George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis

 

 

In the series just concluded, on being with one another forever, I mentioned that I’d like to spend some time in the preface that C. S. Lewis wrote to George MacDonald An Anthology - 365 Readings. I hope you will come along with me in my reflections on MacDonald and Lewis; we’ll see where these go.

 

I was a boy when my mother read MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin to my brother Bill and me. Hearing, seeing, and entering into that story was one of my first experiences with the numinous. It was a foundational experience in that I experienced a land, a realm, a reality that has remained with me all my life. However, it was a foundation that was hidden for many years by the detritus of confusion, anger, instability, and a host of other things – including things that we might not readily think of, such as the wisdom of man as can be displayed in naturalistic Christianity with its Enlightenment hermeneutics (including elements of Evangelical Christianity), and in some forms of Chrisitan experience (including elements of the Praise & Worship movement) that obscure the depth of the numinous in Christ.

 

Without the Presence of Christ, we really have nothing – no matter how ecstatic our experience and no matter the depth and breadth of our intellectual endeavors.  I am afraid we are more pagan that we’d like to admit. 

We cannot conjure the Presence of God with music and lyrics, nor can we impress Him with our finely – tuned doctrinal thinking; our Father has said, once and for all, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!” We still don’t seem to have grasped this.

 

My mother died a few days before her 44^th birthday. Thinking back, I would love to ask her why she chose to read MacDonald to us. Did someone read MacDonald to her? Did she encounter MacDonald on her own?

 

This leads me to two things about Lewis, MacDonald, and me; we all lost our mothers when young. I was older (17 years old) when I lost my Mom than Lewis (9 years old) and MacDonald (8 years old) were when they lost their mothers (I have two younger brothers, though Jim is now with Jesus), but my loss helps me to identify with their losses.

 

The other thing has to do with Lewis and his brother Warren, as children they created stories of talking animals, in fact, they created a world of talking animals…and they wrote about this world; it was a world they never forgot. Why? Well, I think it was because they touched the numinous and the presence of that “land” continued to work within their lives right up until they drew their last breaths. When their lives were crashing around them at the death of their mother, they could find some measure of refuge in Boxen.

 

My mother used to create stories for my brother Bill and me of Susie and Molly Mousie (I don’t think Jim had been born yet). Now here I am writing about this at 74 years old, and while I can only recall one actual story of these mouse sisters, I can see my mother’s facial expressions and her body language and hear her voice – I can see into the land of Susie and Molly Mousie. Did someone tell her stories of Susie and Molly when she was a girl?

 

I must share one more childhood memory which has remained with me, and which my brother Bill has, I think, preserved all these years. Mom purchased an unfinished chest of drawers for us, which we painted a deep green. Being children of the 1950s and early 1960s, we were into outer space exploration. We had a map of the solar system hanging on the wall of our bedroom.

 

One day we decided that we needed a spaceship, it was one thing to look at the map on the wall, it was one thing to look up into the heavens, but if we were going to lead the way in space exploration we obviously needed our own spaceship. What to do? Why of course the solution was to create a spaceship.

 

On the back of our chest of drawers we drew the control panel for a spaceship – I can still see those instruments and gauges. Being confident in our creative work, we bypassed testing and immediately launched into outer space. It was remarkable that we could travel as far as we wanted and never run out of fuel, and when we got hungry we could immediately touch back down in our bedroom and find something to eat in the kitchen. I don’t understand all the fuss about mega budgets for space exploration when all NASA needs is a fleet of well – made chests of drawers.

 

I think brother Bill still has our spaceship, or perhaps he has passed it on to one of his children. I understand that the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum asked him to donate it to their collection, and I further understand that foreign governments have attempted to purloin the technology, but Bill has steadfastly guarded our secrets and preserved this family treasure.

 

Well, Chesterton wrote to the effect that all he really needed to know he learned in the nursery as a child – for there he touched the numinous, there he touched transcendent reality that we do our best to eradicate from children and adults. I’ll close this reflection with C. S. Lewis’s dedication of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to Lucy Barfield:

 

“My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be…your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.”

To be continued…