"Do you agree with Jack on Man's Greatest Sin?" Jerry Root Ep. 4 LFSS Season 6

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Welcome to the C.S. lewis Festival Scholar Series. I'm your host, David Krause. As part of this growing podcast series, we're taking a look at the C.S. lewis Festival last September in Petoskey, Michigan. Over 1200 people attended a variety of cultural, religious and educational events along the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan for this year's festival in September. Please Visit us@cslewisfestival.org for events and registration. In this series of talks, the theme focuses on C.S. lewis and the nature of friendship. Returning author and speaker Dr. Jerry Root took a deep dive during the Saturday seminar of the festival's opening weekend, looking at those qualities in Lewis that made him a good friend and how they were developed throughout his life. He draws heavily from Lewis books, his autobiography, his letters, and the books others have written about him and why it's important to us. And now, Dr. Root, I am going

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to address the topic of C.S. lewis as a friend, and you'll hear a little bit of echo from what Professor Martindale and also Donna said earlier. But let's begin with a word of prayer. Father, this is one afternoon quickly upon us. Quickly it will pass. Much of what's done here will be forgotten years to come. But I pray your holy Spirit would have his way with us, that some things will continue to linger long enough even after we've remembered where we heard them. I know I offer no more than crumbs to these people, these precious people. I pray that you would take the crumbs and like your son did with the crumbs that were offered by the Sea of galilee to feed 5,000. Will your holy spirit take the crumbs that are offered, multiply them, bless them, and apply them to the complex number of different heart issues embedded in each one of the people here. So each one would hear something whereby they would affirm that was for me today. And they would also be affirming in that that you must really love each one, that you gave each person what he or she needed for that to happen. We want super. Something supernatural to occur, and we pray that you'd meet us at those places. In your name we pray. Amen. A quick thing. Professor Martindale said something at the very end where he quoted from a grief. Observe. Reality is iconoclastic. It's my contention this is the biggest idea in all of Lewis's writing. I can take you to every book and I can assure you where either refers to it as an idea or where he expresses it explicitly. Is it too not loud enough? Oh, blessings on you. Yeah. Because that makes me pleased when I've got your expertise giving me some affirmation. Thank you. The idea is basically this and I think it's important for us to grasp, even at the beginning of friendship that that I have an image, say of God. I heard a sermon, maybe I had a late night conversation with a friend. I read a book, heard a lecture somewhere. Some of the pieces of the puzzle came together and in that particular moment the picture became a little clearer and I have a more robust understanding of God and it takes my breath away. But if I hold on to that present understanding too tightly, it will compete against my having a growing understand understanding of God. And consequently then that helpful image has now become an idol and an iconal class is a person who breaks idols. So consequently, Lewis says in Surprised by joy, God is always kicking out the walls of temples we build for him because he wants to give us more of himself. And probably few ways does he help us have more of himself. Apart from scripture and maybe the preached word and the ministry of the Holy Spirit is through our friends. Through our friends, they enlarge our perspective. So in fact, Lewis isn't the only one who believes this. He is influenced by other people. Baron von Hugo, the philosopher of religion that Lewis on occasion quotes. Von Hugo said, beware of the first clarity. Press on to the second clarity or the third clarity. You've got Rabbi ben Ezra, the poem by Robert Browning where he says, about line 35, by the way, if you're married, write down the title of that poem. Rabbi ben Ezra I read it to my wife every year on our anniversary. It's the one that begins to grow old along with me. The best is yet to be. Even the present moment isn't as good as it's going to be. Reality is iconoclastic. But around line 32 or 34 of that poem, he says, then welcome each rebuff that turns our smoothness rough. I think I've got it all figured out. My earth is nice and smooth. Everything is defined in its place. No, welcome the things that help you to see it the way that it is rather than the way you have to have it be. Matter of fact, ask yourself, why do I have to have it be like that? That'll reveal some interesting things too. Tennyson put it this way in his poem Our Little Systems, speaking of theological systems, our little systems have their day, they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of thee and thou, Lord, are more than they. Or as Augustine said, the house of my soul is Too small. Enlarge it, Lord, that you might enter in. Or as the great theologian who Lucy Pevensey once said, oslon, you're bigger. No, child, I am not. But every year you grow. You'll find me bigger. Now, the amazing thing about truth, I mentioned it the other night. You have to have a reality that supports a truth claim. That's key. But no matter what you know about truth, you may have a sure word. This is a pen. That's true, that's a sure word, but it's not a last word. Even this pen has a molecular structure. It has a length, it has a width. It has a chemical compound for its ink. It has a way that it writes on paper, how it writes on cardboard, how it writes on paper smeared with butter. Not very well. But the thing is, that's just a pen. I can have a sure word. It's a pen. I'll never get to a last word, even on this. The fact that I can get to a sure word gives me confidence about something. The fact that I can't get to a last word should give me humility about what I know of that thing. There's always more. Reality is iconoclastic. I don't know if you noticed, if you drew a thread through the comments that Wayne was saying when he was up here, everywhere, where we were moved as we saw him get moved. He was