What CHRISTMAS means to me (CS Lewis)

About ten years ago I stopped giving and receiving Christmas presents. It seemed perfectly clear to me that the entire holiday had become nothing more than a swap-fest. I thought, people only give presents to other people who they expect to get one back from, so it isn’t really a present—it’s a swap. What could be sillier? I was very happy when I found the following essay.

What CHRISTMAS means to me...
by C. S. Lewis
From God in the dock

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn't go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business too have a 'view' on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone's business.

I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to 'keep' it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself—gaudy and useless gadgets, 'novelties' because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance, for after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don't know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I'd sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

The Final Transformation

I've had a small mole beside my nose since I was born. At least it used to be small. It also used to be light in color and mostly unnoticeable. People even used to call it a beauty mark. A mole can make a face interesting if it's small and in the right place. Did someone say "Honey West?"

But during the past ten years that mole of mine got bigger and darkened in color. Instead of a beauty mark, it began to stick out like a witch's nose wart. I finally decided enough was enough and went to have it removed. No big deal right? I mean, it wasn't hurting or bleeding or anything. It was ugly, not cancerous. Any doctor/dermatologist could do the job in five minutes. I used to be in the VA health system until a few weeks ago when they told me I made too much money and promptly booted me out. Serves me right. I was a bad soldier. My soldiering was almost as bad as my singing. I haven't gotten any other health insurance yet. No health insurer would have paid for this anyway unless I lied and said the mole was hurting or something. But I figured, how much could it cost? It's not much worse than popping a zit. Sure enough, the doctor put a shot in to numb it (moles don't have much feeling anyway), cut it off, cauterized it, and bandaged it up. It took maybe five minutes. The bill—$200!!!!!!!!!!!

To say I was put out would be a great understatement. I asked why such a hefty fee. Would you believe his reply was, "It's cosmetic surgery." I said, "So is a haircut, except it takes considerably more time and talent to perform."

Doctors are as greedy as anybody else. Have you noticed that the more money people have, the more they want (and think they deserve)? Now I've always been a republican at heart, but this is exactly why we need a two party system. Many republicans are greedy, but many democrats are power hungry. Their faults are what actually allows them to keep each other in check.

We need a new kind of court system. One that allows you to take someone to task for their greed. I didn't pay just to have a mole removed. I made a greedy man's boat payment this month. This is exactly the point CS Lewis was making in his Reflections on the Psalms. Many of the Psalms are about the topic of justice. "Lord, these people have mistreated me. When will you bring them down low and exalt your faithful servant"? The Jews wholly believed that in this world, or some world to come, there would be a just account given for every action in this life. They were anxious to get what they felt was rightfully theirs, but they were also anxious to see sinners punished. But you'll notice that there were precious few prayers for their enemies.

That to me is the most striking aspect to reading the Old Testament. Forgiveness seems all but lost on the Jews. They're always anxious for God to forgive them, but where do they ask God to forgive their enemies? Where do they themselves forgive their enemies, especially those who are not Jews? You seldom run across such a passage. They had trouble just forgiving members of their own families.

When Jesus came into the world he brought about a true paradigm shift on the subject of justice. He implored us to temper justice with mercy. But forgiveness was better than either. I heard a friend talking on the phone to someone a while back saying that Christianity was all about forgiveness. Without forgiveness, justice and mercy go out the window. If we don't forgive, we won't be forgiven. And if we don't love others, God won't love us.

In Lewis' Till We Have Faces the character of Orual in many ways exemplified the Old Testament (the old paradigm) view of justice, while Fox, whom she called grandfather, saw the new paradigm coming into view.

Orual: "Are the gods not just?"
Fox: "Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?

Jonah slept through a storm because he had no conscience. Jesus slept through one because he did, and it was clear. Most people don't sleep nearly so well as either.

