Home » c.s. lewis » Page 4

Tag: c.s. lewis

On Funny Bits

‘Tell me one [book] that you like.’

‘I liked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Matilda said. ‘I think Mr C.S. Lewis is a very good writer. But he has one failing. There are no funny bits in his books.’

‘You are right there,’ Miss Honey said.

‘There aren’t many funny bits in Mr Tolkien either,’ Matilda said.

‘Do you think all children’s books ought to have funny bits in them?’ Miss Honey asked.

‘I do,’ Matilda said. ‘Children are not so serious as grown-ups and they love to laugh.’

Miss Honey was astounded by the wisdom of this tiny girl…

– Roald Dahl, Matilda (Puffin), pp. 80-81

This is one of the parts I’m glad they left out of the movie. Here comes some rambling.

I read Matilda with my daughters some time ago. They had already seen the movie, and loved it. My soon-to-be kindergartener informed me today that she is wearing a red ribbon in her hair on the first day of school in honor of Matilda. She also informed me that she would be brave, like Matilda, if she found herself wanting to cry. This conversation led my mind back to that one dreaded passage in Matilda that ruined the whole book for me (really, it ruined all of Dahl’s work for me, as if the work itself wasn’t enough).

I did not read much as a child. I can only remember reading, or being read, a few books (a small enough number that you could count them on one hand). The two that stood out the most were Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, and James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. I had very fond memories of those books, and I always planned to read those books to my children one day. I read Number the Stars twice with my oldest daughter, and both she and I loved it. James and the Giant Peach, not so much. But, since my kids loved the movie, I thought we’d give Matilda a try.

I found, in that book, as well as the James book, what every other critic of Dahl found before me. His books tend to be based on children who are mistreated by adults and ultimately find vengeance, justification, and liberation. Of course, there are ‘funny bits’ along the way: most of those ‘funny bits’ involve the kids pulling pranks as a means of revenge against adults (this is much more the case in Matilda than in James). Perhaps it is the ‘serious’ adult in me, but I didn’t really find great humor in the so-called funny bits. In Matilda, I saw a miraculously gifted child using those gifts to do the same things to mean adults that they did to her. There is no meekness in Matilda, though she garners much sympathy as a character in other ways.

But now let me get to my point. I would have given Matilda a meh regardless, but the little dig that Dahl takes at Lewis and Tolkien just makes it worse in my mind. I am amazed that a Welshman took the time to call anyone too serious. I don’t know a lot of Welshman, but the ones I know are fairly serious. That is actually a strength in my mind. Lewis and Tolkien were no Welshman, but seriousness was a strength of theirs as well.

As for Tolkien, his seriousness is a joyful seriousness. He never plays with magic flippantly (in contrast to Matilda or Harry Potter). Wizardry and witchcraft are serious business for him (as well as for Lewis). He painted dark pictures so that the sun could shine brighter. So did Lewis. Lewis may not have had funny bits (though if you do not find Puddleglum or the Monopods funny…), but his work is filled with joviality, which is better than the flippant sort of ‘funny’: joviality, not jocularity.

I experiment with comedy. I watch the effects it has on people, including myself. I grew up watching stand up comedy. I didn’t read books, but my parents let me watch HBO and Showtime (don’t even ask). I saw Eddie Murphy’s stand up routine by the time I was 10, and Andrew Dice Clay (yep), and Gallagher, and Howie Mandel, and Sam Kinison, and Rodney Dangerfield, and Bill Cosby, and others. I always loved sketch comedy, like Saturday Night Live. Seinfeld is my favorite TV show…ever. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t quote something from Seinfeld…not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I digress.

I used to be a big practical joker. I repented of it when Jesus Christ called me out of darkness and into light. I have come to take Proverbs 26:18-19 seriously: “Like a madman shooting firebrands or deadly arrows is a man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I was only joking!'” I am still an amateur comedian. I love puns; I love jokes; I love to laugh and make people laugh. But I don’t want to spread the creeping death of mockery and revenge humor (even though it is in my nature to do so, and to want to do so). I don’t want to speak ‘corrupting speech’ (Eph. 4:29), including corrupting humor, that causes rot and decay, that ruins souls by making them flippant and bitter (read a bit about that HERE). I’m a work in progress, because I’m sarcastic by nature (my dad’s a New Yorker, what can I say?). So I share these thoughts to encourage myself (and others). Even for comedy, there is a more excellent way.

