Latest / Theology Made Podcast / The Man Who Explained Suffering Until It Happened to Him

Transcript

The Man Who Explained Suffering Until It Happened to Him · Theology Made Podcast

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made podcast.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan Vale.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to look at the man who explained suffering until it happened to him.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: In the autumn of 1960,
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: in a shabby brick house on the eastern edge of Oxford,
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: a man went looking for something to write in.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: The house was called the Kilns.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: It sat behind an overgrown pond in Headington Quarry.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: He found what he was after in a cupboard.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Old exercise books, the kind school children use.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them already had a few pages filled in with something else.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he sat down and started writing.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he wasn't writing a book.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: He said so himself later.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: There was no publisher waiting.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: He had no deadline.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: There was no lecture that needed drafting.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: He was 61 years old, and his wife had died in July.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And he had discovered that when you cannot sleep and cannot pray and cannot stay
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: in your own company, your pen still works.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Which led to four notebooks.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what makes this worth your attention.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: 20 years before he opened the cupboard,
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: the same man had written the book that told the English-speaking world how to think
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: about suffering.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it became quite famous.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: It sold,
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: and it kept selling,
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: and it made him the person that grieving strangers wrote letters to.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: If your child died in 1948 and you were a Christian in Britain or America,
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: there was a reasonable chance somebody handed you his book.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he had explained the problem of pain.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in the autumn of 1960,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: sitting in a cold house with a schoolboy's notebook on his knee,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: he could not find a single sentence of it that did him any good.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Clive Staples Lewis.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: His friends called him Jack.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start in 1940, because that's where the trap gets set.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Britain is at war.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis is 41.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: He's a fellow and tutor in English at Magdalene College, Oxford.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: A man with a booming voice and a bad relationship with the 20th century.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: He had come back to Christianity about a decade earlier after a long stretch as an atheist.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he had come back the way a lawyer comes back to a case he thought he had won.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Argument first and feeling much later.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: A publisher named Ashley Sampson asked him to write a short volume for
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: a series aimed at ordinary readers.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: The assignment was the oldest question there is.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: If God is good and God is powerful, why does it hurt so much down here?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And Lewis said yes.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the book came out in October of 1940 while London was being bombed
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: and it was called The Problem of Pain.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: In the book Lewis says that a world where free creatures can genuinely act has to be
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: a world with fixed rules.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Wood has to be hard enough to build with which means it's hard enough to hit someone with.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Water has to hold a boat which means it can drown a man.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot have a universe that is stable enough to live in and also soft enough
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: to never bruise you.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Take away the possibility of harm and you take away the possibility of anything.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then he goes after the word good.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: He says that when most people ask for a good God,
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: what they actually want is a benevolent grandfather in the sky whose main object is
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: to make sure everyone has a pleasant afternoon.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And Lewis thinks that's a small and boring thing to want and that love
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: in any serious sense never works that way.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Love wants the beloved to become something and becoming hurts.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then the line everyone remembers.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis says that God whispers to us in our pleasures and shouts at us in our pains.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Payne gets the attention when nothing else can.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: He calls it a megaphone.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the book?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: It worked.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: It worked because it's clear,
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: doesn't flinch,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: and because Lewis had that rare gift of writing philosophy that sounds like
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: a man talking to you in a pub or a bar over a few old fashions.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: It went into edition after edition,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: and it's still in print 86 years later and can be found at pretty much every Barnes
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: and Nobles.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Here's the part that a lot of folks skip, and it's the reason this episode exists.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: In the preface, before the argument starts, Lewis puts in a disclaimer.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: He says the book has one job, which is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: He wants it understood that he's not attempting the other job.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's the harder one, teaching people how to actually bear it.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: He says he was never fool enough to think himself qualified for that.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: He describes himself, in his own words, as a coward about pain.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it might be the most accurate sentence in the book.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it would take 20 years and one funeral to prove it.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: In January of 1950, Lewis received a letter from a woman in New York.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Her name was Joy Davidman.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: She was 34, Jewish, born in the Bronx to parents who had left Ukraine and Poland.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And she had spent her 20s as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of the United States.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: She had won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1938 at the age of 23.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: She had worked in Hollywood briefly and hated it.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: She was married to a novelist named William Lindsay Gresham,