Till We Have Faces was about a young women's journey from childhood to adulthood, about her awakening from childhood selfishness to adult selflessness, and about learning to let go of anger while learning to love her enemies. She also learned to see herself for what she truly was and what she truly was becoming. She learned that her own heart was the most deceitful one of all and that with a deceitful heart comes a false face. And by the end she learned that in order to find her true face—the person she was meant to be—she had to seek the face of another, the face of a God.

Her story reads very much like the story of the Old Testament's transformation into the New. We find a different kind of man in the old one full of selfishness, envy, greed and violence and yet remarkably intent on getting an undeserved justice from God. But in the new we find a man humble, claiming to own nothing, giving all his excess to the poor, loving his enemies and wishing them the best, and perhaps most importantly we find him at peace while the world around him is in turmoil because his conscience is clear and beaming. And in the end we find the new man transformed yet again into a new body and a new world. It's not a new paradigm but a perfection of what began with Christ.

It's the final testament, but not the final story, for the best story has been saved for last, and only God knows its content. I often imagine it will be like that show "Stargate SG1" where we find these adventurous people stepping through a stargate for the first time, not knowing what they'll find on the other side. It must be very much like being born again. Personally, I can't wait. I like to say that the older I get, the better eternal rest sounds. But I'm only joking because I'm expecting eternal life—not rest. And it will happen. But this stargate will have a sign above it: NO MASKS ALLOWED.

Kubla Khan in Perelandra

I wrote this in 2006 and posted it to my old blog. Since I've been consumed with work as of late and haven't had time to write much, I thought it might be nice to post this old article here.

CS Lewis was extremely fond of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and often made mention in particular of his poem, Kubla Khan. In the afterward to the 3rd edition of The Pilgrim's Regress Lewis talks about mystical longing: "...that unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire... the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan... or the noise of falling waves."

That "unnamable something" is of course what draws all the mystically curious to the writings of CS Lewis as well as to poems like Kubla Khan. I think (sadly) that few people take part at that table where sounds are felt, and curious smells produce imagery from the fringe—the borders of consciousness—where just on the other side of the wall lies the source of that unnamable object of desire that tries to sing out to us of its existence all of our lives. How very few listen for it at all.

Kubla Khan presents us with the imagery of forbidden lands from the other side of that wall. We find both the paradise of the pleasure dome and the deep mysterious icy cavern, "A savage place! as holy and enchanted". Holy in this case meaning just what it was intended to mean—set apart by the divine, apart from our present material existence and, for us, forbidden realms. But now and then there seem to be some people who are allowed a momentary glimpse into these realms. The poetry of Kubla Khan provides for us such a glimpse; Perelandra builds from it. But lets read Kubla Kahn before we venture any further here. It's a short poem:

Kubla Kahn by Samuel Taylor Coleridge-1798

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And `mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And `mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight `twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Xanadu, originally known as Shangdu, was a real place, a sort of miniature city that housed the summer palace of Mongolian Emperor—Kubla Khan (sometimes written as Kublai Khan). It was only about 5 1/2 miles around, but Marko Polo described it as quite beautiful with palaces carved from marble and covered with gold. Other than the fact that the city existed and was quite exquisite the rest of the poem would seem to rest on poetic license. There are no caves or caverns nor rivers running through Xanadu. The river, Alph, mentioned in the poem is likely a variation on the Alpheus River of Greek mythology. So let us bear in mind that Coleridge probably made use of several old tales in fashioning his poem.

Lewis, it would seem, drew deeply from Coleridge's poem for the final four chapters in his novel—Perelandra. There are some striking similarities between the descriptions of the two worlds.

