Category Archives: c. s. lewis

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Between Fall and Winter, Springtime’s an Eternity Away

Fall has pungency 

Like nard. Summer’s fullness crushed

Anoints the late year.

Winter has the scent 

Of absence. Nothing. Death. Life.

Shrouded under snow.

Spring is memory.

Fragrance from a walled garden

Calls to the lover.

Summer will not end.

Here at this wedding: wine, bower

Evermore and more.

________

Please permit another set of haiku-a reprint even, in this case. The pictures will return; I have, in any case, taken some within the last week at least.

I know that poetry should generally be offered sans commentary, but, alas, sometimes I cannot help myself. This set of haiku attempts to map the four seasons to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, with a look forward to the joys of the new creation. In the last two haiku, it also tries to allude to rich sensory images from the the Song of Solomon, which, among other things, is a metaphorical telling of Christ’s inloveness* with his church, his bride.

To be quite honest, even before my father died last week, I have been, and am more or less, in the winter haiku, under the dark drifts of naturalism and doubt, where its seems as if this world and all its toil is all there is and after that…nothing.

And, yet, in better moments, my heart still longs for Spring and Summer after that-for goodness to fill the earth, for justice to reign, for suffering to end, for relationships to be healed, for true understanding between people to arrive, for me to be a whole and true person. It could be that these longings are an anomaly in a meaningless world, but, following C.S. Lewis, I am hoping their absurd existence in the teeth of the temptation to despair means that their fulfillment also really exists.

I want to believe that my father and my mother are…will be. That my father understands the things that knit his heart with sorrow over the last 2 decades of his life. That he now beholds my mother once again, not as his long mourned for wife, but as a strong, beautiful sister. That they can relish their particular shared piece of God’s creative and redemptive work equally along with a billion other pieces. I want to believe that in the light of the Eternal Day, that I am with them, too, at that wedding feast, tasting the wine.

*“Inloveness” is a phrase I borrowed from Sheldon Vanauken’s wonderful A Severe Mercy which I am rereading and which is about many of the themes of this post, including loss and a longing for heaven.

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Coriakin

“What did he do, Sire” asked Caspian.
“My son,” said Ramandu, “it is not for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit.”

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No Bacchus? Let’s Get Raucous!

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Groan. And so it begins, the list of revisions and omissions and additions that the second Narnia movie prepetrates on C. S. Lewis’ story Prince Caspian. I once, perhaps rather rashly, said that they should not make a movie of this chronicle at all, and perhaps that would have been better than some of the changes they seem to have made here. But passing over this story would have created very tough sledding, like Jadis in Aslan’s Spring, to bridge the story over to Dawn Treader.
Well, I am not going to remake all the points that this article, by a very sensitive Catholic reviewer, makes about the film, but, alas, there is no Bacchus, thus evicerating much of Lewis’ use of myth to illustrate truth. No Susan saying, ” I wouldn’t have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan” and Lucy responding, “I should think not.” There will be no Bacchus asking, “Is it a romp, Aslan” and proceeding to create vines to tear down the stones of oppression and new wine to gladden the heart. I am just going to have to wait till heaven to dance with wild abandon as Bacchus and the maenads and Susan and Lucy did then. To be fair, though, such holy joy would have been very difficult to pull off cinematically. Though the filmmakers might have looked to the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing for some (though definitely not all) of the expressions of joy and revelry shown there.
If only the movie makers had taken Jeffrey Overstreet’s advice, I might not be as miffed:
“But I just wish that efforts like this one, and like Alfonzo Cuaron’s extraordinary film Children of Men, would do away with the label ‘Based on the book.’ Rather, they are new stories, ‘Inspired by elements of the book.’”
Also, here is the Christianity Today review. Ouch. Two and a half stars out of four.

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A Blog on Jack!

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Here is a newish blog on Clive Staples, known to his close friends as Jack, Lewis, which I heard about courtesy of Jeffrey Overstreet. There are some pretty well known, and published, C. S. Lewis scholars blogging here and the whole enterprise is connected to the publisher Harper. I have not had the chance to dig in as yet, but it looks pretty cool. And one can even comment. Nice.

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C. S. Lewis Film Online

This is not the the Lewis biography I referenced in a recent blog entry. That one is in the latest box set of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie from Disney. It has an interesting style, with a group of children reading from the books in various places. It is really quite good, and I am very open and eager to loan it out.
The links below are to a video you can view online for free. It is a documentary which I think originally appeared on the Hallmark channel.
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You can screen it online for free, after signing in to the site, and they don’t send you any emails either. It involves dramatization of Lewis’ life by actors along with commentaries by Lewis scholars, and is really quite good.
There are other religiously themed videos available to screen online as well.

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Love’s As Warm as Tears

Love’s as warm as tears,
    Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.
Love’s as fierce as fire,
    Love is fire:
All sorts—infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.
Love’s as fresh as spring,
    Love is spring:
Bird-song hung in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering “Dare! Dare!”
To sap, to blood,
Telling “Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.”
Love’s as hard as nails,
    Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.
C. S. Lewis
-buy the book here