talking about some feature of humility in Lewis's life that could affirm the benefit of another person, in a sense, by making a sacrifice for that other person. That humility is, I think, fundamental to why Lewis was a good friend. He had sure words. He didn't have the last word. Even. Even Wayne was saying, quoting Barfield, he was interested he could stay engaged. He was constantly changing. And we can think of what kinds of change are necessary as we encounter reality. Is it a change of kind? We scrap the old way of looking at things and start all over again? Or a change of degree? A tree doesn't have to give up its interior rings just because it adds more rings. But if it's not adding more rings, it's not growing. And in friendship I can begin to add more rings as I gain perspective, he says in the epilogue of An Experiment. Criticism. My own eyes are not enough for me. I would see what others have seen. I would read what they've written. Even that's not enough for me. I would read what they imagined. Even that's not enough for me. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Gladly would I see how the world Comes charged to the olfactory sense of a dog or how it appears the eye of a mouse or a bee. In that same epilogue, he says in coming to understand anything, we must reject the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are. There's the reality supporting the claim. Marvelous. Well, anyway, Lewis wrote an essay and I want to build up on this humility thing, but I want to get to it through a securitis securitus route, so be patient with me. In an essay he wrote called first and Second Things, you'll find it in the book God and the Dog. He said, if we put first things first, we get second things thrown in. You put second things first, you lose out on first and second things. What is for him the first thing? And I believe it's love of God. I believe it's a primary focus on God by whom and through whom we can make sense of the bigger picture. Lewis was a faith integrated scholar. As I say that, I would say that one of the things that could be a distraction for us is pride. Pride is a distraction from humility. But as I say that also, I have to say I disagree with Lewis when he says he thinks pride is the great sin. He's not the only one who said it. Augustine also said it in his commentary on Psalm 19. Pride is a great sin. And if I disagree with Lewis and Augustine, I'm probably wrong. But bear with me and let me see if I can make a case. If they had said. If. If they had said that they thought pride was a great sin, like the apex of a pyramid is the greatest point on that pyramid, I could have signed on. But the apex of a pyramid has things beneath it that are far more substantive till you get to the base. And I'm not talking here about pride of a job well done or the pride that motivates you to put your child or grandchild's picture up on your refrigerator with refrigerator magnets. I'm talking about that form of pride that presents itself as more than it is, that pretense. If that's true, if I. If I have merit for what I'm saying, what would be beneath the. The apex of pride or pretense as we move down to the base? What precedes pride when you find yourself putting on airs, making yourself look better than you are? What's probably driving that, huh? Insecurity or fear? If that's true, then the Scriptures give us some sort of hint as to what might be at the base. It says in First John, chapter 4, verse 18. Perfect love casts out fear. A corollary to that would be imperfect love breeds anxiety. I'm confident that I have never been loved perfectly by another human being because I'm confident I've never loved perfectly another human being. And to some degree, we've all been saddled with a burden of anxiety. And we have done our fair share of placing some sort of anxiety on others, doing the best we could, but all of us insufficiently trying to exhibit love and respect for others. So consequently, if perfect love casts out fear and imperfect love breeds anxiety, I would like to suggest to you that the greatest sin is to live in neglect of the love of God that is constantly affirming, constantly nourishing, constantly building us up. In other words, to live in neglect of the friendship of God in our life. I think I can depict this. I was on an airplane once, and I was watching a movie. And I don't like to recommend movies you see on airplanes because you don't know how much they've been sanitized. But nevertheless, the movie I saw there was a place at the end, towards the end of the film, where I caught myself bursting out in tears. I don't do that. I'm a high tee on the Myers Briggs. I live in my head. But I started weeping. What was the movie? It was called the Notebook. And whenever I say that, people always sort of comment one way or another because it's a chick flick, and I'm not supposed to like chick flicks. But I want you to know I'm secure enough in my masculinity that I can watch a chick flick. How many of you saw the Notebook? How many of you did not see it? For the sake of you that saw it, I'm going to rehearse it. For the sake of you that did not see it, I'm going to introduce you to it. The move, huh? You talk about who's read what, who's read the book. Betsy's read the book. Two people. Three people. Three. Do I see four? Four going five. Okay, so in the movie, though, we've got James Garner playing this old man who goes to this memory carry unit and starts to read this book to this lady. And she's very standoffish, and we get the picture. And the orderly says it's okay. He comes and reads stories here every day. And the picture that is created for the viewer is that this nice old man goes to memory care unit and reads stories to the old folks who are in dementia. The whole movie is present time. James Garner Reading the book to a woman played by Gina Rollins. And he's reading the story, and it's flashback of the story and. And present time while he's reading the story. And the movie keeps oscillating back and forth. And when we look at the. The story, it's about this young boy who lives in this village in the south and this young girl who comes to vacation at that village with her family for the summer. The young boy comes from very modest means. The girl comes from means whereby they could vacation for a whole summer in a village. It doesn't seem like any relationship could ever develop between these two because so many things