books.
One in particular about is called Redeemer in the Womb. It's Christ living in Mary.
Robert Barron. Bishop Barron.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I like Barron.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Word on Fire Ministries.
Almost everything he writes and speaks about is worth attending to.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: He is brilliant and so relatable.
[00:32:48] Speaker B: Yeah, so those are just three.
As for my own approach to academic work, I don't think that's changed very much. I mean, obviously interests shift as time goes by in any case, so it's hard to distinguish those from shifts that might have resulted from this change.
I'm getting more interested in Tolkien. I think that can be attributed, I think, to having become a Catholic, because Tolkien was a very devout Catholic and seeing the relationship between his own faith and his works is itself very interesting to me. Holly Ordway has just written an excellent book on Tolkien's faith. Indeed. That's the title of the book, Tolkien's A Spiritual Biography. Tracing it's really the first attempt that's been made seriously to trace the whole of Tolkien's life from the point of view of his faith.
And it's very illuminating and I found edifying and encouraging.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: I know there's some things in life that we aspire to do and they don't happen, but it's good to dream. And you've accomplished a lot already. And I know there's more on the horizon. And you mentioned this study guide for mere Christianity.
Is there another book or two in which you would you really feel like, I hope, Lord willing, this will come out, that I can produce this work of scholarship or devotional or fiction before you pass?
[00:34:28] Speaker B: Well, one thing I'm hoping I might eventually do.
Who knows whether it will come to pass? I haven't even proposed it to a publisher yet, so perhaps I shouldn't talk about it, but jinx the whole thing. But I've acquired this interest in the seven heavens as a result of my work on C.S. lewis and the Narnia Chronicles. And the seven Heavens. Those seven symbols of spiritual value, as Lewis called them, strike me as very interesting. And the whole idea of seven.
Why is seven the perfect number?
Fascinates me. So I thought I might eventually write a book which would be a sort of devotional work looking at a different seven each week, the seven days of creation, the seven churches in the book of Revelation, or any seven you can think of, and look at one each week for 52 weeks for the whole year.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Sounds great.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: And the book would be called Feast of Weeks.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: I like it.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: And it would be accompanied by relevant artwork and quotations and citations and things. I think it would be very interesting.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: So maybe a publisher will hear this and say, let's contact Michael Ward. What is the best way to contact you?
[00:36:00] Speaker B: Michaelward.net is my website, and that's the one.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: And I think at the bottom, if you scroll down, it's a claim to fame where you hand James Bond the Spectacles. And what movie was that?
[00:36:13] Speaker B: The world is not enough.
[00:36:14] Speaker A: Okay? And ironically, it's not enough.
And speaking of, I asked this question of every guest.
Life expectancy is, I think, 76.1 or four years or something like that. It's probably changed since the pandemic, and hopefully we live much longer than that. But as we know to be true in history and in Scripture is that we're made to live forever.
What do you think eternity will be like?
[00:36:49] Speaker B: I don't know, except that it will be with Christ, which is far better, to quote St. Paul to live as Christ.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: To die is gain.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: Yes. And St. Paul says that in some ways he wants to stay in this life, to be with those he loves in this world and do good in this world. But then he also longs to be with Christ, which is far better. It's even better. Right? So one shouldn't hope to escape this world at the earliest opportunity.
Go when you're called, as it were.
And that may actually be, that may require of you some patience. I mean, my own dear father has just turned 90 and he's still in fairly good health. But as you get older, inevitably you, you get frail and things are testing and it can be easy to give up and to get depressed and to lose relish in this life and think because you're a burden, you're no longer of use to anybody.
Whereas perhaps the very fact of your being a burden is precisely the use that you are meant to be achieving. Because we should carry others burdens.
It's not a bad thing to be burdened with another person's care.
It can bring out the best in us. It can also bring out the worst in us, of course, but that's true of everything.
So learning to be patient and hopeful even when you're not apparently doing anything good in the world, I think that's one of the great difficult lessons of old age. And I've done a bit of work with people in nursing homes and people with dementia and you know, it can be very difficult getting out of this life.
My own mother had a very, very peaceful passing.
She had a very good death from cancer about 10 years ago.
But not everybody has it that good, so to speak. And we've all got to take our death however it comes to us. One of the Catholic prayers that a Catholic prays every day is pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
A good death, however it comes.
You think of these poor people in Maine yesterday, smeared down by a gunman.
No idea that when they woke up yesterday morning that they were going to be dead by lunchtime.