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

This one is obvious enough. In chapter 14 of Perelandra, Ransom is fighting at night in the ocean with the Unman and finds that he's being dragged way down deep until he's sure he can hold his breath no longer and will die. But just then he finds that they are on a beach. After managing to subdue his adversary, Ransom waits for what seems like an eternity for daylight to appear. It never does. Eventually his suspicions are roused. He stands up and walks along the sandy shoreline feeling upward with his hands until he touches rock. The realization sinks in that, during the struggle, he must have come up into a cavern of some sort from under the ocean. This underground shoreline is certainly "a sunless sea" for him. There is total darkness here. After following along the cavern wall, he meets up with a trickle of water which he hopes may come to a stream if he follows it, as he desperately trying to find his way to the outside world again. He gropes in the darkness for what must be days. The cavern opens up into a vast array of underground vaults which seem endless, "caverns measureless to man". Eventually he comes to a red glow that leads to a very hot area in the cavern, very deep, and it becomes evident that this leads down to something like a river of lava and a huge pit. It's hot, but at least now he can see a little. Ransom descries some strange things including beings that he can only see shadows of far off but which appear humanlike. He's in a chamber now that seems manmade, something like a cathedral with two huge thrones and chairs on either side of them that are much too big for any earth man. Ransom has said on a couple of occasions already in the story that he wonders, "Were all the things which appeared as mythology on earth scattered through other worlds as realities?" But he doesn't pretend to know if these are some sort of gods. A short time later he slips and falls into the rushing water, and soon he's cast out into a pool with the sun shining overhead. He's free. Looking back at the entrance to the subterranean world, he sees, "...a river pouring from the mouth of a cave, a cave that seemed indeed to be made of ice." Actually Lewis decides to make a change here and Ransom finds that it's not really ice after all, but rather, a transparent substance of some kind. However, it is interesting that Coleridge's Xanadu is described as, "A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!"

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

Now compare the above with Ransom coming from the cave, and, taking in his surroundings, he sees the river going down a long, steep slope, "in a series of cataracts... It went down a long way and ended in a winding and wooded valley which curled out of sight...", and likely back to the ocean from which he came. In his description, he also talks of huge mountains and hills, "of almost Himalayan height." An interesting choice of words. Not that Xanadu was in the Himalayas, but it was in China at any rate.

He goes on in his description of the mountains, woods, and valleys: "At his side rose a cliff mantled with streamers of bright vegetation, but gleaming like glass... at each pace his contact with soil and bush appeared to wake new odours that darted into his brain and there begot wild and enormous pleasures."

In Xanadu we find:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

And we also find aural sensations of a mystical nature in both worlds. In Perelandra, Ransom says that there were three lasting impressions on him of his journey beyond the cave and that one of them was, "the song... it floated through his sleep and was the first sound at every waking. It was formless as the song of a bird, yet it was not a bird's voice... rich and golden-brown: passionate too, but not with the passions of men." Ultimately, we learn that it's the song of a large dog-like creature as big as an elephant, a creature who's very existence was owed to its song. When Ransom hears the eldila (angels) speaking, he takes great pains to remind us that they are not creatures of flesh and blood, and as such, have no lips and vocal chords; their voices are of an entirely different nature, "like a chime of remote bells... It is by art, not nature, that they effect human ear-drums and their words owe nothing to lungs or lips." He also mentions the songlike sound of the streamer-trees.

In Kubla Khan sounds also play a big role:

And `mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

And also Kubla Khan presents us with the singing Abyssinian maid:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight `twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

Perhaps this would be a good place to take a closer look at the structure of the poem and Coleridge's opening comments on it. Coleridge says of himself:

In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall." The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

"Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as were, given to him. [I shall sing a sweeter song today]: but the tomorrow is yet to come. As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease."

So it appears that the last fragment he refers to are the lines beginning with: "A damsel with a dulcimer", and we can probably assume he means that the rest of the poem was exactly as he remembered writing it during his dream-state. Incidentally, the "slight indisposition" he speaks of was actually a fairly severe case of rheumatism, and the "anodyne" prescribed was opium. This was really just about the only effective drug known to ease pain in those days. Some critics are of the assumption that his opium induced trance states shouldn't be taken seriously by the modern student of the metaphysical. I differ in opinion with those critics, and I believe Lewis did too. Coleridge meant no harm in taking the drug, and I find it's best not to limit the powers of the Divine by claiming that drugs effectively keep them at bay. If God be God, he can certainly do as he wishes during a man's drug induced state just as he can in his normal dream life. This is probably subject to the reasons for taking a drug. Coleridge probably didn't like taking it. It was simply something he had to do if he was to live at least a somewhat normal life.

