March 11th, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
 A man steps from a bedroom out to the landing and finds himself on a precipice. Looking down, he sees an endless chasm. Looking up, he sees a tiny circle of sky high above him, pouring down the sides of the chasm like a waterfall.
A house feels unusually warm. To the discerning eye, little tongues of flame briefly trace the edge of a doorframe, an umbrella stand, a bookcase — then disappear.
A woman studying at a table smells a witheringly bad stench. The light is blotted out by a dark shape in the window: corruption, in the form of a huge, foul bird.
Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion is sprinkled with such emblematic scenes. I became curious about it when I read The Magician’s Book and learned that C.S. Lewis was deeply moved by this “strange” tale. Tolkien was uneasy with Lewis’ admiration for this author’s imagination. But from the lion of the title to the Platonic vision unfolded in the fictional town of Smetham, this book surely provides the inspiration for many of Lewis’ works, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the space trilogy.
The basic situation: a little philosophical study group has been meeting to discuss the notion, developed both in Plato and (in this story) in an ancient manuscript about the angels present in the creation, that the world was made of eternal energies and ideas bodied forth in material things. Mr. Foster, who ends up one of the story’s more unfortunate characters, gives this its clearest exposition when he explains that the leader of the group believes
that this world is created, and all men and women are created, by the entrance of certain great principles into aboriginal matter. We call them by cold names; wisdom and courage and beauty and strength and so on, but actually they are very great and mighty Powers. It may be they are the angels and archangels of which the Christian Church talks… And when That which is behind them intends to put a new soul into matter it disposes them as it will, and by a peculiar mingling of them a child is born; and this is their concern with us, but what is their concern and business among themselves we cannot know. And by this gentle introduction of them, every time in a new and just proportion, mankind is maintained…
What is humanity to do when angels and archangels respond to the summons and begin erupting into the finite world? What will become of them? Williams explores some possible answers through a cast of characters that includes a pair of young philosophers, a butterfly collector, a couple of club members who thirst for power, a bookshop clerk, and a young woman who aspires to earn her doctorate studying Abelard. How each character fares depends on their inner “ruling principle,” and how they meet it when it confronts them in the form of an animal: a great lion, a unicorn, a butterfly, a pterodactyl, a lamb. Ultimately it all swirls to a head in a mythic recapitulation of Adam’s naming of the animals, whereby the breach is closed, and the flaming sword — which until now I have seen only as a symbol of discipline and punishment, but which now I see more truly as an instrument of mercy — is reinstated at the gates of Eden.
I loved it, though not because I can explain every part of it. I loved it because its imaginative truth is very powerful, and it got under my skin. It has the multifacetedness of myth — you catch a shimmer of meaning here and there, and the shimmers are part of a harmonious whole, but the complete diamond is difficult to comprehend. I would agree with the descriptor “strange” which is often applied to this tale, but I would add “satisfyingly complex” because it forced me to slow down and ponder so many things. It raised my awareness of other dimensions of existence than world we touch and see, deepened my understanding of some aspects of my faith, and got me thinking about what my own “ruling principle” might be. Surely I’ll read this again one day — and in the meantime, I definitely want to read more Charles Williams.
Further reading:
I found this article about Charles Williams an interesting read. In it, Thomas Howard describes Williams’ writing this way:
Williams unfailingly leads us all on what George Eliot called “a severe mental scamper.” His mind was so packed with images, and so curious about every cranny of the universe, and so regaled by ideas—especially dogma—and so overcharged with what one can only call high-voltage restlessness, that it is a wonder his prose is accessible at all… Certainly he leads us all out into titanic vistas, and startles us over and over and over by pointing out features in that vista which to him are obvious, but which in a thousand years we might never have noticed.
Here is the Wikipedia entry that includes a list of Williams’ works and a biographical sketch.
Here is an e-version of The Place of the Lion.
March 10th, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
Tonight at my small group we discussed Revelation 5, where the Lamb of God is the only one worthy to open to scroll beside the throne of Heaven. We discussed the scroll as God’s plan for the unfolding of the whole history of the created order, sealed by sin until someone worthy appears.
My childlike, practical side wondered why the One on the throne just didn’t open the scroll himself. Of course he was worthy. But to open it, to go on with Plan A after humankind has chosen to sin, would have meant our annihilation.
The original plan involved humanity, made in God’s image to rule, given free will. The true Plan A was un-fallen humanity in a perfect world.