count against it. His poverty, her wealth. He has a high school education, even likes reading the books of Walter, the poetry of Walter Whitman. But the thing is, though, she has the best education her parents money can buy her. Her family's together, but extremely pretentious, his family. There's brokenness. We don't know where the mother is. Did she abandon the family? Did she die? But clearly there's been some sadness. And so many things seem to count against this relationship working. But in fact, in time, a summer romance emerges. And when the girl's parents find out about it, they got to get that girl out of there because they have plans for their daughter and he's not part of them. And while they're pulling out of town, he's running after her, weeping. She's in the car weeping, and he shouts out, I'll write to you every day. The mother hears it, and every day she's there to intercept his letters at the mailbox. Something else that counts against the relationship working, she thinks. He said he would write to me every day, and I never hear from him. He writes dutifully and he never hears back from her. And then World War II breaks out. And the circumstances of that war caused them to be separated even further geographically and emotionally. And it's at that moment in the movie, the director tips his hand and we realize it's this old man and this old lady's story. And every day he comes to memory care unit to read the story to his wife about how they fell in love. Towards the end of the movie, they're having a nice dinner in the hospital. Tablecloth on the Formica table, a candle burning on the table, a rose and a bud vase and a record player playing all the music that it informs so much of their relationship. And the whole environment is pulsating out to this woman, the love of this man for her. He gets to the end of the story he's been reading all day. And she says, that is the most beautiful love story I've ever heard in my life. She says, it sounds so familiar. And he says, it's. She says, it's our story, isn't it? And he says, yes. And cognition washes across her face. She says, how much time do we have? He says, last time it was only five minutes. She says, how are the children? That's a question a mother would ask, isn't it? He says, they're fine. They came to see you today. She says, oh, please tell them I love them. He says, I will. And as a music plays, she says, hold me. Can we dance? And they begin to dance across that hospital floor. And as quickly as she's come into cognition, she falls out of cognition, finds herself in the arms of a stranger and begins to scream. And the orderly has to come in and sedate her. And James Garner's character, watching the whole thing, is standing there, biting his knuckle, weeping. And that's when I lost it. Now, Lewis says, don't start analyzing a story till you get the story. Read the book first and go back and say, why was that passage so meaningful to me? When the movie was over, I started saying, what was it about that scene? And I realized, this is all of our story. We're all part of a love relationship, and we live most of our life in dementia, and yet constantly we are being told about the love of this particular one. And there come those soaring moments when all of a sudden we come into cognition and we find how deeply we're loved by God. And then some little inconvenience occurs. We fall back into dementia. And when I saw James Garner's character biting his knuckle, I said, that's a window into the very heart of God, who loves us so deeply. And I think Lewis was wrong when he said pride was a great sin. I think the great sin is to live in neglect of the love of God. And when Lewis writes first and second things, you put first things first, you get second things thrown in. I think Lewis is moving in the right direction there. We love God first, and we can have these other loves. Friendship, marriage, children, so on. How do we rehabilitate Lewis on this matter? And I. I'm going to do it. Because Lewis has so much about the love being primary in our life. He wrote the four loves. Every good Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is in direct proportion to his love for God. About three weeks before he died, in his letters to children he writes a letter to an 11 year old American girl who wrote to him through his publisher. He gets a letter basically on his deathbed and he writes her back. This great Christian on the threshold of eternity, writing to this young girl on the threshold of her earthly experience. And he says, if you continue to love Jesus, nothing much will go wrong with you and I pray you may always do so. If I love God first and I enter into a relationship with another, I'm not going to use that person as a surrogate for my love for God. I'm going to be able to be a servant and a giver, not a taker and a user. And I think the love of God is where good friendship starts. Lewis was a good friend because he sought, as best any man might, to live first in the love of God. And Professor Martindale emphasized some of that for us today. Humility, therefore characterized his life not as an antidote to pride, but as an expression of his love for others. Lewis saw the need in his own life and the letters to American lady that were referred to earlier. Let's write to this woman. Indeed, we are all very difficult to live with. There's an honesty about that humility. A panhandler came up to Lewis one time and asked him for money and he emptied his pocket and gave all the money in his pockets, that guy. And the person who was with Lewis said, why did you give that man money? He'll just go drink it. And Lewis said, yeah, but if I kept it, I would have drank it. In other words, he's more willing to scrutinize his own motives rather than judge the motives of another person. There's a degree of humility there. People mattered to him. I used to own a letter where he said, in the letter I answer all my mail. And we heard earlier about what a cost that was for him and about how difficult it made Christmas for him. Humility, it seems to me, is a synonym for honesty in the cloud of unknowing. A medieval book that I got to through Lewis. We know a monk wrote it, we don't know his name. It's so different than today. You write a book and we're not sure if you're selling ideas or selling yourself. You got to have big marketing firms out there. You've got to go do your radio and television interviews