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: who wrote Nightmare Alley,
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: and who drank,
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: was not faithful,
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: and who once telephoned her to say he was not coming home and did not know
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: where he was.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And on the night that call came,
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: alone in the house with two small sons sleep upstairs,
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Joy Davidman had an experience she spent the rest of her life failing
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: to explain adequately.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: She described it as the sudden, undeniable presence, God is in the room.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: She had been an atheist by conviction and a Marxist by training,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: and she said it took about half a minute.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Afterwards,
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: she went looking for someone who could tell her what had happened,
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: and she found Lewis and started writing to him.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the letters were good.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's significant.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis got sacks of mail and he answered nearly all of it.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: But this correspondence was, well, it was different.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because she argued with him.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: She caught him out.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: She was faster than he was in a way that, well, almost nobody in Oxford was.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And she was funny about it.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: She came to England in 1952 and they met.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Her marriage collapsed and she divorced Grisham in 1954.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: She moved to London with her boys,
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: David and Douglas,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: and then to Oxford where she was poor and proud and didn't quite fit in anywhere.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: In 1956, the Home Office declined to renew her permission to stay in Britain.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: She was going to be sent back to America.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: No money, no husband.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so on the 23rd of April,
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: 1956, at the Register Office on St. Gilles in Oxford, Lewis married her.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he was clear with everyone about what this was.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: A legal transaction to keep a friend in the country.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: He told his brother, warning it changed nothing.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: She kept her own house.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: He kept his.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: He was 57.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: He had been a bachelor his whole life and had written a good deal about love and the abstract.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Six months later,
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Joy answered the telephone at her house in Headington,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: and her left thigh bone snapped under her while she was still standing.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: The x-ray showed why.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: The cancer had been eating through the bone for some time.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was in her femur, in her shoulder, and her leg.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: The doctors gave her a very short amount of time to live.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And Lewis, at 58, discovered what he actually felt.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: He had married her on paper to keep her in the country.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: But watching her die in that hospital,
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: he understood he was in love with her,
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: and had been, and had constructed an entire legal fiction to avoid having to say so.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: He asked the Bishop of Oxford for permission to marry her properly in the church.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Bishop said, no, she was a divorcee and Anglican discipline was Anglican discipline.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: So Lewis went around him.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: A priest named Peter Bide,
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: a former pupil who happened to be passing through Oxford and who had a reputation
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: for praying over the sick, came to the hospital on the 21st of March, 1957.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: He married them at the bedside.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: He had no authority to do it, but he did it anyway.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Warnie was there as a witness.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Then Bide laid hands on joy.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And prayed for her healing, which was also not his to do.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: But the cancer stopped.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Not permanently, but it stopped.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: The bones rebuilt themselves.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: By the summer, she was out of bed.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: By the following year,
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: she was walking without a stick,
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: running a household, and gardening, going to dinner.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis wrote to friends about it in the tone of a man
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: who had been handed something he did not think could exist.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in April of 1960, the two of them flew to Greece with their friends, Roger and June.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Joy climbed the Acropolis.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: She was in constant pain as she climbed, but she did it anyway.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Lewis said afterwards, it was the happiest fortnight of his life.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: She died on the 13th of July, 1960.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: She was 45.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: They had been married in a church for three years and four months.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us back to the cupboard and the exercise books and the coldest autumn of his life.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: The first line he wrote, it's famous now.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Fear.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The fluttering in the stomach, the restlessness, the inability to take in what anyone is saying.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: He writes about wanting other people to talk to each other so that he doesn't have to speak.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: He writes about the embarrassment of the faces of colleagues who see him coming
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: across the quad and visibly decide which way to walk.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then he gets to God and the temperature just drops.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: He says that when you go to God in ordinary happiness, in gratitude, the door opens.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: He says that when you go to God in the kind of desperation
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: where there is no other door left,
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: you hear something on the other side,
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: a bolt sliding,
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: and a second bolt, and silence and the sound of somebody walking away inside.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the passage that made this book radioactive in 1961.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: But here's where the popular version of the story goes wrong.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: You'll hear people say that Lewis lost his faith when his wife died
