C.S. Lewis: Cloud of Witness

The other week, I was hanging out in my kitchen minding my business and without warning the C.S. framed illustration that I had received from good friends this last Christmas, affixed to the wall by that 3M sticky device and hanger, came off the wall and the portrait crashed into my kitchen table. I was pleased that the glass didn't shatter. I think my box of cigars softened the blow.

It wasn't one of those cheap Chinese knock-off picture hangers. It was the real 3-M deal. The portrait, glass, and frame, aren't very heavy, measuring both less that one foot in distance in regards to the X and Y axis. But, crash it did. I surmise that it was because the kitchen wall is painted with semi-gloss paint which is slicker as it has a compound in it that resists water and allows it to be scrubbed which is of importance with the kitchen water vapors and messes emanating from my latest culinary masterpiece. 

I was wary of putting the C.S. Lewis illustration back up in the kitchen. It really didn't seem like the correct place to hang Old Jack anyway. Then, a startling idea came to me: How about hanging on the hook in the living room which is for hanging plants (those with draping vine-like properties). I used to have a plant there but not since I returned to living in the townhouse.

I loved the thought of C.S. Lewis peering down on me like some elevated professor, looking to both enlighten and admonish his eager student. That would be me. Better than a living plant. An author of living words! Plus, I don't have to remember to water it! 

It is rather amazing that Lewis continues to speak to our culture 50 years after his death in 1963. In college, I had bought a five-pack of his most best-selling books....Mere Christianity was one, I think the others were Miracles, Abolition of Man, Screwtape Letters, and a book that escapes me. Oh yeah, The Problem of Pain. 

Last summer I rescued that copy of Mere Christianity from my Dad's Cabin where it has languished on the shelf for over 30 years. Not sure how it wound up there along with the dated furniture and etc. I do have a formal copy of Mere Christianity in my Book Hall of Fame upstairs but I don't trifle with that copy, wanting to keep it pristine. This is my working copy and it sits on the old wobbly family coffee table that somehow, through a twist of fate, wound up in my possession rather than at the Cabin.

After my demise, most of my stuff is going straight to Goodwill or the junkyard. There is little of value in my place. I pray though that my Book Hall of Fame is bestowed on someone who will appreciate their legacy in my life. Books that helped me understand the existence that God gave me. I hold no illusions, however. Unless something unexpected happens where I have heirs, my line is at a genetic cul-de-sac.  Which is French for dead-end. Which I am totally cool with. I could care little if I leave offspring in this world.

I think this planet is going to have a rough time of it coming soon. If I was a parent, I think I would be worrying 24-7 about my kids and my responsibility towards them. With very little control, which is the very definition of stress to me: high responsibility and low control.  

We can't be trifling with reality and expect that creation is not going to react and respond. I think that there is a world to come after this one is discarded like an old shoe. I don't exactly know the redemptive acts that will do so, but I do consider that matter is not eternal. It is temporal. Only God and humanity are eternal. I was reminded of this today as I picked up that old copy of Mere Christianity and read a paragraph at random. Or maybe  God worked in my opening of the pages. I came across this observation:

"Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse —so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy.

If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment."

So, in my estimation, C.S. lives on, not just in the words written, but as an eternal soul. One, whose work, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. I think he is looking down pleased.