Earlier this week I made an early morning trip up to see CS Lewis' gravesite in Headington in East Oxford about 3 miles from where I am staying.
There are a myriad number of Lewis-related tours and pilgrimage destinations to see here in the city center (or "centre" as they spell it here in Oxford). No Lewis fan can come to Oxford without a stopover at the Eagle and Child, where Lewis and Tolkien swapped manuscripts and banter over pints of good cheer. And while perhaps not as alluring as the pub, the schools Lewis was associated with here in Oxford give you some sense of the academic world he inhabited from a boy.
But I was on the hunt for something off the beaten path, something you can't find along the usual tourist trek. I wanted to see something Lewis-related that is a little less hallowed than the Eagle and Child and something more ordinary than an Oxford University college. I was searching for something less glorious than all this. I wanted to see something less -- and something more; I wanted to see Lewis' church -- the parish he worshiped in and the cemetery behind it where he is buried.
Apologist and Churchman
It is impossible to fully articulate what a contribution Lewis made to Christianity in the last half of the last century and has continued to make in the first part of this one. Both a Cambridge and Oxford professor and great Christian thinker, Lewis has given generations of Christians a logic and way of talking about faith that has helped them to make belief in God a reasonable choice. In the shadow of two world wars, Lewis did his theology in what Bonhoeffer called "a world come of age". An intellectually robust faith was necessary following the deaths of so many millions of people and the near destruction of a whole civilization. Lewis' writings gave us tools of metaphor, analogy, and story which allowed us to go on thinking and believing in God, trusting in His goodness, and hoping in His ultimate victory over the dark powers of evil.
Perhaps this Lewis theme of faith in the Good is most beautifully captured in his book "The Last Battle" when Tirian says to Jill, "But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan." To trust that the world is in God's hands even amidst all the horrors of war and human cruelty was a much-needed word in the 20th century. It is still a needed word today.
Lewis' writings were extraordinary helpful to me personally as a young man as I endured my own soul-wrenching struggle to believe. For Lewis's help in this most difficult part of my journey I will forever be thankful. He came to me just when I needed him most, just as I was ready to give up entirely. As I have spent the last week submersed in the Anglican tradition that Lewis was himself a part of I can see that they have an ever-present language to describe what Lewis did for me. They call it the communion of saints.
Now, however, 15 years after my own participation in the archetypal battle to believe, and 10 years into the vocation of serving as a pastor, I have different, now even greater appreciation for Lewis. I appreciate him now not only as a great apologist for the church universal, but even more so as a congregant in the church particular. In other words, I appreciate him now perhaps most deeply as a churchman.
It's Very Ordinariness
Holy Trinity Church just isn't that easy get to -- or even know where it is. I left about 6:30am following the map on my phone and headed East across the Magdalen Bridge, into East Oxford, and then up the very steep hill toward Headington. Once up the hill I went another mile or so into the Headington Quarry neighborhood where the Lewis house "The Kilns" is and where his parish was supposed to be. That's when I discovered the map wasn't quite right. Assisted by a very generous sign and two smaller but no less necessary signs, I finally made it to the little walking path that bent through the woods and then wound its way out into the back of the church yard. And that's when I took my first, and most-striking mental note: Lewis' church is quite uninspiring -- just like he told me it would be.
Made of grey stone, probably taken from the nearby quarry, small in size, and hidden away in its little neighborhood, Holy Trinity is not anything like all the grand churches I have visited on my British Evasion thus far. This is definitely not a cathedral, but a church for the commoners, a very ordinary-looking building, and probably just about the last church anyone would hope to find a transcendent spiritual experience -- which, again, is just like Lewis told me it would be.
