S7E6 – LAL 4 – “Troubling News”

The letters between 1959 and 1960 reveal some difficult times for both Jack and Mary, including the death of Jack’s wife, Joy Davidman.

S7E6: “Troubling News” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

She received absolution and died at peace with God. I will try to write again when I have more command of myself. I’m like a sleep-walker at the moment

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Chit-Chat

Matt gushed about his Christmas plans with his girlfriend.

Andrew has been busy working hard and has picked up the Time magazine mentioned earlier this season:

He mentioned the picture which was included which is normally attributed John S. Murry, but which here says it was by Anthony Barrington Brown.

David has recently been on the Lorehaven podcast and The C. S. Lewis podcast (reposted here).

Toast

• Matt: Coffee
• Andrew: Coffee
• David: Mint Tea
• Matt toasted recently-upgraded Patreon supporter Matt Nash.

After the toast, David referenced Love is tears, a line from a C. S. Lewis poem, Love’s as warm as tears:

Love’s as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.

Love’s as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts–Infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.

Love’s as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering “Dare! Dare!”
To sap, to blood,
Telling “Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.”

Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (what all that is)
Our cross, and His.

C. S. Lewis, Love’s as warm as tears

Discussion

01. “History is bunk and the weather is lovely”

• Ulysses Grant-Smith

Does not what we call “history” in fact leave out nearly the whole of real life?

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• David referenced Many Times & Many Places: C. S. Lewis and the Value of History by K. Alan Snyders
• He also quoted Mother Teresa response to the question as to what can be used to promote world peace:

Go home and love your family

St. Teresa of Calcutta

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen.

Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Serenity Prayer”

We are having beautiful winter weather at present: bright, pale sunshine (paler than you ever see – Joy calls it the “arctic light”), still air, and just that sprinkling of hoar-frost which makes everything sparkle like sugar.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

02. “Correspondence, Cat Talk, and Cancer”

Manlike, I am not naturally a correspondent at all. The daily letter-writing I have to do is very laborious to me

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

•  Rev. Peter Bide

03. “Death be not proud”

…just like you, we keep on hearing jokes for which she would have been exactly the right recipient. There is now way out of it: either one must die fairly young or else outlive many friends.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Over the course of this episode we concluded that the person who had died was not his former nurse, Lizzie Endicott, but Janie McNeill.

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 enfold you.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

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 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.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

“This,” she said, “I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of
longing for death.”

“Ah, Psyche,” I said, “have I made you so little happy as that?”

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

[I] 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.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

“My favorite image on this matter [Purgatory] comes from the dentist’s chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am ‘coming round’,’ a voice will say, ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ This will be Purgatory. The rinsing may take longer than I can now imagine. The taste of this may be more fiery and astringent than my present sensibility could endure. But . . . it will [not] be disgusting and unhallowed.”

C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer

…[The National Health Service (NHS) is] better than leaving people to sink or swim on their own resources

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• The clip from 30 Rock where Jack’s baby is born in Canada and they try to pay for healthcare…

Forgiveness by its nature is for the unworthy

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Andrew shows off a biro of the same kind owned by Lewis:

04. “Take Up Thy Cross”

• The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

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

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

I get no more tired now than I did when I was younger, I take much longer to get un-tired afterwards

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

I get no more tired now than I did when I was younger, I take much longer to get un-tired afterwards

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• Andrew explains that the “Boojum” mentioned in the earlier letter was from Lewis Carol’s The Hunting of the Snark

05. “Cancer Returns”

Apparently the wonderful recovery Joy made in 1957 was only a reprieve, not a pardon…. [Joy’s] 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.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 8)

It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow–getting into my morning bath is usually one of them–that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. 

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Part III)

• Did Lewis ever dress up as a polar bear?

…finds me with as clear a conscience about correspondence as a not very methodical, nor leisured man ever has…

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Let us hope that both of us will have been given Grace , amidst all this ghastly commercial racket of “Xmas”, to enter into the feast of the Nativity: the racket has nearly smothered it!

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

David referenced his appearances on the Lorehaven podcast and The C. S. Lewis podcast (reposted here).

06. “Flu, Poetry, and Travel”

• Asian flu

…he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

Psalm 121:4

07. “Jesus Shock”

They give the condemned man what he likes for his last breakfast, I am told”

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

…many people in a quiet, cultured state of unbelief who would always speak of Christianity with reverence… His very rudeness shows that he is not quite free from the fear that there ‘might be something in it after all’

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• Jesus Shock by Dr. Peter Kreeft

She received absolution and died at peace with God. I will try to write again when I have more command of myself. I’m like a sleep-walker at the moment

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Part I)

I said not long before that work and weakness are comforters. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three — far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part I, Chapter 9)

08. “Having command of himself”

Don’t knock and it shall be opened to you

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
• Andrew referred to the phrase “an absolute brick”

09. “Taming Wrath”

I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.” There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly dear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book II, Chapter 7)

“For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

Matthew 6:14-15

Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord delivered him to the jailers,[m] till he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

Matthew 18:32-35

Either X is not so bad as, in my present anger, I think. If not, how unjust I must be. If so, how terrible X needs my prayers

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

“Would you like to be Redival? What? No? Then she’s pitiable.”

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

10. “Old Age”

Why, it was years ago that, on finishing my work before lunch, I stopped myself only just in time from putting my cigarette-end into my spectacle case and throwing my spectacles into the fire!

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

• John Dryden invented the rule saying that you can’t end a sentence with a proposition?

Christ will be there just as much as in any other place

C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

Wrap-Up

Concluding Thoughts

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