And I may walk out of this hotel now and be cut down by a bus, sure, but I might live until I'm 103, right?
So however it comes, you've got to be ready for it.
[00:39:54] Speaker A: And I think that's the key, right, is that you are ready. And I think when we know Christ, we don't have to feel death. The one who knows us best and loves us most has been there, has overcome death. And I know that that is the joy we have as Christians. Amid the pain. And I had Chronicles of Narnia read to me when I was younger as well, and other things as well, including, I remember just a simple prayer, which was a song of Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. And my father suffered dementia for many years, and his last years were rough. And each time I went to see him when I was back in Texas, I didn't know if he'd be lucid or not or how much so. And he loved to sing hymns. And the last time I saw him, and he loved strong hymns and, you know, a mighty fortress is our God. And so I asked him, after a couple hours of conversation, I just said, daddy, would you like to sing a hymn?
And he thought about it, and he said, I don't remember. Like he couldn't remember any. And so stayed with him a little longer and it was time for me to go. And so I remember pushing him down that hallway in his wheelchair because he couldn't walk anymore. And I just remember looking down on him thinking there was a time in which he pushed me in a chair. And I was thinking back on childhood memories and things I had learned. And even standing beside him in church singing these hymns together and trying to out sing one another almost, and smiling. And I got him to his room and I literally had to physically pick him up almost like a child and tuck him into bed.
And, you know, I just remember him sitting there looking at me as if this was meant to be. It was your turn. My turn.
And it was hard to leave, and I didn't really want to leave. And I prayed with him and we, you know, he followed me about halfway, followed me through the Lord's Prayer.
[00:41:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:51] Speaker A: And I said, amen. And I love you, dad. And I love you, son. Maybe two or three times. And then as I turned to leave, to walk away, which would be the last time I saw my dad, he just started singing at the top of his lungs, jesus loves me. This I know, excellent. For the Bible tells me so. And it was so beautiful and as complex as life can be, and even trying to decipher some of these great works of literature with others, I think in the end, when we remember that, that Jesus does love us, that he died for us, and it really makes everything okay. And I think it sounds, you know, from your mother's experience and now your father, when they may wonder, why am I still here? Isn't it beautiful how God reminds us that I'm not done with him yet and he's not done with us? Either.
And I'm grateful to you for your friendship over the years, but just the way you've let God use you through your writing.
But just speaking and letting people ask you difficult questions, because we've had many of those conversations and even about Catholicism. So a conversation we had a few months ago and the reading I've done since and that. And I'm just really grateful for that. And I think it's important for us as fellow Christians. You Catholic, I'm Protestant. And yet we find that common ground, and Lewis has been that for us and many others in that. All of that being said in that immediate context there, what advice could you give? Because there will be Catholics as well as Protestants and even skeptics listening to this podcast. What advice would you give them in terms of just the journey in reading? Maybe with Lewis, I know we've talked about mere Christianity, we've talked about till we have faces in that, but just even in scripture, I have people ask me all the time, you know, surprisingly, we're living in a culture that is less and less biblically literate. Someone will say to me, where would I even start in the Bible? And so I'm kind of, I guess I'm asking you that in a roundabout way. What would you say?
[00:44:01] Speaker B: Well, where one should start in the Bible is probably with one of the Gospels. Start at the heart of the book. Don't work your way from Genesis to Revelation. You'll get bogged down in the minor prophets and you'll never make it to the Testament.
So, yeah, start with the Gospel of Mark or Luke or any of them, Matthew or John for that matter. They're all obviously the best things that have been written.
As for more generally about how people should go about the spiritual life, I would say one of the things I have learned from C.S. lewis is honesty. And maybe he learned that from Kirkpatrick. Ironically, in Lewis's book on prayer, he says we must learn to lay before God what is in our heart, not what ought to be in our heart or that we would like to be in our heart. You just got to be frank. And I mean, it's an offence even in normal human relationships if when you meet an old friend, you don't tell the friend what's going on in your life just to keep up the front.
And how much more so with God who isn't deceived? In any case, we try to deceive ourselves that we can maintain a facade and a false consciousness.
So being honest about what's really going on and the difficulties we might be facing.
There's no possible progress to be made in the spiritual life unless you are honest.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: Correct? Yeah, I agree.
Lewis's prayer life, what can you tell us about that? What did just the daily spiritual journey look like for him in the morning? Was it noonday prayer?
