The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses - C.S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Lewis)

A slim collection of sermons and speeches, most given during WWII, but it packs a big punch. Lewis is such a good writer and thinker, reading him is like getting a glimpse into the way we were meant to use our brains. Humility, honesty, incision, and ingeniously creative yet spot-on analogy abound in these essays. Some examples:

• "The Weight of Glory" - Lewis boldly expounds and defends the promises of Scripture about heaven and glory.  "Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot image what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
• "Why I Am Not A Pacifist" - Lewis takes a specific question - whether pacifism or military service is a moral requirement of Christians - and gets to the root of the issue, which is how we decide what is right and wrong, and what pitfalls of self-interest and justification attend our decisions.
• "The Inner Ring" - In an astounding piece of psychological realism, Lewis examines the detrimental effects of our desire to belong to an elite group.
• "Membership" - Lewis shows how being a member in Christ's body is a defense against both cold individualism and totalitarian collectivism.

For me, the most striking essay bears the imposing title "Transposition", but fear not - a more vibrant, poetic, yet approachable work of theology would be hard to come by.  Lewis wrestles with the idea of heaven, which his contemporaries, leery of Biblical phrases like "streets of gold" and "victor's crowns", had abstracted into a meaningless and unimaginable state. Lewis confesses his own hesitance to embrace the Bible's pictures, but he makes a compelling case through the idea of transposition - adapting something from one medium to another, in this case from a richer to a poorer. His examples are perfect: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony adapted for a solo piano performance, pencil drawings of nature, and the similarity of our biological reactions to joy and sorrow. The person who knows Beethoven's 9th will recognize and recall the various orchestral instruments in the pianist's performance, but the novice will only hear the piano, and indeed might object to the piece as a full symphony after coming to love it performed in solo. Similarly, a pencil drawing has a richer meaning for someone already familiar with the colors and dimensions the drawing is supposed to represent, but someone experiencing the object first through the drawing might think it is merely white and flat. 

Someone stuck in a dungeon from birth whose only knowledge of the outside world is through pencil drawings will be wholly unable to comprehend color, nature, depth, and distance, and might even object when they are told that the outside world is not made of pencil marks. Our position is that of the person in the dungeon, unfamiliar with the original but given images in a poorer medium. So while it would be foolishness to discard the images because we don't like them, it would be equal foolishness to assume the images are exact representations and give us a full and true picture. Lewis goes on to apply this idea of transposition to several other "problem" doctrines, like the person of Jesus and the promised resurrection of believers.  Mind blown.

Arbitrary rating:  5 out of 5 ingeniously creative yet spot-on analogies

The Christmas Books + The Life of Our Lord - Charles Dickens

The Christmas Books (Dickens, 1843-1848)


With the publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843, Dickens created an instant classic which has had an incalculable impact on our culture. The story has been known, loved, hated, retold, and parodied countless time in countless mediums since then, but rereading the original is always an enjoyable experience.

The success of his little book inspired him to publish similar novellas each Christmas for the next four years, so they are often lumped together as Dickens's Christmas Books, though only one other is expressly about Christmas. I had never read these others, so I figured Christmas would be a good time to read them (yes, I am behind). General impressions:

1) Dickens's love of the stage is clear in the construction of these stories. A five-act structure is explicitly outlined in A Christmas Carol, and the other stories are eminently stageable with a restricted setting, a contained timeline, and a pointed (sometimes obvious) plot.

2) Though each story has its own focus, they all examine the beliefs and attitudes that lead people either to love and charity or to cold individualism. Sometimes the relationships are restricted to a family, like in The Cricket On the Hearth or The Battle of Life, while others aim for a more generalized love of mankind, like A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain.

3) Dickens's default tool to elicit (or wring) love and charity from his readers is the waif.  Between the five books, the waif count was somewhere around nine or ten. Truth be told, the books with more waifs are stronger -- A Christmas Carol would be seriously lacking without Tiny Tim.  I cannot repress tears every time I read those scenes, no matter how hard I try. The waifs are possibly the primary redeeming element of the scattered, unfocused The Chimes.

While I can't make the case these are all lost classics unjustly overshadowed by their famous predecessor, each of the other four books is worth a read. Perhaps The Haunted Man is the strongest, with its examination of the role of suffering through the peculiar "gift" given to its lead character, while The Battle of Life is easily the weakest with its overwrought and unnecessary sisterly sacrifice, but each has something unique to offer.

Arbitrary rating:  4 out of 5 pitiful waifs


The Life of Our Lord: As Written for His Children (Dickens, 1849)

This highly personal document, which Dickens refused to publish during his or his children's lifetimes, was finally brought to the reading public by his grandchildren in the early 1900s. Quite simply, it is Dickens telling his kids the story of Jesus. The simple voice of a dad comes through these pages, rather than the witty, important author.  It was an enjoyable read, and I got to pull out my Bible a few times and fact check -- there were some things I had completely forgotten about, but sure enough, Luke or John had the story too.  It can be tempting for authors to re-imagine and embellish, but there is very little of that here, just a plain retelling of the Gospels, with some explanatory glosses for the kids. The only rough spot - Dickens explains "Son of God" to mean that Jesus was such a good man that God considered him his son. I guess Dickens isn't the first Christian to stumble over the person of Jesus, and he won't be the last. That opening stumble had me worried for the end, but Dickens relates the death and resurrection faithfully.  A good read for those interested in who Dickens was and what he believed.

Arbitrary rating: 3.5 out of 5 loving dads