and all that sort of thing, kind of unknowing. He didn't even put his name on it wasn't that he was ashamed of it, but he was trying to put some ideas across, not sell his personality but in the Cloud of unknowing. This again, a book I got to through Lewis. This is something the author of the Cloud wrote about humility. Humility is nothing else but a true knowledge and awareness of oneself as one really is. For surely whoever truly saw himself as he is would truly be humble. Two things cause humility. One is the degradation, wretchedness and weakness of man, to which by sin he has fallen. He ought to be aware of this harshly, at any rate, all the time he lives, no matter how holy he is. But the other cause of humility is the superabundant love and worth of God in himself gazing on which all nature trembles and all scholars are fools and all saints are blind, he writes. Therefore strain every nerve in every possible way to know and experience yourself as you really are. It will not be long, I suspect, before you have a real knowledge of God as he is, not as he is in himself, of course, for that is impossible to any save God, and not as you will in heaven, both in body and soul, but as much as is now possible for a humble soul and a mortal body to know and experience him, and as much as he will permit the sure word, but not yet the last word, we can move and develop and grow. I think it was the love of God and this humility that made Lewis such a good friend. He also lived with a sense of wonder and awe then in that world where he embraced a level of humility. Let me see if I could depict it again in another author I got to through Lewis, which was G.K. chesterton. Chesterton wrote a short story called Tremendous Trifles. And in this short story, he has these two boys who are living in a row house with a front garden of about 10ft by 10ft with a brick fence around it. And they are singularly bored in that front garden. And all of a sudden a fairy milkman comes by that's very Chestertonian. And he gives to each of the boys one wish. So the first boy, Paul, he wishes to be made a giant. So from his giant stature, he could go around and see all the great wonders of the world. And in his giant stature, he takes a stride across England, wades across the English Channel and comes up at France and walks across to the great Alps and looks down on them, and they look like little bumps on the ground. How could anybody be interested in something so small and shabby? He says, I know the Great Pyramid. It was one of the great wonders of the ancient world. So he walks across Europe, wades across the Mediterranean, comes up at Cairo, looks down, and he sees the Great Pyramid. Just a bump, Braille on a wall. Seems to be more dramatic than that. He says, I know the Victoria Falls. He walks down the Nile, jumps across the Zambezi, comes to Victoria Falls and looks at it, and he says, when the bathtub was on at home, it was more exciting than that. Niagara, that's where I'll go. He steps across Africa, wades across the Atlantic, comes up at the Great Plains States, looks down at Niagara Falls, and it was less interesting than Victoria Falls. He's tired now. He. He lays down across the Great Plains. And Chesterton says, an intellectual backwoodsman comes out of his cabin reading a book in neocatholic theology and having an axe in his other hand. And he reads, in the book, pride is being swollen out of due proportion to your proper state in the world. He looks at the book, looks at the giant, looks at the book. Taking his axe, he cuts the giant's head off over a week. That sounds pretty gross, but read your old fairy stories and you'll find it's not too far. But what happened to Peter back in the garden? He makes his wish. And when he makes his wish, he says that he wants to be made diminutive, about a half inch tall, a little pygmy. And the milkman gives him his wish, and he never leaves that garden ever again. But he sees wonders that he had missed all of his life because he just wasn't small enough and didn't have the humility enough to see those wonders. Chesterton says, you think I'm making a mountain out of molehill. I need to remind you molehills are mountains if one was small enough to see them as such. And he ends that essay with this line. The world will never starve for want of wonders, only for want of wonder. You look around this room right now, there's not a person in this room with you right now whose life isn't fascinating, deep, interesting. It's not a thread. The novelist gives us a thread. I like novels. I've never read a novel as interesting as another person. Because a person isn't a threat. They're a fabric of threads. And there's such wonder there. And I think this is driving Louis this level of humility. I think it was this love of God and this humility that made Louis such a good friend. He lived with a sense of wonder. He writes, in the Weight of Glory. There are no mere mortals. You've never met an ordinary person. He says, the weight or Burden of my neighbor's glory is always upon me. Because every person you ever met is. Is destined to be an everlasting glory or an everlasting horror, I might suggest. So are we. And the mark that we're moving towards an everlasting glory is when we can assume the weight of glory and seek to encourage other people to be all that they might be in God. Lewis depicted this in his fiction in many ways, but one instance is worthy of note here. Edmund Pevensey. He's just a terrible person. He tries to betray his siblings. He tries to sell their souls for Turkish delight. My heavens, I would have held out at least for chocolate. And in this horrible experience of Edmund doing the wrong thing, he has no hope of rescue unless Aslan the Lion, the Christ figure of Narnia, lays down his life for him. In an act of great humility, divine humility, he rescues Edmund from the White Witch. Edmund becomes known as Is Edmund the Just. Once he's redeemed. And Edmund goes back to Narnia in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, two books later. And it begins as you know how it begins. There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrub. And he almost deserved it. That's written by Clive Staples Lewis. Who knew nobody deserved to be named Clive Staples? And Eustace is a little boy who has the heart of a dragon under the skin of a boy. And in the magic of that land, Eustace has turned outwardly into what he's always