In the final two lines of the last stanza Coleridge writes:

"For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."

In Perelandra when Ransom first emerges from the cavern weak and hungry, he finds that within arm's reach are clusters of something like grapes. He lays beside the pool eating and sleeping for quite some time until he recovers from his injuries and fatigue. It may have been as long as three weeks he tells us. Lewis also says, "Indeed it was a second infancy: in which he was breast-fed by the planet Venus herself...." And of course Perelandra was a new Paradisiacal Garden of Eden. Honeydew by the way is a sticky material found on certain plants and was often referred to as the food of fairies. Lewis also writes, "Much that his fingers touched was gummy...".

Coleridge mentions reading, "Purchas's Pilgrimage". He's referring to the book, Purchas his Pilgrimage. Besides Marko Polo, Purchas also mentions seeing Xanadu. It is Purchas who mentions "streams" and "springs" within its walls. When Coleridge writes of an "Abyssinian maid... Singing of Mount Abora" he is probably making reference to a hill in Ethiopia called Amara. (Ethiopia used to be called Abyssinia). Purchas also wrote of this sacred hill:

"Heauen and Earth, Nature and Industrie, have all been corriuals to it, all presenting their best presents, to make it of this so louely presence, some taking this for the place of our Forefathers Paradise." The sides of the hill are of overhanging rock, "bearing out like mushromes, so that it is impossible to ascend it" except by a passageway "cut out within the Rocke, not with staires, but ascending little by little," and closed above and below with gates guarded by soldiers. "Toward the South" of the level top "is a rising hill ... yeelding ... a pleasant spring which passeth through all that Plaine ... and making a Lake, whence issueth a River, which having from these tops espied Nilus, never leaves seeking to find him, whom he cannot leave both to seeke and to finde.... There are no Cities on the top, but palaces, standing by themselves ... spacious, sumptuous, and beautifull, where the Princes of the Royall blood have their abode with their families." [Quote taken from Frederick H. Sykes]

It's likely that Lewis also read of Purchas' journeys and got some of his ideas directly from it as well as from other old tales about lost regions of paradise (especially the realm of Prester John of which much has been written; it held a particular fascination for his friend Charles Williams).

One could easily write a book twice the size of Perelandra in trying to describe all the small details Lewis encompassed in the making of the novel. Having no wish to do so, this is where I will end.

Seeing Around Invisible Corners

I've mentioned several times how much respect CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien had for John Dunne's dream experiments with Oxford students during the 1920s. These culminated in his seminal book, An Experiment With Time, about people who often dreamed of future events. Something that I think is just as interesting are the experiments Rupert Sheldrake did with cats and dogs that proved they can often find their way home from just about anywhere. Some dogs also showed an amazing ability to know the exact moment their owners were about to come home. The dogs would go over and sit by the door at the precise moment their owners were beginning their homeward journey. He wrote a book outlining his experiments called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.

While I have very little use for psychology, and I think Carl Jung's dream archetypes are a bit silly, Jung did have a very honest outlook on the more strange abilities that humans show now and then. The following is from a TV interview he did toward the end of his life:

Interviewer: I know that you say death is psychologically just as important as birth and like it is an integral part of life, but surely, it can't be like birth if it is an end. Can it?

Jung: [W]e know that there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche--that it isn't entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future. You can see around corners and such things. ONLY IGONRANTS DENY THESE FACTS. IT'S QUITE EVIDENT THAT THEY DO EXIST AND HAVE EXISTED ALWAYS. Now these facts show that the psyche--in part at least--is not dependent on these confinements. And then what? When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone--and obviously it isn't--then to that extent the psyche is not submitted to those laws, and that means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of psychical existence beyond time and space.

Isn't it nice those few times you come across a respected professional who acknowledges the incredibly obvious?