S7E4 – LAL 2 – “Dear Mary…”

The gang continues to work through Lewis’ Letters to an American Lady. As their friendship grows, Jack and Mary are now on a first name basis…

S7E4 – LAL 2 – “Dear Mary…” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart”

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Chit-Chat

• Ticket to ride

Toast

• David: PG Tips Tea
• Matt: Starbucks Holiday Blend coffee
• Andrew: Nothing!
• Matt toasted Patreon supporter Kevin Larson

Discussion

01. “Historical Context”

• Lewis leaves Oxford and joins Cambridge
• Completes Narnia
• Warnie is recovering from Alcoholism
• Joy is coming on the scene

02. “Too much mail and missing Mass”

…if there were less good will (going through the post) there would be more peace on earth.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

The Abracadabrist poets… What gives the show away is that their professed admirers give quite contradictory interpretations of the same poem—I’m prepared to believe that an unintelligible picture is really a very good horse if all its admirers tell me so; but when one says it’s a horse, and the next that it’s a ship, and the third that it’s an orange, and the fourth that it’s Mt. Everest, I give it up.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

I am sure that when God allows some cause like illness or a ’bus-strike or a broken alarm clock to keep us from Mass, He has His own good reasons for not wishing us to go to it on that occasion. He who took care lest the 5000 should “faint” going home on an empty stomach may be trusted to know when we need bed even more than Mass.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

03. “Modern medicine, Britain, and Nobility”

We mustn’t let these modern doctors get us down by calling a cold a virus and a sore throat a streptococcus, you know!

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Only foreigners and politicians talk about “Britain”

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

04. “Cryin’…”

…[do] not “weep inwardly” and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we—and especially, my sex—don’t cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn’t we?

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Hrothgar embracing Beowulf, Johnson embracing Boswell (a pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple) and all those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last kisses when the legion was broken up

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

05. “From insecurity to arrogance”

That makes me think it comes from inner insecurity – a dim sense that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody, and a belief that this can be achieved by arrogance.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen

I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her: that, after all, is almost the greatest evil nasty people can do us—to become an obsession, to haunt our minds. A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects, is the thing, if one can only stick to it.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

06. “Redemptive suffering”

I suppose (tho’ it seems a hard saying) we should mind humiliation less if [we] were humbler. It is, at any rate, a form of suffering which we can try to offer, in our small way, along with the supreme humiliation of Christ Himself. There is, if you notice it, a very great deal in the New Testament about His humiliations as distinct from His sufferings in general. And it is the humble and meek who have all the blessings in the Magnificat… One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself. My old confessor used to impress on me the need for the 3 Patiences: patience with God, with my neighbour, with oneself.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• Fr. Walter Adams

07. “Priorities, Jack!”

I shall become human again at about the end of September.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• The Kilmer Family
• Meg Hunter-Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

Joyce Kilmer, Trees

08. “Parents are not Providence”

I got back from my holiday [in Donegal] yesterday, to the usual pile of letters which makes one wonder if holidays are worth it.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Parents are not Providence: their bad intentions may be frustrated as their good ones.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

09. “Bonjour!”

• The Vulgate
• Le Lion, la Sorcière Blanche et l’Armoire magique

10. “The move to Cambridge”

…it’ll “larn you” to practice mock modesty another time.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

…perhaps having to fast for medical reasons is a just punishment for not having fasted enough on higher grounds!

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• Magdalen College, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge
• De Descriptione Temporum (C.S. Lewis Speaks His Mind recording, “The Great Divide”)

Matthew 26:6-13; Mark 14:3-9; Luke 7:36-50

It is nice to be still under the care of St. Mary Magdalene: she must by now understand my constitution better than a stranger would, don’t you think. The allegorical sense of her great action dawned on me the other day. The precious alabaster box which one must break over the Holy Feet is one’s heart. Easier said than done. And the contents become perfume only when it is broken. While they are safe inside they are more like sewage. All very alarming.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

11. “Love others as yourself”

I’ve been treating you (and others) badly of late, but, I think, with some excuse… you have never been absent from my prayers. So try not to be hurt by my silence.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

[A personal rule may] …give one a spuriously good conscience.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

[Those who stay away from church]…at the bidding of their doctor are just as obedient as those who go.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

The sense of the presence is a super-added gift for which we give thanks when it comes, and that’s all about it.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

[The Abolition of Man is] …almost my favourite among my books but in general has been almost totally ignored by the public.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

12. “Statistical Distribution”

• Dr. Havard

“But my cough does get better after I’ve been taking cough mixture for a day or two.” He replied: “yes because you don’t start the mixture until the cough has become a real nuisance, which means until it was reaching it’s peak after which it would have gone away in about the same time whether you had taken the mixture or not.”

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

…but the dog, being an honest, humble person, always has a bad one [conscience], but the cat is a Pharisee and always has a good one. When he sits and stares you out of countenance he thanking God that he is not as these dogs, or these humans, or even as these other cats!

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Oremus pro invicem [Let us pray for one another] as you people say

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Oremus pro invicem [Let us pray for one another] as you people say

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

This Latin phrase comes from the Vulgate rendering of James 5:16 where James speaks of praying

13. “Fear”

Fear is horrid, but there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. Our Lord was afraid (dreadfully so) in Gethsemane. I always cling to that as a very comforting fact.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

14. “Snippets”

…chapter of obstacles …rhymester

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

The photo from Time [Magazine] was a useful mortification; good as a hair shirt.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• St Francis de Sales
• William Law (“A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”)

…many instances of domestic nastiness come before me in my mail.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Thanks also for the almost scandalously munificent gift of stamps. But (seriously) never do it again. Stamps are money, and you have none to spare.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

15. “Redemptive Suffering II”

Deepest sympathy for all your complication of troubles… I can only hope that through all this you are being brought closer to God than you could have been otherwise…It is not forever. It will all one day go away like a dream. 

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• The Divorce of Princess Margaret

I never read the papers. Why does anyone?

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

To abstain from reading – and a fortiori from buying – a paper which you have once caught telling lies seems a very moderate form of asceticism. Yet how few practise it!

C. S. Lewis, “After Priggery, What?”

16. “Sacraments / Prayer / Ordinary Rule of Life”

The only thing one can usually change in one’s situation is oneself. And yet one can’t change that either – only ask Our Lord to do so, keeping on meanwhile with one’s sacraments, prayers, and ordinary rule of life. One mustn’t fuss too much about one’s state.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• St. Padre Pio recommended weekly Confession, daily Mass, daily prayer, and daily Examen
• Rule of Life

17. “Struggle / Dependence on God”

For it is a dreadful truth that the state of ‘having to depend solely on God’ is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. But trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained we will not turn to Him as long as He leaves us anything else to turn to. I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. In the hour of death and the day of judgement, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwittingly) to begin practising it here on earth. It is good of Him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good all the time. 

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

All blessings. “Beneath are the everlasting arms” even when it doesn’t feel at all like it.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Wrap-Up

Concluding Thoughts

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