been inwardly. And he cannot see the kind of person he's been until once he's been dragoned. He looks in a pond and he sees what he really is. He sees what he's really been. And he is so brokenhearted. He's so sad. But in his dragon state, he's able now to do things for the Dawn Treader because that boat has been horribly harmed in a storm. The mast has broken off. They haven't had food. They have to revictual the boat. They have to get water, you know, clean water in the. In the hold and so on. And so now from his dragon state, with his dragon wings, he's able to go up to the boat. They're afraid of him at first, and they see he's crying. They realize it's Eustace. And he ends up gathering animals for their hold. They need a mast. Okay. He goes over to a tree and just with his claws, knocks off all the branches. With his hot breath. He tempers the wood, puts it in place for the. For the master he flies over the island and tells them where there's sweet water. And now they're getting ready to go the next day, and they don't know what they're going to do with the Eustace problem. The next morning, in the wee dawn hours, Eustace as boy comes walking back to the camp of the Dawn Treader. And there's only one person who's up to receive him as a Father Confessor. And Eustace tells his story that he went back that night to the pond and there was a drag, a lion there. He said, I was bigger than the lion, but I was sore afraid. And the lion spoke to me and said to me, you must undress yourself. He says, oh, yeah, yeah. Dragons are like lizards or snakes. Maybe I could just shed my skin. And so with tremendous effort, he sheds his skin, looks in the pond, and still he's dragon again. Tremendous effort. He looks in the pond and still he's dragging a third time, frustrated, he can't fix himself. And the lion says, I must undress you. And taking that lion claw, he digs through that dragon flesh and goes all the way to that dragon heart that Eustace brought with him into Narnia. And he makes him boy not again, but real boy for the first time. And Eustace comes back to tell that story. And who's his Father Confessor that meets him? Edmund. Edmund. The one who himself had to be undragoned because here now is the one who can meet the need of another. And by the way, Eustace goes back to Narnia and the Silver chair because the son of King Caspian, Rillian, has been captured by a witch. He's the crown prince of Narnia, and she has excluded him from understanding his true identity. And he needs to be rescued. And who is deployed to go back to Narnia to rescue religion? Eustace. Eustace. In other words, we're touched by one and we're deployed to touch others. Because in the humility we can have real friendship. And in that humility we can assume the weight of glory, our concern for the welfare of another person. Lewis writes in the Four Loves. Friendship seemed the happiest and most full human of all. The loves. The crown of life. The school. Here's the operative word, the school of virtue. Virtue. Virtue factors strongly in what Lewis believed was a benefit of friendship. He writes of virtue with some constancy. It's a mark of maturity, he makes clear in Mere Christianity. He wrote this Moral rules or directions for running the Human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown or a strain or a friction in the running of that machine. There are moral rules to be obeyed. Probably on our own, we'll become self referential in community. We can cultivate virtue and we can begin to recognize we have obligations in the most midst of those things. Rules are to be obeyed. We learn obedience in society. George MacDonald In a quote from Lewis's McDonald anthology, George McDonald wrote, Obedience is the opener of eyes. McDonald wrote in his book Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, we do not have souls. We are souls. We have bodies. If you tell a child he has a soul, he thinks like anything else he has, he could lose it like his keys or his books or his homework or his coat. He thinks when he dies, he goes a grave and his soul goes off someplace else. There's McDonald says no, tell the child he is a soul and he has a body. And when he dies, his soul goes to heaven. He leaves his body behind like clipped hair on a barber shop floor. For those of you that still go to barber shops. So what makes up the soul then? We ask, and I would suggest to you, it's that immaterial part of being human. I've read a lot of books on the soul, and traditionally we distill it down to these things. It has a thinking part reason, it has a feeling part the emotion, and it has a choosing part, the volition. I would also like to say, coming from an academic environment, that reason is hands down the weakest, the weakest feature of the soul. If I make a bad choice, my reason doesn't kick in and say, boy, Jerry, that was stupid. You keep going down that path, you're just going to hurt yourself and hurt others around you. Now, my reason being weak instead makes all kinds of excuses and rationalizations for that bad choice. And it keeps me in a state of moral blindness. Lewis put it this way. Continued disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind. He writes that in a preface to Paradise Lost. Aristotle put it this way. Vice is unconscious of itself. And Aristotle coins a word for this rationalizing of bad behavior. And the word is Akrasia comes from two Greek words, chrisia, which means command. And the alpha negation in front of it means I lose command of my moral life because I've rationalized truth and reality from my moral life. The way Paul put it in Romans 1:18, we suppress the truth in our unrighteousness. When friends come together in the pursuit of virtue, encouraged and undergirded by love and humility, friends encourage one another towards Good and right action. GK Chesterton put it this way. When it comes to obedience, positive joy exists on condition. There's a fence. And the fence, the fence is something that protects us from that which is outside. Lewis writes about it in his essay on fairy stories. He calls it the doctrine of prohibition. And he refers to Chesterton. Here are all these fairy stories. Cinderella, you want to go the ball, you can go the ball, but you've got to be gone by 12. Pandora, you want the box, you can have the box, but don't ever open it. Adam and Eve, you want to be in this garden, you can be in the garden, but you can't eat from one