It was no surprise to God that humankind sinned — thus Plan B, in which the scroll remains sealed because his designated rulers have fallen. No one of them is fit to open it. He comes himself in the likeness of sinful man, reconciles humanity to God, and only then opens the scroll so the plan can unfold.
What I thought about for the first time was that although we complain about the presence of evil in the world, and although the question is often asked, “How could a good God allow such fallenness and pain?”, think of the other option according to the scenario laid out in this chapter: God proceeding with Plan A regardless of human frailty and rebellion and unworthiness, and annihilating us. God opening the scroll without troubling with redemption. God rolling out in a fallen world his Plan A, in which the role assigned to humanity — to rule — can only be accomplished through free cooperation with a holy God.
Pain in the world is a terrible thing. But holiness unleashed without mercy would have been much, much worse. The human race would have ceased to be. It almost happened in the story of Noah. But instead, thank God, Plan B. The presence of pain is the evidence of God’s great mercy and gentleness and patience.
I am also struck in a new way by the endorsement this gives to God’s original plan for humanity. Not only does he refuse to open the scroll until he has established the conditions necessary for it to work. He doesn’t simply throw it out and write a new one. He believes in the glorious possibilities of the creation He has made — even after it falls. (It sheds more light on His response to Job.)
I’m not saying it very well. But it seems important.
March 9th, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
…they couldn’t all want Archetypes coming down on them, not if they were like most of the religious people he had met. They also probably liked their religion taken mild — a pious hope, a devout ejaculation, a general sympathetic sense of a kindly universe — but nothing upsetting or bewildering, no agony, no darkness, no uncreated light. (Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion)
Our pastor is preaching on Revelation, and this morning I finished reading it. The sermons have been very helpful and illuminating, but to be honest, if they did nothing but get me to read Revelation, that would be a significant accomplishment. I think I read it quickly for my New Testament class in college, but aside from that I’ve studiously avoided Revelation. It’s been twisted and used in so many unfortunate ways, and it’s so full of incomprehensible symbolism, that I’ve simply been afraid of it.
 Or am I just a spiritual wimp, who “likes my religion taken mild,” as the excerpt above puts it?
It’s been interesting to start this novel, my first Charles Williams read, the same week I finish reading Revelation. The Place of the Lion is about Plato breaking in on a peaceful British village. More specifically, it’s about Platonic ideals and forms erupting into a time and place and re-absorbing created things. The leader of a little philosophy/Bible study group is the focal point of what’s happening.
It’s interesting because Revelation is, in a sense, about the same thing. It gives visions into a reality existing in another dimension. So reading the novel is providing me with an imaginative medium for continuing to meditate on some of what I’ve read in Revelation.
Here are my thoughts about Revelation:
March 7th, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
Today I have the honor of being a guest contributor at 5 Minutes for Books. My thoughts on A Thousand Splendid Suns appear there in a regular Sunday feature titled “On Reading.” Click here if you’d like to stop by!
March 6th, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
 I missed the Poetry Friday round-up yesterday. Fridays are so busy for us that I haven’t been able to participate much this year. But my friend Ruth has an interesting post on tears in the “new normal” since the earthquake in Haiti.
 My first thought was of this Jill Briscoe poem, which I’m familiar with through her sermon “Crumbling Clay.” Then this morning I thought of this one I wrote myself, about the woman in Luke 7:36-50 who poured both tears and perfume over Jesus’ feet.
The poem mentions the ancient tradition of a tear bottle in which people saved their tears — the tradition that gives meaning to the idea in Psalm 56:8 that God puts our tears in his bottle. Some say these “lachrymatories” would be used to capture a mourner’s tears when someone died, then left at their grave as a symbol of respect. Others believe that these bottles were buried with their owners as a symbol of their lives’ experiences. I use the latter picture in this poem.
I don’t have an alabaster jar of perfume, but the other outpouring the woman offered — her tears — is one readily available to all of us. Here, I’m thinking of tears less as an expression of excessive sadness than as an expression of a soul fully alive.
Worship
She went where she knew you would be.
Somehow she knew that you would welcome her even there
at a churchman’s banquet.
Somehow she knew you that well
before she even met you face to face.
She carried two small bottles,
one of them filled with tears –
the sum total of her life, saved up to take with her one day to her grave –
griefs and joys, losses and gains,
all her suffering and rejoicing mingled together in a little clay vial,
and all her shame, by far the biggest portion.
