I cannot help but to think of C.S. Lewis when I read about “the Fox” in Til We Have Faces. No, Lewis was not a Stoic as the Fox was. However, he was an atheist – which might be comparable in some respects, especially the common disdain for “superstitious nonsense.” Both Lewis and the Fox had a great affinity for stories, poetry, myth, music, and beauty in general, and this affinity was ultimately the Achilles heel of their atheistic philosophies. The Fox, a Stoic who’s very philosophy of life is to avoid desire because it leads to “passion” and suffering, cannot help but to become enraptured in the mythical poems he shares with his little princess pupils. Something is awakened in him – a great desire and longing for it to be true – but each time he quenches the flames of this would-be passion with his no-nonsense Stoic philosophy.
In this same way Lewis suppressed his longing for God with his rationalistic Atheism – as long as he could anyway. In his autobiography Surprised By Joy, Lewis recalls three points in his life that awakened this sense of unexplainable longing for something:
“…it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. …I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.” (72-73)
All three of the events he mentions were encounters with someone’s artistic creation. The first experience was when his brother Warnie crafted a humble garden on a tin lid and then showed “Jack” (the name Lewis gave himself) his wonderful creation. Again he was enraptured with this “joy” unexpectedly as he was reading Longfellow’s poem “Tegner’s Drapa.” Upon reading the opening lines, “I heard a voice, that cried, / ‘Balder the Beautiful / Is dead, is dead!’” Lewis says:
“… instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of the northern sky; I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then...found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.” (17-18)
Yet again, Lewis encountered this overwhelming sense of “Northernness” as he saw an illustration by Arthur Rackham:
“A vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless Twilight of a Northern summer, remoteness, severity...and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago, in Tegner’s Drapa, and that Siegfried belonged to the same world as Balder and sunward-sailing cranes.” (72)
Just like the Fox, Lewis was drawn to this inexplicable truth, but he fought it with his cerebral cortex. Lewis was a man torn in two directions: romanticism (not the Eros type) and logic, and his logic tied pinned him from the supernatural. Yet the romantic in him kept tugging and tugging until the pins popped. At last, it was a discussion on myth that finally led Lewis to the cross. Tolkien and others convinced him that this myth of a dying and rising God had, in fact, become a reality in Christ. “Checkmate.” He did not become a Christian that night, but when he finally laid down his defenses against Christianity, he called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
In these experiences of Joy there was a powerful and compelling truth communicated to Lewis, “something,” he said, “never to be described.” It was a truth one cannot prove through logical argument or a didactic outline with three alliterative points – it was a truth that must be experienced. And Lewis, like the Fox, experienced it through art. Now, throw in the fact that both of them were tutors, and you practically have an allegory on your hands! Ha!
Art has profoundly impacted me. This is my first semester in seminary, and I have come here specifically to try to discover what role the fine arts play/should play in the Christian life and church. I am studying homiletics (preaching) this semester, and I am asking myself questions like, “What role, if any, does art play in a sermon?”
I am learning a lot from the fascinating novelist/theologian Frederick Buechner. He also sees that art can convey something of truth that cannot be explained. In his book Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Buechner talks about how the prophets would speak in poetry as well as prose, thus conveying not only “particular truths” but “truth itself which cannot finally be understood but only experienced.” Likewise, he says that the preacher should do the same. It is okay, he says, to use words to convey “particular truths,” but:
“in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve.” (23)
This sounds eerily similar to Lewis’s description of “Joy.” Indeed, I think that is what Lewis would call what Buechner is describing. This Joy, this longing, this desire is itself an experience of truth that, at least in my experience, has largely not been provided from the pulpit or from Church itself. Instead what we get are only sermonic points, arguments, exegesis, and apologetics.
Even though Lewis was one of the greatest apologists of the twentieth century, he too saw that argument has its limitations and is even sometimes dangerous. He once commented in a letter to Dorothy Sayers that he was frequently uneasy because, “…apologetic work is so dangerous to one's own faith. A doctrine never seems dimmer to me than when I have just successfully defended it." Indeed, the Gospel that has been presented to us has been a feast of fact, but a fast of fiction along with this longing Lewis calls “Joy” and Buechner calls “Truth.” How sad. No one here is advocating that we throw aside the importance of logic, facts, and loving God with our minds, but to do that and neglect the rest of what composes us makes our faith and our love anemic, not compelling.
We need to experience and feed in a way we have largely not been fed from the pulpit, fed not with mere points, arguments, and propositions, but with joy, hunger, and longing: truth itself. Many people who are not Christians experience truth in this kind of joyful way, but they do not know where it comes from. In this kind of truth God only whispers and He never uses His name, so they put the best name to it that they can – whatever that may be. We Christians say that we know where this slippery and joyful truth comes from, the same place all other good gifts originate – God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We need to know God experientially with that really indefinable part of us that is so hungry, a part of us that is fed through well-done stories, paintings, songs, and movies.
And I’m left to wonder, “Can this happen at the pulpit?” Buechner seems to think so. Indeed he made it so in his own spellbinding sermons that dripped imagination, imagery, poetry, narrative. Brian McLaren describes Buechner’s sermon narrative as “a far cry from telling little anecdotes to illustrate points… the story is not like an orange rind, but … is itself the point, or at least the thing that points beyond itself to something more….”
I cannot help but to desire to see this Joy happen more frequently through the efforts of the church and at the pulpit -- whatever that looks like. And although I am not exactly sure how it should be done, I am eager to keep exploring and reading and listening and learning. Maybe I’ll figure it out. Maybe not. Whatever the case, I think there is a need that cries out to be met: many Christians have the opposite of what we see in Lewis’s and the Fox’s battle between joy and intellect. Lewis and Fox were compelled by joy, but could not intellectually assent. Many pew warmers on Sunday mornings intellectually assent because their intellect has been fed, yet they never have this evoking experience of truth that compels them to Joy. We have been cheating, in a way, stuck in our heads, reading the Cliff's Notes instead of the novel. Like Buechner said, we are starving for this truth and we don’t even realize it. We are in a mansion on a hill with many rooms. The banqueting table of Christ is abundant and His breadbasket is bottomless, but we are having trouble finding our way from the study to the dining room.
No comments:
Post a Comment