May 20, 2008: Imaginative Works Where Holiness Dwells

In a sermon I recommended finding exemplars of holiness in great works of fiction. For men there is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and Jeremiah Land in Peace Like A River. For women: Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Desdemona in Othello. For children: Lucy Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. For the imaginative: Reepicheep the Mouse and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair respectively.

Recently I found to my delight what I think might be an example of virtuous life imitating virtuous art. Just before the great battle scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis has the Christ figure Aslan give the following order: "Those who are good with their noses must come in the front with us lions to smell out where the battle is." The other lion in the scene, the merely mortal one, is exultant. He "kept running about everywhere pretending to be very busy but really in order to say to everyone he met, 'Did you hear what he said? Us lions. That means him and me. Us lions. That's what I like about Aslan. No side, no stand-off-ishness. Us lions. That meant him and me.'"

Lewis wrote that in 1949. In May of 1955 he was writing one of his many letters to Mary Shelburne, a neurotic American who constantly complained to him about illnesses and money troubles and all the injustices that others had inflicted on her. She also wrote bad poetry. Out of the blue, Lewis dropped the following:

Between ourselves, as one rhymester to another, it is a great pity that the word "world", such a good important word and often so emphatically demanding to come at the end of a line, has so few rhymes in English.

One rhymester to another! Goodness. Lewis should have been poet laureate of England, whereas Shelburne (bless her heart) was an irritating fool. When she got this letter, did she go around to her friends and say to them, "Do you see what Lewis wrote? One rhymester to another. That means him and me. One rhymester to another."

I'm reminded of the hymn Oh What Matchless Condescension the Eternal God Displays, and the Bible verse that says that Jesus "is not ashamed to call them brothers" (Hebrews 2:11). This is that gracious, unpatronizing virtue found in noble kings who treat mere peasants like fellow royalty - or themselves like mere peasants. Could the grace of Lewis's Aslan have been in the back of his mind when he stooped to Shelburne's level, or raised her up to his?

Jesus liked to use fictional stories (The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son) to inspire good behavior in real life. With holiness in the real world so rare, fiction is a great place to find it. Read Pride and Prejudice (or watch the A&E miniseries), and in some situation you may soon be asking yourself, "What would Jane Bennet do?"