She poured that warm river out over your feet
down to the dregs, sparing nothing.
She let down her hair and mopped it all back up
till her crowning glory was dripping wet,
raining kisses on your salty, new-washed skin.
The other jar came next,
made of beautiful alabaster,
filled with expensive perfume whose heavy intoxication rose in a cloud
as she drained it, too, over your feet
down to the dregs, sparing nothing.
It wasn’t necessary to you at all, was it? –
The sweetness of the perfume just recapitulated
the sweetness of her first impulsive offering of tears –
Let my tears perfume your air, Lord Jesus –
my heart before it’s thought about
my soul before it’s put into words
my deepest well
my quickest and most truthful self
expressed in this intimate flood.
I empty the bottle over your precious, scarred feet
down to the dregs, sparing nothing.
You say, “You have loved much.
Go in peace.”
Copyright © 2010 Janet Goodrich – All Rights Reserved
 Suzy Schultz, "Alabaster Jar"
March 4th, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
 Robin McKinley’s Chalice has taken me several tries to get through. Much though I’ve liked this author’s other books, this one didn’t make a serious grab for my attention till about 150 pages in. Till then, there was something too sleepy and passive about the prose, and just a little too unreal about its fictional world, to pull me in.
This is not to say there weren’t interesting things about it. It takes place in a realm that resembles in some ways the prelapsarian innocence of Genesis, where humans and nature still have a close bond. Its governing system involves a (male) Master and a (female) Chalice who are exceptionally attuned to the “earthlines.”
There are a couple of key differences from Genesis, though. One is that there is no transcendent God, just “the gods of the earthlines.” Another is that the story picks up after a pretty serious disruption of the harmony between people and nature. The previous Master, governed by excess of every kind of passion, was killed along with his Chalice in a fire (just a tad of symbolism there), and the “demesne” (synonymous for state?) has been deeply wounded. Enter this cast of characters: a new Chalice who keeps bees and has a “gift” for honey, and a new Master, younger brother of the old one, whose training as a “priest of fire” is set aside to return to rule.
Even such a sketchy plot summary makes it clear: there is a fair amount of complexity in this imaginative world that needs explaining. Despite an interesting situation and potential for an enriching story — a comment in some ways on the nonfictional world I live in — this tale never really got off the ground. The dialogue seems to be mostly speech-making, there mainly to convey information about the details of “Willowlands” and its rituals, traditions, and history. The pace is languid. The seriousness with which we’re asked to take honey as a healing substance was always a bit of a barrier to me. Somehow, the bridge was never quite firm enough into the imaginative realm to permit easy access. In the end, I found this story to be an ambitious and promising attempt never quite realized.
I picked up my copy of Chalice at a regional publisher’s book sale after seeing Jeane’s review at Dog Ear Diary. She gave it a similar appraisal.
March 4th, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
 The Man who Didn’t Wash his Dishes has been a favorite of mine since I was a very small child. Everyone else probably knows this story about a middle aged, single man who cooks an unusually large dinner one night, then decides to put off doing the dishes. He keeps putting it off for days and days until the dishes are piled everywhere.
 What will he do? Creative solutions involve eating out of ashtrays, soap dishes, and flower pots. His little black cat looks on in amazement in most of these old fashioned illustrations. All these years later, I still taste the bitterness of soap bubbles on my tongue when we get to the part where he eats out of his soap dish, and I still picture the extremely ugly aqua soap dish on which a cake of Lava used to sit for exceptionally dirty hands.
 His meteorological solution creates a path back to an ordered little home. Like Bread and Jam for Frances, in which Albert’s lunchtime ritual and little cardboard salt shaker used to inspire me to savor my lunch, Phyllis Krasilovsky’s first storybook used to make me crave an orderly room. This man has become a frequently-invoked character when children’s rooms or crafting times seem to be building up insurmountable piles of stuff.
 Then there’s Angus and the Ducks. This one gets special mention because after poring over the book quietly all the way home from the library, Younger Daughter asked, “Mommy, if I read you two pages of this book, can I read in bed tonight?” (Yes, one of the carrots I dangle is that once she’s reading on her own, she can keep the light on for awhile at night and read like her big sister.)
What inspired this surge of motivation? Beats me. I was thankful for it though!