I have found that there is quite a difference between the frivolous laughter that comes from a smart alek remark (and I make too many of those) and the deep laughter that comes from something that provokes true joy or insight. Dahl provides the first kind. Lewis and Tolkien provide the second kind. Lewis and Tolkien provide darkness so that the light may shine brighter; Dahl is just light (like a feather). I vote for Lewis and Tokien, and pray that this is the kind of laughter I will give to my children: not the stand up comedy kind, not the practical joke kind, not the potty humor kind, but the rejoicing in the midst of sorrow kind – serious joy. God help me.

May you be funnier than the flippant without being flippant; more merry than the one who’s had one too many without having one too many yourself; more perceptive and insightful than the stand up comedian; more humorous than the funny pages without turning into a  walking funny page yourself; more laugh-out-loud hysterical than those who resort to body-part-humor without feeling the need to demean the things that God has created. May you be light-hearted and still have a weight and substance and fullness in your soul. That is all.

Meek Love

It’s been a busy week that has included trying to come up with a Sunday School lesson on ‘he descended into hell’ from the Apostles’ Creed. I haven’t had time to write much outside of that and sermon work. But as I meditated on 1 Corinthians 13:4 tonight, thinking about the meekness of love (suffering long and being kind), I found my mind going back to two quotes that are worth sharing. The first is Thomas Watson’s description of meekness:

Meekness is a grace whereby we are enabled by the Spirit of God to moderate our angry passions…First, meekness consists in the bearing of injuries…The second branch of meekness is in forgiving injuries…The third branch of meekness is in recompensing good for evil… (Thomas Watson, An Exposition of Mat. 5:1-12).

And I thought of C.S. Lewis’s challenge to us in The Four Loves:

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

And so the blessed Spirit continues 1 Corinthians 13, and men like Watson and Lewis, to rip up my heart and put it back together as they point me to the Lord Jesus Christ, the meek One, who bids us, in the words of Watson, not to learn of him how to perform miracles, but how to be meek.

A Reason to Read Old Books

For Lewis, the reading of literature – above all, the reading of older literature – is an important challenge to some premature judgments based on ‘chronological snobbery.’ Owen Barfield had taught Lewis to be suspicious of those who declaimed the inevitable superiority of the present over the past.

…Lewis argues that a familiarity with the literature of the past provides readers with a standpoint which gives them critical distance from their own era. Thus, it allows them to see ‘the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.’ The reading of old books enable us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping ‘the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.’

– Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis – A Life, p. 187

Old books don’t simply bring an old perspective – they bring perspective. You’ll never be a great critic of culture until you gain the vantage point of cultures gone by. I meet people who think that we’re finally figuring it all out these days. We’re the best of the best, surfing the edge of the tide of history. Little do they realize there were people in ages past much smarter than we are today.

This perspective could lead to reverse chronological snobbery. We want to be careful not to put artsy glowing halos around the heads of the departed. They were far from perfect. But their perspective is needed nonetheless – if we are to have any perspective at all.

Enabling the Student (C.S. Lewis)

Alister McGrath comments on C.S. Lewis’s teaching style:

Lewis did not see it as his responsibility to impart information to his students. He resented and resisted what some then called the ‘gramophone’ model of tuition, in which the tutor simply imparted the knowledge that the student had so signally failed to discover for himself.

Lewis saw himself as enabling the student to develop the skills necessary to uncover and evaluate such knowledge for himself.

–C.S. Lewis – A Life, p. 164

This type of teaching philosophy is something I contend for, and something I’ve had to debate and defend for the past couple of years in my studies in Instructional Technology. I always go back to a Wendell Berry quote I came across a while back:

‘Information,’ which once meant that which forms or fashions from within, now means merely ‘data.’ However organized this data may be, it is not shapely or formal or in the true sense in-forming. It is not present where it is needed; if you have to ‘access’ it, you don’t have it. Whereas knowledge moves and forms acts, information is inert. You cannot imagine a debater or a quarterback or a musician performing by ‘accessing information.’ A computer chock full of such information is no more admirable than a head or a book chock full of it (Another Turn of the Crank, p. 96).

My contention is that the true teacher, that is the good teacher, is not someone who sees his or her task as merely imparting information; rather, he or she is the one who sees his or her task as the work of in-forming – that is, actually working to inwardly form the student. Another way of saying that is this: the teacher’s job is not simply to teach the students what to think, but to teach them how to think. In practice, this takes a thousand different forms. For the Literature professor, for example, it means that you don’t simply make your students learn facts about Shakespeare and his plays and sonnets; rather, you teach them to read Shakespeare profitably for themselves. You want them to be able to pick up Hamlet for themselves, even if it’s a year from now, and actually be able to read it and enjoy it. I am having almost daily discussions with a young friend of mine who is taking a summer Lit course at the moment. His daily quizzes involve the remembering of names and places primarily. This is precisely what McGrath says Lewis was against. Teach them to engage the story, not to remember facts about the work. Stop niggling over the data and teach them to engage the actual narrative.