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: and he got it back by the end of the book.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a tidy arc.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's what the film version wants.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's what a lot of sermons want.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Read the notebooks and you're not going to find it.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis never seriously entertained the idea that God does not exist.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: That option was simply not on the table on those pages.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: What terrified him was a different possibility and it was much worse.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: The possibility that God is there, fully real, entirely powerful, and cruel.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: That the evidence of the past year points to a being who cultivates people the way
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: a scientist cultivates a lab animal.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis put this idea on the page in plain language,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: he turns it over, and he does not pretend he hadn't thought about it.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Then he says the thing this whole episode has been walking towards.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: The danger, he writes, was never that he would stop believing in God.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: The danger was that he would keep believing God.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And start believing dreadful things about him.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: That is a completely different crisis from doubt.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Doubt asks whether anyone is home.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: This asks what is living in the house.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he's honest about the smaller challenges too.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: He notices that he is starting to lose her.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not the fact of her, but the reality of her.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Every time he pictures joy,
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: the picture gets a little smoother,
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: a little more agreeable,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: a little more like a composite built out of his own preferences.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he's afraid that if he keeps this up for a decade,
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: he will end up devoted to a woman he invented,
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: and that the real one,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: the sharp and difficult and funny one who argued with him about theology in
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: the kitchen, will have quietly slipped out of the building.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: He notices too that his prayers have started sounding like performances.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in the fourth notebook, he writes down what he thinks actually happened to him.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: He says his faith had been a house of cards.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he's not saying this in despair.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: He says that it fell down that easily, that it needed to fall down.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the falling was a mercy because a house of cards is a bad thing to be standing in.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes further.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: He says God will keep knocking them down as many as he builds until he stops building them.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the image he lands on is that God is an iconoclast,
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: a breaker of images,
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: and that the shattering of Lewis's picture of God was itself the act of
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: the God being pictured.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: The door was never bolted.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: What was on the other side had simply refused to look like the drawing Lewis had made of it.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis sent the notebook to his literary agent,
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: favor and favor, published results in 1961 under the name N.W.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Clark.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: The initials came from an old Anglo-Saxon phrase,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: not woke, which means roughly, I know not who.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis had used it before for poems he did not want attached to his name.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Clerk is the old word for scholar.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the byline reads more or less, some scholar, but names with help.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: He wouldn't put his own name on it.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: The man who built a career on public argument,
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: who debated at the Socratic Club and broadcasted The Nations on BBC,
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: published one of the most personal things he ever wrote as an anonymous stranger.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a story that goes around,
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: it's probably more myth than truth,
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: that a friend of Lewis and seeing him suffering recommended this book by
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: an anonymous scholar.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: The book was called A Grief Observed.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: He died on the 22nd of November, 1963, a week short of 65.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was the same day Huxley died and the same afternoon Kennedy was shot in Dallas,
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: so the newspapers had other things to cover.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: The book was reissued under his own name the following year.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now hold the two books next to each other because this is the whole point.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis never withdrew the problem of pain.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: He never issued a correction.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: He never wrote a preface saying the young man who produced it had been talking through his hat.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: It stayed in print through his entire life.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he led it.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And as far as anyone can tell, he continued to think the arguments in it were sound.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: He just found out at 61 that being sound and being useful are separate things.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: The argument about free will and fixed natural laws is still a good argument.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: However,
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: it does nothing for a man at four in the morning in a house where the other half of
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: the bed is empty.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis had said as much in 1940 in a preface nobody read.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: But he had no idea at the time he was going to live it.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a way of knowing something is truth, but it stays as a sentence.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a way of knowing it that it gets into the body,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: it costs, and it cannot be transferred to anyone else by an explanation.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis spent 20 years as the most articulate possible example of the first kind.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Then he got handed the second kind.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the shocking part.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't destroy him.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: It made the second book possible.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to The Theology Made Podcast.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you found this helpful or encouraging,
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: please like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on.