 Last but not least: Glamsters. This giggle-worthy picture book tells the story of two hamsters on the eve before hamster sale-day at the pet store. One takes it into her head to start reading the newspapers lining her cage, and discovers some tips for being transformed from a hamster into a glamster. Since she wants to stand out from the crowd, she follows all the instructions, but when she’s finished and her sister urges her to look at her reflection in the water dish, the results aren’t quite what she’d hoped for. This was a good read for two girls in love with their small rodents.
Big secret: Older Daughter will be receiving another hamster book, The World According to Humphrey, for her birthday next week. Also notable this week was a chapter book called The Twin Giants that struck the rare path down the middle between my two readers. And on deck we have The Phantom Tollbooth to attempt as our next longer read together; I’ve never read it, but based on the reviews I’ve seen, it’s worth a try.
See more read-aloud posts at Hope Is the Word.
March 2nd, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
From time to time, I’ve written posts that ask questions about prayer. I thought that for once I’d set aside my reflexively speculative turn of mind, and write an unabashedly affirmative and practical post about it. So without further ado, and from the heart, here goes:
- Prayer creates an opening for God to speak. How many times in prayer has my train of thought been interrupted, intruded upon, by a new thought, one that has never occurred to me before, coming from left field?
- Prayer releases hidden things from underground springs. Case in point: in preparation for a family member’s surgery this week, my whole family converged at our house to pray together about it. We were fine, talking and laughing, and we’d had a month to pray independently about the surgery. But the minute we bowed our heads together, we felt like weeping. Something deep down was released.
- Prayer brings peace. It reaffirms that all the questionables and scattered pieces of the picture are comprehended by one loving mind.
- Prayer brings clarity. Seldom do I get up from praying without that wrung-out, refreshed, more composed feeling that is to the soul what a good night’s sleep is to the body.
- Prayer reminds me of my smallness. Especially when I don’t have any “suggestions” for God — you know, multiple choice answers like we’re accustomed to giving him: “Lord, here’s the problem. I pray that you would do this; or this; or maybe this.” My best prayer sessions may begin in this frame of mind, but discard it by the end, transformed into simply, “Lord, here’s the problem. Please help. I have no clue. Open my eyes to see you at work.” Seeing my smallness is the beginning of spiritual health.
- Prayer makes me more compassionate. Interceding for others, I become more aware of them as people in their own right, independent of whatever significance they may have to me personally. It makes me more forgiving.
- Prayer opens my eyes to the eternal significance of the mundane.
- Prayer opens my ears to the “still small voice” that waits till the last moment before whispering, “Go this way,” or “Hold your tongue; that doesn’t need to be said,” or “Here’s an idea:”
- Prayer increases my capacity for God’s love, received and expressed, because it reminds me of his perspective on things and people — including myself.
- Prayer satisfies my deepest need — for God himself, as George MacDonald says. It reminds me that it’s less about receiving answers, but about receiving the communion and friendship from God that he designed us for. It’s not that this replaces answers. It just restores them to their proper, secondary place.
Lord, teach us to pray. Not how to pray, or what to say, or what rules to follow, but just to pray.
March 1st, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
 I’m not sure why I picked this book up just now. The ideal time to experience it would probably be in the midst of loss.
Or maybe I would find it annoying then. Maybe that’s the time when no one else’s words will do.
Written as a journal in the days after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed chronicles the stages and preoccupations of grief. I remember learning (from this biographical video, I think) that it was originally published under a pseudonym. Not until after his own death did Lewis’s name appear as the author.
Potent, personal, and refreshingly honest, this short book (only 65 pages) finds Lewis questioning God’s goodness, wondering whether the dead are indeed reunited in the “sweet by and by,” acknowledging his belief that suffering continues in the afterlife, and holding up his rationality again and again as a shield against the gale-force pain of loss that leaves him groping in a vacuum.
Here is just one sample of the honesty I’m talking about:
They tell me that H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this?…
‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.
It should be no surprise that one of the most popular writers of Christian apologetics finds and affirms his underpinnings in God by the end, but not until he has known the full weight of pain and uncertainty.
I remember reading in George MacDonald’s sermon on Job that it is better to question God’s existence than his goodness. Here are MacDonald’s words:
To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood… Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.
I thought of this passage when I read in A Grief Observed, “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’” I wondered if Lewis had reread any of the Unspoken Sermons that had such an impact on him during this season.
I called A Grief Observed “personal” earlier in this review, but it’s only personal in the sense of facing hard questions; the details of daily life and of individual personalities are stripped away. Because of this it captures the universal experience of grief of which hard questions are a part. It’s a good book to know about, and perhaps to revisit when it’s my turn to walk the difficult path it traces.
