"How do you define friendship? And how Did C.S Lewis?" Jerry Root Ep. 1 LFSS Season 6

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Welcome to the c.s. lewis festival scholar series. I'm your host, david krause. Since inception in 2003, over 22,000 people have attended a variety of cultural, religious and educational events each September along the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan and in Petoskey, Michigan, for this year's festival. Please Visit us@cs LewisFestival.org for events and registration. This is a series of talks on the theme of C.S. lewis and the nature of Friendship. Kicking off the festival is a talk by renowned Lewis Author and speaker, Dr. Jerry Root. Lewis had a remarkable capacity for friendship in all walks of life, an important and unique trait. What was it about this man that made this true of him and of us? Dr. Root explores this in depth.

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I'm really grateful to be here with you. And I realize that I am a bit of a pea brain and I wonder if anybody is ever more than that. Sometimes I meet people who are a little bit full of themselves. And I say, the Widener Library at Harvard has 19 million volumes under that one roof. How many of them have you read? Well, nobody's read very many, so maybe we compare ourselves with somebody else. But if we compare ourselves with what's out there, there's just so much. And when we talk about Lewis and friendship, there is so much in the Lewis literature. There are 73 books, and there is much on friendship throughout those books. And then if you read his letters, of course, you see what kind of friendships he kept going, both through correspondence, but also with his personal acquaintances. When we talk about these things, there will be several of us who will be addressing you this week. Professor Don King at Montreat University, a very close friend, Wayne Martindale. Professor Martindale and I have done a couple of books together, and so we're going to try to bring you a wider range of material, but none of us will be covering it all. So tonight I want to look at things that relate to how Lewis helps us with friendship, but also how he warns us about things that could hinder us from having good friendships. But before we do that, let's say a word of prayer. Gracious Heavenly Father, I worship you for the privilege of being among these people. I know, Father, that there's so much I don't know. And I know, Lord, that there are so many people in this gathering who have different things pressing upon their hearts. Joys, sorrows, conundrums, uncertainties. What are the possibilities that one person could stand up in front of a room full of people and say something that would connect with everybody? It seems to me it's impossible unless you're involved in the transaction. Your son once took five loaves and two fish crumbs and blessed them and broke them and distributed them, and everybody there left satisfied. Would your Holy Spirit please do something like that among us this evening? Would he take the crumbs that are offered and distribute them in such a way that each person here would leave, saying, I really got something out of that talk. And that each one, in saying that, would have the affirmation that you so uniquely love them, that you gave them what they needed to hear tonight. For that to happen, your Holy Spirit needs to be part of the transaction. Something supernatural needs to happen. And with great anticipation we look to you to that end, and we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. Owen Barfield, who is one of Lewis's close friends, and he was actually the only member of the Inklings I ever met. Owen Barfield described his friendship with Lewis, C.S. lewis, and he said this. The experience of oneself over against that which is not oneself is a sine qua non of human consciousness, sine aqua non, that without which there is nothing. You can't really understand yourself unless you understand yourself in context. It could be historical context, it could be geographical context, but particularly in relational context. Calvin and the Institutes begins, without knowing oneself, there is no knowledge of God, and later says, without knowledge of God, there's no knowledge of oneself. Lewis wrote, we need others, physically, emotionally, intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves. There's an essay that Lewis wrote that's really sort of a short story where he said that there was a former student of his had called up and said he wanted to meet with him. And Lewis said, I really enjoyed the student when he was doing tutorials with me and I was excited to see him. But the student came with his fiance. And Lewis said now the dynamic that they shared together was going to be in some ways compromised because he was going to have to be thoughtful of this fiance. The story is called the Shoddy Lands. And as Lewis was talking to this young man, Durwood, he realized that Peggy, his fiance, it was as if he was seeing into her mind. And he said, what I noticed was that her whole world was blurry and that there was nothing clear in her mind as he imagined this. And he said the only things that were clear were things like dresses from a fashion shop, flowers, not flowers in nature, but flowers that were cut. She noticed things that were for her and not necessarily did she notice others or things that were for others. And Lewis said It dawned on him that she liked the cut flowers because they were for her, not the flowers in nature. What did she have to do with those? And he recognized the sort of self referentialism and self centeredness that kept her from having any kind of relationship with somebody else. I remember in our family years ago, my wife always had this program that if anybody had a beef, something