This is my last blog this semester. It's hard to believe we've come to the end; this class and the authors we read have impacted me in a powerful way. The last author I'm writing about is, strangely, the one with whom I am most familiar and whom I have loved the longest.
C.S. Lewis has been influential in my Christian growth from the time I was eight years old. I suppose that is why it has been so difficult for me to write on him, for his writing has helped shape me into who I am today. I learned something new about Lewis, however, when we were studying Perelandra. I will attempt, here in my last blog, to do justice to one of my favorite authors of all time. This new understanding in a way ties this whole semester together...
When I hear the title Perelandra, one instance - to me, one of the most amazing in the entire trilogy - that rings through my mind in found in the beginning. When Lewis, the self-named friend of Ransom, enters the house, he encounters the Supernatural. In the presence of something otherworldy and mysterious, someone totally outside of his understanding, his very perspective is altered.
What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical but the floor was not horizontal - the whole room seemed to have heeled over as if it were on board ship. The impression, however produced, was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal...it was...
...profoundly disturbing. It would not fit into our categories...
This is the realm the great Christian authors of the 20th Century beckon us to enter.
G.K. Chesterton did it through the Absurd.
Graham Greene finds Grace in Despair.
Charles Williams displayed the Fantastic.
C.S. Lewis shows us the horror of the Terrible Good.
J.R.R. Tolkien tells a Myth to call us to Truth.
Flannery O'Connor gives the Grotesque.
Walker Percy portrays the Mystery of the Unspeakable.
All used distortion; all show us our world, our society, our faith, and our own souls, through forcing us to enter into a completely new horizontal. They cause us to face the Divine and have our own perceptions destroyed. We are left disillusioned, unbalanced, and tilted off of our axis. We realize that it is we ourselves that are off-centered. In the face of the never-changing, unexplainable Truth, His vertical brings us to an entire new existence of being. We cannot be the same after encountering Him.
We cannot be the same after reading authors such as these.
They portray GOD in ways that do not fit into our categories.
We are left disturbed...exactly where we should be.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I am disturbed every time I have to read fiction from CS Lewis. ;)
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, you are right about the authors and how they have to take us out of the dead, almost post-apocalyptic modern world and show us that there are signs of life; that even though we have forgotten the other realm, it still exists.
It is good to be an anarchist, witness to pious church ladies, literally bear one anothers burdens, to see that light; though faint has not abandoned us, to come to glimpse with ugly reality of falleness, and to realize that we need each other to recover the message of the Gospel.
Good blog Kala.
CS Lewis is still like reading a Thomas Kinkade painting.