Another example: For the Bible teacher, this means that you aren’t content to teach content; instead you want to impart your students with tools that will enable them to engage the Bible when you are not around. I teach a Sunday School class on a semi-regular basis. I am not the least concerned whether my students can recite all 66 books of the Bible. If they can, that’s great. I’ve never asked them to. I’m more worried about their grasp of the narrative of the Scriptures and their engagement with the Law and the Gospel. If they get those points down, they will essentially be able to engage any passage they come across in their own reading.

I’m tempted to give more examples of how this can play out, but Literature and Bible are my own areas of interest. I’ll leave it to others to make applications in those areas for the time being.

The world around us is in-forming us. Movies are catechisms for our imaginations and impulses. Technology is shaping the way we learn and look at the world. If teachers, especially Christian teachers (and preachers), are content to see themselves as so many shovelers of data, then we are really only digging a hole. If we actually are shoveling something, it probably doesn’t smell too good in terms of pedagogical aroma. Don’t be content to inform. in-FORM.

Always Moving Yet Never Leaving Anything Behind (C.S. Lewis)

Alister McGrath quotes the opening lines of The Allegory of Love:

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.

He then comments,

Where some argue that humanity must embrace a synthesis of contemporary science and social attitudes as ‘the truth’ – to be contrasted with the ‘superstitions’ of the past – Lewis declares that this simply leads to humanity becoming a by-product of its age, shaped by its predominant cultural moods and intellectual conventions. We must, Lewis argues, break free from the shallow complacency of ‘chronological snobbery,’ and realise that we can learn from the past precisely because it liberates us from the tyranny of the contemporaneous.

–C.S. Lewis – A Life, p. 184

Humanity is not like the jump from the horse and buggy to the car, in which the horse and buggy gives up the ghost and disappears. Humanity does not, or at least should not, move from life to death, or from one life to another form of life. Humanity is (continuously) alive; it has an organic unity and continuity stretching from generation to generation. The Fourth Commandment, ‘Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land,’ acknowledges as much. If our days are to be prolonged, we must recognize, and especially honor, the continuity of life and the precedents set by those who came before us.

Chesterton made the claim in Orthodoxy that a belief in tradition is simply a belief in the ‘democracy of the dead.’ It is not only our (modern) vote that counts; humanity must acknowledge that the votes of the past cast by our ancestors count for something as well. They may have voted wrong from time to time, but their votes have impacted us and should be acknowledged, and honored where possible.

If you resist the reading of old books, for example, you are doomed to live in the claustrophobic present without any ventilation. A knowledge of, and respect for, the past is like the joy of opening a window in a stuffy room. It lets fresh air in. It is old air, but to us it is fresh.

Democratic Ethos

I got into a discussion about politics the other day. I know better; it always causes problems (I suppose that could be a good thing from time to time). In the discussion I told an older gentleman that I was primarily a Christian (not a partisan of the political sort), and that this means that I want to make both Democrats and Republicans uncomfortable to some degree. He responded by noting that he knew me well enough to know that I was quite conservative. I agreed with him, but then contended that I differed from many Conservatives in that I do not believe democracy itself to be the end-all-be-all of political positions or realities. ‘Really?’ was the response I got.

Now I know what he was thinking at this point: ‘Oh boy, he’s a socialist and I didn’t know it.’ But, of course, this was not what I was thinking, so I interjected: ‘I believe we are all headed for monarchy, and I think that is a good thing.’ To which he replied again, ‘Really?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and the King on the throne will be Jesus Christ; King of kings, and Lord of Lords, forever…’

This effectively ended the conversation. Mission accomplished; I made a Conservative as uncomfortable as I usually make the Liberals. And now I’ve brought it up twice, since I just wrote about it here. But I bring it up here primarily to note this quote from C.S. Lewis:

…A society which becomes democratic in ethos as well as in constitution is doomed. And not much loss either.

– C.S. Lewis, Talking About Bicycles, from Present Concerns, p. 72

Does that make you uncomfortable? Then ponder the reasons why. I think Lewis offers a very helpful corrective for us here. You can read about it in a bit more detail in another post I wrote (HERE). There I agree with Lewis’ idea that you can either view Democracy as good on account of man’s ability to rule himself or because of man’s inability to rule others. One is idolatry and the other is a position of humility.