tree. The all positive joy exists on condition. Chesterton says there's where the obedience is. It's the opener of eyes. As McDonald said, the fence keeps me from that which will harm me. But I put my nose up against the fence and I lose out if I get beyond that on the joys that I will find if I turn my back to the fence and see the whole playground that's been defined for me. And maybe I lose sight because I'm off the rails a little bit, but maybe I'm off the rails at a time different than my friends. And my friends can draw me back in and oh yeah, that means I'll be fit at another time when they may be ready to go off the rails and I can draw them in and there's a contribution that's going on and the relationship. It's interesting too that Professor Martindale referred to Smoke on the Mountain by Joy Davidman. Today, that book Smoke on the Mountain is about the Ten Commandments. And she said all, all the Ten Commandments that are stated as thou shalt must be properly understood as thou shalt nots must be properly understood as thou shalts. And so therefore what? Thou shalt have no other gods before thee is God saying, thou shalt have me. Thou shalt not bear false witnesses. God saying, thou shalt be a truth teller. Thou shalt not commit adultery. As God saying, thou shalt learn to do relationship well with one. Thou shalt not. And you go through the list. Thou shalt not murder is what God's saying. Thou shalt learn the art of affirming life. You get to the last command, what is it? Thou shalt not covet. Which means what? Thou shalt learn to be content, learn to live within the perimeters. Lewis put it this way, because we're broken. And in that brokenness, we have our friendships. And in those friendships we want to mend. Lewis says obedience is a splint that God places on a broken life that it might mend to learn to do life without the splint. I would put it this way. I think we're pea brains. I don't think any of us knows very much. Or we could compare ourselves with somebody who knows less, but we could delude ourselves to thinking by comparison with that particular person that we were pretty hot stuff. You want to compare yourself with how much you know to the Widener Library at Harvard. 19 million volumes under that one roof. How many of you read if you compare yourself with what's out there to know we're all pea brains. Not those books in the Widener Library. There's not an I dotted or a T cross that God is unfamiliar with. He's really big, we're really small. But in light of that, I would suggest to you that while I don't know much every place where I obey God, I can live in the benefits of omniscience. I can live beyond my own capacities. And where I don't see, if I'm in a community of friends, they might see at that moment what I don't see. And I can benefit by what they share with me. There's love, there's humility, there's. There's a place of growth. These moral rules lead to fair play. Lewis writes, a mere Christianity and harmony between individuals, something that's essential for a good friendship. And they allow us to tidy up or harmonize the things inside of each individual that's broken, and so on. He goes on to say basically that virtue is a means to the good life. The abolition of man. Lewis makes it clear that truth is a rational response to reality, but a virtuous life is a moral response to reality. The abolition of man. He says, for the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. And the solution had been knowledge, self, discipline, virtue. Lewis writes about virtue in many places. He not only depicts it in his fiction, but he also writes about it specifically in Mere Christianity. He writes about it specifically in other places as well. Even in his literary critical work and Mere Christianity, he talks about these different virtues. He says of fortitude, courage. By the way, virtue is an integrated whole made up of courage, temperance, justice and wisdom. Those four. And again, you could read about it in the chapter on the Cardinal virtues and. And Mere Christianity. But a fortitude or courage, he says it includes both kinds of courage. The kind that faces danger as well as the kind that sticks it under pain, guts is perhaps the nearest to modern English. Lewis said, well, I want to define each of these. These characteristics of virtue. Courage is basically. They're all habits, by the way, one courageous act doesn't make you a courageous person. One temperate act refusing one second piece of pie doesn't make you a temperate person. So courage is a habitual ability to suffer pain and hardship. It's endurance, fortitude and staying power. Let me say it again. Courage is a habitual ability to suffer pain and hardship. It's endurance. It's fortitude. It's staying power. Courage is the ability to say yes to right action even in the teeth of pain. When I was in college, after my freshman year of football, I had a friend named Pokey Cleek. And he was a track guy, and he had been running cross country while I was playing football. Football is. Is an anaerobic sport. You put out for six seconds and pant desperately for 30. Pokey came to me and says, hey, Jerry, why don't you run with me in the Palace Verdes Marathon? Palace Verdes in California. It's not a flat marathon like the Chicago Marathon. This is like this. And I said, I don't know, Poke. I don't think I can do that. And he starts talking to me. I'm a freshman, so naturally, you know, he can talk me into anything, right? I'm so gullible. So he picks me up at 5 in the morning, we drive to Palos Verdes, and we get there, and I'm going, what am I doing here? And all of a sudden, I saw thousands of people getting ready to run in this marathon. I saw the LA Times Sports Photographer there to take pictures. I saw the ABC Wide World of Sports there ready to film this thing. And all of a sudden, man, I was ready to go. The adrenaline's pumping. I hate to admit it, but I got down in the front of the whole group and a sprinter start, the gun goes off, and I took off and I led the whole pack for 200 yards. A marathon is 26 miles, 385 yards, and I still had 26 miles, 185 yards to go. I had a stitch in my stomach and everything. I finished 20 miles, couldn't walk straight for three weeks. You know what I learned that day? A marathon is not a sprint. Life is not a sprint. It's an endurance race. And it requires courage and the ability to hang in there, even in there's difficulty. And sometimes