It's a theme Lewis wrote often about. That the sacred is often hidden in the ordinary looking, like a prince princess is hidden among the poor in so many of the fairy tales he loved so much. But therein lies the test of the heart; its the very ordinariness, the unspectacularity, the commonness of things which mask their inner beauty. And for Lewis this was true -- perhaps especially true -- when it came to matters of faith. The inner nature is always hidden, and only the pure of heart can see. And it there, within the heart, that a battle -- cosmic in nature -- takes place for every individual soul. Will they stay at it and come to see with their heart or will they be content to only see with the conceit of the eyes?
The Battleground
Lewis first started attending Holy Trinity as he was beginning to change his mind about being an atheist and philosophically accept the idea that there is a God. He was not yet a Christian, but what he called a "Theist" and began going to church out of what he described as a kind of obligatory citizenship or sense patriotic responsibility to "fly one's flag" in declaration of a belief in God.
But the church, it's demanding Anglican traditionalism and liturgy, and especially it's people were altogether uninspiring for the young Lewis. Here's an important and self-conscious reflection on his view of the church at the time from his memoir of those days of conversion "Surprised by Joy":
"The idea of churchmanship was to me wholly unattractive . . . It was, to begin with, a kind of collective; a wearisome "get together" affair. I couldn't yet see how a concern of that sort should have anything to do with one's spiritual life. To me, religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters. And then the fussy, time-wasting botheration of it all! The bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing."
For Lewis, a Romantic accustomed to an academic world where performance was evaluated on individual and not collective merit, this whole church thing was at once both much too communal and not near enough lovely.
And that was the battleground, Lewis later made clear. Many of the spiritual insights he later gave us in the plots of a scheming demon in "The Screwtape Letters" come from his reflections on his own struggling experience in the early days of attending church at Holy Trinity. Here's the demon Screwtape describing to his junior nephew demon Wormwood how he might go about foiling the burgeoning faith of his "patient" who appears a lot like Lewis in those critical days of first attending church and considering becoming a Christian:
"[The patient] sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like 'the body of Christ' and the actual faces in the next pew."
Shadows and Substance
"Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow"
These are the words T.S. Eliot penned of "The Hallow Men" who are neither in heaven nor earth. It is in the shadow of these things -- between heaven and earth, war and peace, the glory of things promised and the reality of things received, the sublime body of Christ eternal and the actual, struggling face of Christ temporal that a Christian must learn to live if he or she is to learn to be a Christian. And the place where and the people to whom a Christian goes to learn these things is, according to Lewis, called the Church.
Lewis stayed with the church. He kept going even though he didn't always like it very much. But in continuing to go he came to see it as something that it did not quite appear to be at first -- something sacred, and beautiful, and holy. Something heavenly cloaked in something very earthly.
For Lewis it was there, in the local parish, among the creaking pews and beneath the banal sermons that one comes submit oneself to what God wants to do with them. And what is that? To do what all Christians come to church to do -- to sit among creaking pews and pray the prayers of ancient people, and sing the hymns of bygone generations, and above all else to take the Sacrament which opens us to behold the mystery of faith and see with our spirits what we cannot see with our eyes.
In other words, it there in church that we come ourselves be changed in our essence like the bread and wine are changed -- to be, ourselves, transubstantiated.
As Lewis reflected:
"But as I went on I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren't fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit."
Call to Worship
I round the corner into the Holy Trinity graveyard which is quaint and still, the graves still shadowed by the high trees at this early morning hour. I walk the yard from north to south but discover Lewis' grave to be just as difficult to find as was his church. It strikes me immediately that there might be some kind of meaning to that. Finally, after walking to and fro for about 10 minutes I get eye of the plot. There he lies amongst the tombs just as he set amongst the pews. He is not alone or in just a pair of twos or three. He is buried there in the same earth and dirt as all the common saints of Holy Trinity, and all the communion of saints everywhere.
And then it occurs to me what is going on out in that graveyard -- what they're doing. They're doing together in death what they did together in life -- they're waiting. The congregation is waiting for the bell to ring and the call to worship to begin and for what is now only known in part to finally be seen and known in full.
In other words, the congregation is waiting for its hour of glory to begin.
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