Did he follow the Book of Common Prayer? I mean, what did it look like for him?
[00:46:12] Speaker B: Yes, he. He was very much a prayer book Anglican. And during term time, especially when he was living in college, he would go to morning prayer in the college chapel and I presume he would say it at home alone. If he wasn't in college, when he used to go on holidays and stay with his friends George and Moira Sayer in Malvern.
Sayer eventually wrote a biography of Lewis.
Sayer says that Lewis liked to walk up and down the street praying. Praying, yes. I mean, silently, I presume.
But he found, particularly at that stage of his life maybe that it helped him to keep awake.
You know, if he sat silently in a chair in a warm room and said his prayers, he would fall asleep. But if he's walking up and down the street, that's not going to happen. And he also, he said he quite liked to say his prayers in a train, mostly empty compartment on a train. There's just enough action to keep one awake, but not so much that one is totally distracted.
Those are some of the things I recall about his prayer life.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: Okay. Lewis was called on during World War II at a difficult time. People were fearful to give advice and he did get these radio addresses that turned into Mere Christianity based on that book in particular, or other works of Lewis, based on what you're seeing, what we are seeing unfold in real time in life.
What can we take from his writings? Is anything in particular stand out that would be helpful for us?
[00:48:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I think drawing on Mere Christianity, one of Lewis's great contributions was his focusing on the broad central mainstream of the faith.
[00:48:25] Speaker A: Hence mere Christianity, hence mere.
[00:48:27] Speaker B: Christianity, which means plain or central orthodox Christianity, avoiding those things which separate one denomination from another insofar as you reasonably can, while still being honest about the existence of those differences, but nonetheless putting those differences aside as much as possible, because a lot of those differences are fairly irrelevant, really. Definitely secondary and definitely second or almost certainly secondary.
Lewis, remember, had been brought up in Belfast in the north of Ireland, in a very sectarian and divided community. Catholics and Protestants at each other's throats, and the theological divide between Catholics and Protestants inflamed by and complicated with political differences which were totally irrelevant to the actual Theological questions at stake. And so Lewis had grown up in a community where he saw that a lot of what supposedly divides Christians from Christians is either very trivial, comparative to what they have in common, or entangled with irrelevancies.
And I think when he came to. Right. Mere Christianity, he drew upon that experience, and that was the great gift that he was able to give his readers.
He focused in on what I would call an ecumenism of charity.
The ecumenical approach is the household of faith. That's what ecumenism, oike in Greek, means, household where we live.
And he wanted to say that actually, we've already got so much in common. We're effectively under the same roof already.
We may be in different rooms of this house, but we've got a lot in common. And let's not allow the devil to divide us. I mean, after all, the devil, diabolos means the scatterer, the one who throws apart.
It's very much a Christian impulse to bring people together, not in a peace, peace, where there is no peace sort of sense. I mean, that's the dishonesty which he was always standing out against.
But let's be honest about what we have in common.
Catholics and Protestants both believe that Jesus is the son of God and that he died for our sins and rose again from the dead.
Isn't that already 90% of the whole picture?
[00:51:23] Speaker A: Certainly what matters most. Yes, absolutely.
[00:51:26] Speaker B: Which isn't to say that the remaining 10% is unimportant, but let's just keep things in perspective.
[00:51:33] Speaker A: Yeah, the main thing. The main thing. And to, you know, major on the majors and try not to major on the minors, which, as you mentioned, can be divisive. And I think it's just so unfortunate because I have many friends who are devout Catholic, you being one of them, and, gosh, we're in this together. I mean, it's a beautiful journey and we need each other's presence and encouragement.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: Yes. C.S. lewis and Tolkien. Look at them. Prime example of Catholic and Anglican who never settled that difference, but nonetheless were hugely important to each other, not just personally, but professionally.
Without Lewis's encouragement, Tolkien would never have written the Lord of the Rings. He admits as much.
And without Tolkien, Lewis quite possibly would not have become a Christian at all, or certainly not at that stage of his life, with his whole writing career ahead of him.
So thanks be to God for good ecumenical relations.
[00:52:35] Speaker A: Absolutely. Thank you. I agree, and I'm grateful for the ecumenical relationship that we have. Thank you. And I look forward to just the conversation continuing. So thank you so much. Just for your time today. It's great to see you and. And I hope it goes well this evening. God bless you.
[00:52:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:53] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:52:53] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
[00:52:54] Speaker A: Thank you very much.