it's the ability to hang in there when your friend doesn't do so well, you want to abandon them? No, you learn to forgive them. You learn to stay committed to them and the hopes that maybe when you're the one that comes up short, they'll stay committed to you. Then you have temperance. And Lewis talks about it, referring it to all pleasures. And it is meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. Lewis talks about temperance and he says it's interesting that there are some people who want to abstain from things and then universalize the abstaining and think if you're going to be spiritual, you have to be like them. And they set themselves up as a standard of performance. My wife and I talk about it as regional sins. You find out which sins are the regional sins of that area because some people will be very accepting of one kind of behavior and not accepting of another kind of behavior. And Lewis says the comment on this is that they, they will begin to say, this is what you have to do. He writes in one of his books, the worst of bad men are religious bad men. The quicker I'm willing to die for my faith, maybe the quicker I'd be willing to kill for my faith. Or painted thus Seth the Lord across my own opinions becomes dangerous. It's self referential. Of all bad men, religious ones are the worst. But I would say of all good men, religious ones are the best. So we have to be able to mark and discern. Temperance will help us. So temperance then I would define this way. Temperance is a habitual ability to resist the enticement of the immediate pleasure in order to gain the greater, though more remote good. Temperance is the ability is. Temperance is the habitual ability. They're all habits. Habitual ability to resist the enticement of immediate pleasure in order to gain the greater, though more remote good. If courage is the ability to say yes to right action even in the teeth of pain, then temperance is the ability to say no to wrong action, even in the very jaws of, of pleasure. When our kids were little, I, I became concerned that they weren't temperate. I know you might have thought that my children and Claudia's children were just born temperate, but it's not true. I, I, I can remember at Christmas we, we would put out a pail, a red pail with those Hershey's candy kisses in it that had the, the red and green foil around them. You'd be a cruel father if you put those out and didn't let your kids each have one. But I had to go upstairs for something and I'd left The pail there. And I said, you kids could each have one. And they consumed it quickly. And I said, you can't have another one till after dinner is over. I went upstairs, and when I came running back down, I ran by the living room, and I saw these two bodies duck behind the couch. I backed up. I said, jeremy and Alicia. And they came up from behind the couch with chocolate all over their faces. I said, I've got to teach my kids temperance. I'm not going to do this. You remember that penny candy you could get? That was butterscotch scotch with the yellow cellophane wrapper. I'd sometimes come home, they'd say, dad, dad, do you have a prize for us? I always brought him prizes when I came home. You know, maybe a paper clip or a doodle or a rock or something. But one time I came home with these. This candy, and I said, yeah, I've got a surprise. You can have this penny candy right now, or if you refuse it, I'll take you to Toys R Us and buy you a toy for $10 tomorrow. They all took the candy. I thought, I've got my work cut out for me. Eventually, my oldest son, Jeremy, he took the offer of the toy, and his siblings took the candy, and they couldn't even suck on it. And temperately, they had to chomp it, you know, eat it quick. Next morning, Jeremy says, dad, can we go to Toys R Us now? Eventually, each one learned. Each one learned. And then, Then what happened? You know, I was teaching college courses years ago. In the philosophy course, I would talk about temperance, and these kids would laugh their heads off when I tell them a multiple number of stories about my kids being intemperate because they knew it was immature and it was inappropriate. I go, how many of you are shacking up with your boyfriends or girlfriends? And it got real quiet in the class then, because they weren't temperate. But we raised the ante from candy to something else. And then when we get older as adults, what is it? Food? And all of a sudden, we start seeing, this is a battle that has to go on all the time because it's a habitual ability to do these things. Then we go to justice. Lewis says justice is the old name for everything we should now call fairness. You want friendship? If there's no justice, there's probably not going to be real friendship. It includes, he says, honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, all that side of life. If I was going to define justice, it would be this. Justice is a habit of being law abiding. It secures and protects natural rights. It is fair. It renders to others their due. Justice is the one feature of virtue that insists my moral development is linked to my responsibility to others. I'll put it again. Justice is a habit of being law abiding. It secures and protects natural rights. It is fair and renders to others their due. Justice is the one feature of virtue that insists my moral development is linked to my responsibility to others. This is undergirding what Lewis says when he says, there are no ordinary people. I have the weight of glory and it's the weight of my. The burden is the weight of my neighbor's glory. And then lastly is wisdom. And wisdom is the habit of being careful about decisions one makes. It seeks counsel and advice. Wisdom is the habit of being careful about decisions one makes. It seeks counsel and advice. We used to live in England. My kids always wanted to go see labyrinths. They thought they were amazing. They like to see labyrinths. They thought they were amazing. Thank you. So anyway, the best one that we ever saw was at Hampton Court, which was Henry VIII's home. And there's a big hedge maze there. Connie and I were there just recently. Even again, we'd take our kids there. You could pay the proprietor, they would go in there. They couldn't get out. So it was like having a hedge babysitter for your kids that afternoon. But if you got lost in the maze, you know what you'd do? You'd cry out, and the proprietor would get up on a scaffold, and