they wanted to talk about, they could call for a family meeting. And our youngest son was nine years old at that time. And he said, I need a family meeting. So Claudia made tea, hot chocolate, popcorn. We sat around the table, four children, my wife and I, and we said, okay, Jeff, what's on your heart? He said, my older siblings don't love me. I thought, well, that's going to be easy to solve. I said to the other kids, so what do you say? And my daughter Alicia said, we don't. And I said, why? Why is that? And she says, because you and mom love him more. Well, I know my wife and I, and we didn't play favorites with our kids, but still, if she thought we did, that's a sad story, isn't it? It's a little bit self referential because it's just from her perspective without seeing the wider perspective. And so I said to her, well, let's look at this for a minute. Why do you think we loved him more? She said, well, we always saw you dress him, feed him, bathe him, clothe him, whatever. And she said, we saw that all the time. And I said, but we did it with each of you. You just don't remember when we did it with you because you were babies at that time. I said, I think I can prove to you that he probably got least amount of attention. When our oldest son Jeremy was born, he was tyrannized by attention. Have you ever seen a firstborn child? Oh, look what Jeremy can do. No child has ever done anything like this before. Oh, look how he can blow little bubbles on his tongue and make them go off like that. Isn't it wonderful? Wow. And you know how they say firstborns have a tendency to get performance oriented? That's because we expect them to perform. Second born came and I said, alicia, my daughter, when you came, the attention was cut in half. Jeremy got all the attention, you get half the attention. And second borns tend to be a little more competitive. They see a world's already going on, they're trying to get into that world, and it becomes self oriented, self reference. We see it all from our perspective and we don't Necessarily see the perspective of another person. Our third born, Grady, he comes on the scene and I think he thought this, this world's too complex, forget this. And the third borns tend to be more independent. I'm going to get my kudos outside because I don't know if I can get into this complexity here. And then poor Jeff came fourth born. I said the attention was quartered by the time he came, but he's going to give it the old college try. If Claudia and I were hugging in the kitchen, he would just try to squeeze in there because he wanted to get a little bit of that. And then I said to the older kids, I can prove what I'm saying. Look at your baby books. Jeremy's baby book is full of pictures. He's got all the refrigerator magnet pictures. When he started his first day of school, the cameras were flashing. When he got his first tooth pulled, there's a picture of him holding the tooth with the space in his mouth and his smile and boy, oh boy, come morning, he had a shiny quarter under his pillow. Alicia's picture book, first girl, her baby book is full. Grady, he had some things in his book. Jeff. Well, we did remember to put his name in his book. And boy, I'll tell you, when the first day of school came. Claudia, what happened to that camera we had? I remember we had it around here somewhere. And when his tooth came out, he thought, oh boy, I'm getting on that gravy train. I'm going to be there. This is going to be great. I wish he could have been there the next morning when he came downstairs with crocodile tears and that tooth in his hand because the tooth fairy didn't come by. You should have heard the boatload of excuses we made. Oh, I think it's tooth fairy season. And he was probably. The tooth fairy is probably very busy. I'm sure if you put under tomorrow, you'll, you'll, you'll get what you're looking for. I wish he could have been there the next day when he came down and there was that tooth again. And I'm thinking, my wife and I should be arrested. I said, oh, try it again, try it one more time. The next day he comes down, $5. He's got $5. And the other kids say, we just got a quarter. He says, I got $5. They say, he's spoiled. He would have rather had the quarter the day of than the $5. And we start to pick these messages up that are somewhat self referential. And as we move in that direction we inhibit our having good friendships because a friendship requires for us to see the other person, to notice the other person, to contribute to the life of the other person. And all of us that day around the table learned that everybody had their story and every story mattered. And we need to enter into relationships where we can appreciate the story of others. The truth is, there's an objective world that exists independent of our thoughts about it. We have the capacity to know that world. And failure to know it as best one might leaves us trapped in the dungeon of self. And Lewis is constantly writing about subjectivism, about self referentialism, about the importance of breaking out of the dungeon of self. So we could get to know a wider world. We could get to know God in that world, we could get to know others, and we could be partners as we go through life together. There are objects in this world, things to be known, and subjects knowers like you and me. Truth is discovered through a proper relationship between subject and object. Truth, people is not reality. Truth is what I think about reality when I think accurately about it. I remember one time I was in my office at the Billy Graham center at Wheaton College, and I had to go into the restroom and I was in the stall. I heard somebody come in. A couple minutes later, I came out of the stall and there was a woman standing at the mirror in the men's bathroom. She started berating