February 27th, 2010 by Janet Goodrich
 Reading The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia has been a rollercoaster experience. In that sense, the title is apt, named as it is after the weighty tome Lucy leafs through in search of a spell that will free the dufflepuds from invisibility in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The book attracts and repels Lucy by turns. This book had a similar effect on me.
As a child, Laura Miller was captivated by the Narnia books, reading them repeatedly and finding in them her own desires realized in a fictional place she longed to go to. As an adult skeptic not in sympathy with the Christian themes in the Chronicles, Miller returns to examine them with a critical eye. She concludes,
Everything that Lewis had ever read and loved went into Narnia, and because he was a great reader, these things were as deeply felt by him as actual experiences. In his own way, Lewis, too, believed that everything in the Chronicles was true, and this conviction is what he communicates to his young readers.
It was a fascinating voyage, once I passed the halfway point. In the first half, I struggled with wanting to throw the book across the room. I talked to the pages. I wrote long complaints in my reading journal.
The first half of the book focuses on what Miller sees as the failures of the Chronicles (chiefly their Christianity) and of Lewis personally. In some ways it reads as an extended dressing-down of Lewis for chauvinism, prejudice, hyper-conservatism, and general sneakiness for “proselytizing.” On questions of interpretation, I simply didn’t agree with some of her literary judgments. On questions of Lewis’s personal life, I know enough about the subject to recognize that some of the personal charges are exaggerated.
It’s not that I can’t handle the idea that Lewis had failings. Of course he did (along with most of the Patriarchs in the Bible). Miller seems to be under the impression that if Lewis’s Christian admirers knew more about him, they would become disillusioned. But his Christian admirers, if they are indeed Christian, should be the most clear-eyed and gracious of all on the subject of sin.
Mostly, I object to the school of thought that sees an author’s private life as territory relevant to literary criticism. Miller writes that after she entered college, poststructuralist and postmodern theory became popular:
Books that past generations regarded as eternal monuments of genius were dragged into the courts of theory and indicted for their ideological inadequacies. Their authors’ personal lives and political beliefs served as evidence against them. Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia lurked everywhere, often in disguises that required expert decoding.
In some ways, I felt this was the kind of study Miller was conducting. Yet she continues,
The honest, educated reader, when tackling the towering literary works of the past, now faces a different, though no less precarious task: how to acknowledge an author’s darker side without losing the ability to enjoy and value the book.
We’re on the same page, I thought. I’ll stick with it, and see where she goes from here.
I’m so glad I did. Miller’s discussion in the second half of the book is urbane, wide-ranging, engagingly written. She writes without condescension about children’s reading experiences, and captures feelings many readers of the chronicles share. Among the topics she addresses are:
- Lewis’s ideas regarding myth and the friendships that shaped his thinking
- His friendship with Tolkien
- His views concerning Medieval worldview and literature
- Nature depictions in the Chronicles
- The Wood between the Worlds (one of my favorite parts of Narnia) as, among other things, a vast library
- Fairy tales in general
- The countrysides of England and Ireland and the history inscribed on the very landscape
Scholarly yet conversational, the voice that emerges from these pages inspires my respect and liking. When Miller lies down in an ancient barrow and tries to imagine the people who made it, or describes her initial reaction to Narnia, or ventures brilliantly down any number of scholarly pathways into different branches of literature or history, I feel nothing but keen interest and pleasure.
Since finishing The Magician’s Book, I’ve wondered whether the problem is that a belief system can’t be fully evaluated from a skeptical vantage point. Certain aspects can be, but there is something to be said for the eye of faith. The analogy that comes to mind is of attempting to write a critique of, say, Michelangelo’s David based on a black and white photograph. My observations would be accurate only to a point; the full experience of the sculpture would have to be more tactile. I’d have to see it in person to experience its size, its dimensionality, its color. That’s the only way to see its full meaning.
I hate the fact that what I say could be misinterpreted to mean that Christianity is an exclusive club. It is open to all. But Miller’s references to Christianity from her perspective as a lapsed Catholic are unrecognizable to me as a believer, and on some points she is demonstrably inaccurate in her understanding. Having gotten this button into the wrong hole, her conclusions about Lewis’s practice of it, and all that radiates from that center artistically and personally, fail to line up either.
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