from his elevated state, he could see where you were and he could guide you out of the maze. Wisdom is a perspective of the scaffold. You get it from scripture, you get it from friends. And if you don't have that kind of connection, you're going to be isolated. And it won't be long before you'll become a fool. So consequently, here it is wisdom. And here are these issues of temperance that Lewis says are one of the benefits of good friendship. Furthermore, in the Allegory of Love, a throwaway line in that great literary work, the work that came out in 1936, it was the one that established his reputation as a great medievalist. He says in a throwaway line, innocence is not goodness. He's not saying innocence is not good. It's good in that it's unspoiled, but it's not proven character. Innocence is not goodness. He writes, even divine nature cannot make a virtue a gift. The secrets you can't talk about, they Control you? How do you get past those stuck places? You enter into friendship. You let down your guard. You share with a person you can trust. You share with them your struggle. And the next time you face that area where you have, time after time after time stumbled, you enlist that person to be with you in the midst of it, to pray for you, to support you at that time. Finally, you get past it. A couple weeks later, you face it again. And you enter into those relationships with a friend. Because. Because Liz Lewis says virtue is one of the benefits of friendship. And you get over it again. And the next time you get over it and the next time you fall on your face and that friend is there to pick you up, and the next time you get over it and the next time you get over it and the next time you get over it, and pretty soon you start developing a habit of victory over that area of temptation. It becomes a habit. Aristotle says habit is man's second nature. At that place where you have a habit, where you always stumble, you are better than Adam and Eve were before the fall. They were innocent, unspoiled. You're now developing character and virtue. Don't get proud because God just opened up the curtain a little bit. You get arrogant, he'll open it up real wide, and you see you got 10,000 things like this you have to work on. But nevertheless, there's growth and development in the context of friendship. And Lewis says virtue is one of the benefits of friendship. So what undergirds it? We'll end where we started. A security in the love of God so we could be lovers rather than takers. An understanding of humility. And I want to show you this characteristic in Lewis. You can see it all throughout his written work, but I want to give you one example of it. In his letters to children, there was a little boy named Moritz, an American. He was nine years old, and he was concerned that his love for Aslan was increasing over his love for. For Jesus. And he was concerned about it. And Lawrence's mother wrote to Lewis and said, I have a son. He's worried about this. What do I tell him? Listen to Lewis's letter and see if you can't get some of these features of love, of humility and of virtue in this letter. Dear Mrs. K. Tell Lawrence from me with my love one, even if he was loving Aslan more than Jesus, and I'll explain in a moment why he can't really be doing this. He would not be an idol worshiper if he was an idol worshiper. He would be doing it on purpose, whereas he's now doing it because he can't help doing it, and trying hard not to do it. But God knows quite well how hard we find it to love him more than anyone or or anything else, and he won't be angry with us as long as we're trying, and he will help us. 2 But Lawrence can't really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that's what he's doing, for the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Lawrence thinks he's loving Aslan, he's really loving Jesus and perhaps loving him more than he ever did before. Of course there is one thing Aslan has that Jesus has not. I mean the body of a lion. But remember, if there are other worlds and they need to be saved, and Christ were to save them as he would, he may really have taken all sorts of bodies in them which we don't know about now. If Lawrence is bothered because he finds the lion body seems nicer to him than the man body, I don't think he need be bothered at all. God knows all about the way a little boy's imagination works. He made it, after all, and knows that at a certain age the idea of talking and friendly animals is very attractive. So I don't think he minds if Lawrence likes a lion body. And anyway, Lawrence will find as he grows older the feeling liking the lion body better will die away of itself without his taking any trouble about it, so he needn't bother. 3. If I were Lawrence, I'd just say in my prayers something like Dear God, if the things I've been thinking and feeling about those books are things you don't like and are bad for me, please take away those feelings and thoughts, but if they're not bad, then please stop me from worrying about them and help me every day to love you more in the way that really matters, far more than any feelings or imaginations, by doing what you want and growing more like you. That is the sort of thing I think Lawrence should say for himself, but it would be kind and Christian like if he then added, and if Mr. Lewis has worried any other children by his books or done them any harm, then please forgive him and and help him never to do it again. Will this help? I'm terribly sorry to have caused such trouble and would take it as a great favor if you would write again and tell me how Lawrence goes on. I shall of course have him daily in my prayers he must be a corker of a boy. I hope you're prepared for the possibility you might turn out a saint. I dare say the saints mothers have in some ways a rough time. And there's a guy who's aware of St. Monica Augustine's mother humility undergirded by the love of God, that could exhibit itself in welfare for others.

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Thank you, Dr. Root. To learn more about the CS Lewis Festival and why thousands have attended a variety of cultural, religious and educational events, please visit our website@cslewisfestival.org this entire podcast has been made possible by the CS Lewis Festival in Petoskey, Michigan and its generous sponsors. I'd like to thank the festival as well as podcast producer Zach Smith of Hands Media.