July 1, 2008: Our Curse, Another's Blessing

I have a new answer now to the question, "What's your favorite book?" The best book I have ever read is Volume 3 of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis.

It was never intended to be a book. Lewis did not keep letters mailed to him, and he did not expect anyone to keep letters he sent to them. But they did - friends, scholars, children, strangers, lunatics, pastors. They wrote him boatloads of mail from all over the world and he painstakingly responded to every one. They treasured his letters like gold and were able to produce them 30-40 years after his death when editor Walter Hooper went looking for them.

Many who received a personal letter from Lewis were ecstatic (and this encouraged them to write more!), but for him letter-writing was a constant woe. He called it "the bane of my life" when speaking in confidence to a friend. It ate up all his leisure time and bit into his work. He had to get up early every morning to respond to the previous day's mail. When he returned from a brief vacation he'd find an overwhelming stack of 60 letters waiting for him. Since he could not type, and had a genetically deformed thumb that would not bend at the knuckle, he had to do the best he could writing by hand (and he constantly apologized for his bad handwriting, especially as he got older.) For at least a decade he dreaded Christmas, because he would get hundreds of letters at that time, and he felt he needed to answer them all. He begged close friends to write him at some other time of the year.

But Lewis' curse is my blessing. I find his letters to be the best devotional material I have ever read. I noticed long ago that writing that is intended as devotional usually leaves me unmoved. But when I read Lewis dealing graciously with a confused child or correcting an errant scholar or appreciating a gift or simply expressing grief, it inspires me to worship. And as for his casual insights, oh my goodness they leap out from every page. You have no idea how many times over the past few months I've said to my sons, "Remember the other day when we were talking about plagiarism/ the gracious treatment of bores/ the foibles of Rev So-and-So/ the poetry of T. S. Elliot? Well listen to this paragraph I just read in Lewis!" It is as though he had somehow listened to our conversation and nailed the point in 50 words or less.

In 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 St. Paul asked to be delivered from a thorn in the flesh, and God said no. Lewis' thorn in the flesh was a constant pile of correspondence he wished he could avoid, but his response to that thorn comes down to me as a source of great enrichment and delight. Now I have a follow-up prayer with regard to my own thorns: "Lord, please take this curse from me. It is the bane of my life. But if you will not, then would you be so kind as to turn it into a blessing for others? Thank you."