On November 18, 1963 Lewis writes to Muriel Bradbrook:
“That’ll be fine. Sat. 8th
Dec. wd. do me excellently. If you come about 4 o’clock you shall have tea and
scones in the kitchen: if you prefer it, it’s sherry or whiskey in the study.”
On November 21 he writes to Nan
Dunbar:
“Thurs. Dec. 14 at about 11. a.m.
wd. Suit me well.”
And then we come to his letter of
November 21 to Philip Thompson, a letter that I excerpted in my December 18,
2011 post:
“Dear Philip Thompson,
To begin with, may I congratulate
you on writing such a remarkably good letter; I certainly could not have
written it at your age. And to go on with, thank you for telling me that you
like my books, a thing an author is always pleased to hear. It is a funny thing
that all the children who have written to me see at once who Aslan is, and
grown ups never do!”
[All excerpts are from The
Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, 3Volumes, Walter Hopper, editor. Harper San Francisco.]
On November 22, 1963 Clive
Staples “Jack” Lewis completed his journey. He wouldn’t have tea and scones or
sherry and whiskey with Muriel Bradbrook on December 8; nor would he spend time
with Nan Dunbar on December 14. As I’ve previously written, it is fitting that
his last published letter, that written to Philip Thompson, was a letter
written to a child, for Lewis not only wrote for children, he also wrote to
children. Jesus says to us that unless we become as children that we can’t see
and enter the Kingdom
of God, and for sure we
can’t touch it or taste it or smell it – the texture of the Kingdom is a
texture of joy and delight, it is one of selfless serving as opposed to
self-serving. As Reepicheep would say, to experience the Kingdom is to take the adventure that Aslan gives us. Sometimes
we may appear victorious, sometimes we may appear defeated – but the only
appearing that matters is Christ’s and whether we live or die we are His…we can
be certain that where we live today are but the Shadowlands.
It is the grown-up world that is
one of make-believe; one of masks and role playing and falsehoods; one of spin,
one of saying, “You may hear the words I speak but do you know what I really
mean?” “You may see the mask I wear but do you know who I really am?”
The grown-ups are the ones with
the imaginary friends, except their imaginary friends are not the harmless ones
of childhood, no, the imaginary friends of grown-ups are pride and vanity and
popularity and wealth and physical looks and possessions and power and
affluence and personal peace…the list goes on; these are fiendish friends who
kill, who deceive, who make empty promises. It is the child who sees that the
Emperor is naked, stark naked.
The adult makes excuses as to why
we can’t be our brother’s keeper; why we can’t provide for the poor and needy,
the fatherless and widows. The adult builds walls of arguments that provide
secure barriers to sacrificial living, to selfless giving, to reconciliation,
to forgiveness, to mercy and grace. And the adult invades the Temple and pushes the children and the lame
and blind away and makes Jesus into a figure of practicality and economic and
political common sense. The adult in the Temple
is so guarded that he does not know the pain of his fellow pew-sitter because
to know his pain would require childlike vulnerability and trust – concepts
foreign to the adult.
And so Aslan chooses children to
reveal Himself through, and to us adults Christ says, “If you would know Me, really
know Me, let me teach you to become as a child, and in becoming a child you
will know what it is to be a true man (or woman) created in the image of God.”
I close this series with the last
paragraph of the Narniad:
“And as He spoke, He no longer
looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were
so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of
all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever
after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life
in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and
the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story
which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter
is better than the one before.”
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