Shadowlands

I can't seem to escape dear old Jack. I'm enrolled in a Lewis seminar for this semester, and so far I've read Surprised By Joy and A Grief Observed; the latter is a heartbreaker of a read. Would that my reflections on death and dying were as poignant and lyrical, and that I would have loved someone so deeply and truly by the end of all things. That, of course, is another theme for another post. On the other side, my Great Conversations class (for which I am only a TA) was required to both read The Four Loves and watch Shadowlands, the film about Lewis' coming to know and marry Joy Davidman Gresham, a woman very much Lewis' complement in arenas romantic, intellectual and spiritual. Lewis' longing for a world beyond this one, beyond the Shadowlands, as he called earth, was ever more clear in his relationship with Joy; "You are the truest person I have ever known," he tells her as she lies helpless on her hospital bed, suffering through the pain of cancer. And though he admits that his incessant seeking after the next world, the real world, has ever consumed his entire being, he carefully reminds Joy that he only started living after he met her. I'm eager to call theirs the poster of anti-romance, a relationship that almost works backwards, and yet I'm keenly aware of the influence each had on the other even when love followed marriage. Their rapport and sparring is inspiring, as is their honesty and mutual longing for the real life, for Heaven as it is both imagined and left to God's creative prowess.




Reading The Chronicles of Narnia as a young girl left me, too, hungry for more of the morsels Lewis offered, for the brush of Aslan's fur, for the smell of the Dawn Treader, for a conversation with Puddleglum and the sights of a journey into the New Narnia...

A particularly compelling thought that Lewis spends much time exploring is that of the numinous, or the idea that there is mystery inherent in this world that ever points to the place where divinity actually dwells, and puts forth the idea that we might actually, in this world to one extent and more so in the next, be able to commune with it. Lewis contrasts Brother Lawrence's idea of "practicing the presence of God" with understanding that, at times, it seems as though we are very much aware of and living in light (dark?) of his absence. Which is, quite honestly, a particularly sobering idea in light of his response to Joy's passing. How does God's unrecognizability affect us from day to day? Do I seek him? Fight him? Am I aware of him through his absence even more than I'm frustrated with him because of it? How do we wait for God in a world that seems to exist, well...without him? It seems that we mortals are caught between the two promised advents--his incarnation and his second coming--the veil still mysteriously hanging in front of our bleary eyes...

There are likely to always be two Nicoles--the historically faithful and the newly doubtful. And conversation between the two is likely to be tense. The presence/absence dilemma is a very serious one, and so cataphatic/apophatic theological dogma are equally compelling, and the middle ground less and less so. And I don't know which veil I'm more eager to remove, if I can ever remove one. To be utterly convinced of God (and encouraged in that joy), or to be utterly devoid of him (and confirmed in that doubt).

I am hopeful in what-I-will-be, but...

But.