me. There was clearly a conceptual difference in our understanding of things. And I looked at this woman and I pointed and I said, urinals. She screamed and ran out of the room. There was no reality to support her claim. Truth is not reality. Truth is what I think about reality when I think accurately about it. Lewis was involved in the Socratic Club at Oxford University, and there was a relativist who was debating him. And the relativist said, how do you know there isn't a blue cow on that piano right now? And Lewis said, and what sense blue? If you have nothing to refer to, you can never answer the question. And consequently, we forget that and we become self referential and we become unaccommodated to the reality of the real world around us. The classical definition of truth, and it's used from ancient Greece all the way through history with some odd idiosyncratic definitions along the way, but they don't last long because there's no reality to support the claim. It's this. A statement is true when it says what is is or what is not is not. Or a statement is false when it says what is is not, or what is not is. This is a pen. That's true. There's a reality that supports a claim. This is not an elephant. That's true. There's no elephant there. If I said it is an elephant, that's false. It's falsified because there's no reality to support the claim. The word pen is arbitrary. Initially, it's a symbol. The Greek word for symbol comes from two Greek words. Sun with balein, to cast or to throw. I throw together two things. A word for one of these. Now I don't have to have one of these around to refer to when I talk about pen. You've got a rough idea of what I'm talking about. But we live in a world now that has become so self referential that anarchy of thought occurs when. When words are disassociated from the reality that gives credence to the word. There's a guy in Lewis's that hideous strength. His name's Wither. He's the head of the nice. The NICE is the national coordinate. National Institute for. National Institute for Coordinated Experiments. Nice. They are not nice, they're horrible, self referential, very bad, very controlling. And Wither is the head of this group. And at the end of the book, when they have destroyed language and something like the Tower of Babel occurs in this world, Wither is walking around and he's totally disassociated, even for the danger of that moment. Lewis writes about him. He hath long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities, had deepened and darkened year after year into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through pragmatism and then through logical positivism and. And out at last into the complete void. The indicative mood. That's what is the indicative mood now. Corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth. And now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last moments before damnation, Lewis writes, are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue bottle. The indulgence of some fatal lethargy seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and. And total destruction. So consequently we dismiss ourselves from the reality and we lose the capacity for anything because of the self referentialism. I want you to think for a minute. In our day, what are we saying? You can use whatever pronoun you want to. The reality makes no difference. You can call yourself whatever gender you want to. What happens at that moment? Communication is at a loss. The word pin is arbitrary initially, but once I've settled on it, I have to be able to have a society that will use the same word. If I don't use the same word, then I lose a capacity for communication. And what follows is that community fractures and disassembles. We become imprisoned in our self referentialism and we become disassociated from anyone or anything around us. And Lewis writes about this not only in his fiction, he writes about it in his other works as well. So that we could see friendship has to begin by having an understanding of truth, of reality, the truth about ourselves and the truth about others. CS Lewis Rogan Coming to understand anything, we must reject the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are. Friendship benefits us greatly in helping us to break out of the dungeon of self, just as all things in the objective world, properly understood, can help us. In the English syllabus, Lewis wrote this to his students at Oxford University. We have fulfilled our whole duty to you. If we can help you see some given tract of reality. If we can take you to a text and you could read that text and understand what the author is saying. You could read the text and not be projective on the text, but draw out of that text that which is going to enlarge your thinking, enlarge your soul, and enlarge your capacity to relate to an objective world. That's always going to be helpful in the cultivation of friendship. Without this, we might be tempted to believe that that the tracks on a train actually narrowed. As they move further away from us, we lose the capacity to see. Lewis believed that reality is infused with the very presence of the God who made it. Also. This is also important. Why is it important for us to connect with reality? Because the God who made that world is exhibiting something of his presence in that world and something whereby we could first begin with friendship with him before we move on to friendship with others. I think one of the finest things Lewis wrote is chapter 17 of Letters to Malcolm, chiefly on prayer. I'm going to recite a paragraph to try and make my point in just a moment. But before I do, I want to define a term and the term Is the word coruscation. Coruscation. I don't define it to offend you. You probably know the word. But when I first read this, I had no clue what that word meant. So I went and looked it up. Coruscation is a sudden flash of brightness. We can talk about fireflies coruscating in the back garden on a humid summer evening. We could see dark clouds coming from the west, moving eastward. And in those dark clouds we can see lightning coruscating in the clouds. You got the idea. So here's what Lewis said, making a distinction between gratitude and adoration or worship. Gratitude exclaims, very properly, how good of God to give me this. But adoration asks, what must that being be like? Whose far off and momentary coruscations are like this? One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun. Wow. I remember when I read that and I started asking Lewis's question, what must God be like? It breaks me out of the dungeon of myself. It helps me to see a wider world. I remember when I first read that it was when Voyager, the interplanetary probe, was speeding past Saturn back in 1979 or 80, and it took pictures of that most interesting planet in our solar system, the one with rings. And they discovered at that time that Saturn not only had rings, but the outer ring of Saturn was braided. And I'm going, my word. The outer ring of Saturn was braided. We'd never seen it up close and personal till the Voyager passed by. I have friends who are physicists. I come from an academic environment. I say, why is it braided? One of my physicist friends said, jerry, those are the kinds of questions that keep us physicists up late into the night. I've talked to five different physicists and each one gave me a different explanation. There was a negation of the other four. I think one day they're going to explain it to us and we're going to understand reality better and we're going to adjust our souls to understanding that reality. And that's going to help us when we come into friendships because we'll adjust the scoliosis of our soul so we could be in proper relationship with another person, not just projecting ourselves on that person. I had a firefighter friend, I told him about the braided rings of Saturn. He says, yeah, Jerry. And we don't know if God didn't just braid it for the picture. But I started asking Lewis's question to sort of associate me with this wider world. I think of ships that parked themselves over depths of The Pacific Ocean. Greater than the light of the sun can penetrate. And they dangled cameras into those depths and take pictures of fish painted neon light bright. Why? Can't be to attract a mate. There's no sight that depth. Matter of fact, how do those fish get together at those depths? That itself is interesting to me. I think of growing up in Southern California, where I would love to see palm trees silhouetted against an auburn sunset sky. Or to see a mountain range silhouetted against an auburn sunset sky. Now I live in the Midwest, in the Chicagoland area. A cornfield silhouetted against an auburn sunset sky. There is beauty there if you would willingly distill it out. But we could have lived on a darkened planet and gotten word from on high that there would be one sunset. We could have lined every west coast of every continent and every island on our globe. And we could have regaled our progeny by writing of the glory of that great event in our journals and diaries. But what must God be like that? He's made our planet a perpetual kaleidoscope of sunrises and sunsets. And how often we forget because we see it with such regularity that we don't attend to it. And how often there are glories of a friend that we might know. And because we sort of take them for advantage or we don't pay attention, we miss out on something that might be right before our very eyes. I always like to see stars twinkling in a night sky. But we could have lived in a planet where we would have missed the fact that there are not just stars. There are shooting stars, there are comets, there are galaxies, there are moons. And you guys get to see it all the time. Living way up north here, but I was with a bunch of students up by Lake Superior at one of the Wheaton College campuses. And I can remember at midnight, the students came knocking on my door and said, jerry, they're out. They're out. And we went outside and we saw those northern lights and reds and blues and greens and whites coruscating and pulsating in the night sky. And you know what we did? We stood on the ski dock at that camp from midnight to 2 in the morning, singing songs of praise to God and praying for prayers of thanksgiving for the glory of that event. Because that was the just thing to do. Justice is to render to a thing it's due. You can think about delicate things that God has made. Butterflies, peacock feathers. There's one for you. And as we think about these things, Lewis is too honest to let us stop There he wants to see thing with all of its complexity. He forces us to ask hard questions too, like, what must God be? Like that there's earthquakes in Haiti or tsunamis in Japan, AIDS babies born in Africa, too many school shootings in America. And Lewis writes this in his sermon, the Weight of Glory. If our religion is objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent. First, precisely in the puzzling or repellent, where we see what we do not yet know and need desperately to know. Consequently, we look at our friends and we may see something goofy in them. They do something inappropriate. What do we do at that moment? I've read people who have said, yeah, it looks like CS Lewis and his friend JRR Tolkien had a falling out at the end of their life. I go, I wonder how they got that. I can tell you places where Tolkien wrote something about Lewis to his son Christopher. And it wasn't very praiseworthy. But my heavens, how many of you have ever, how many of you are married? How many of you ever had sharp words with your spouse? Is that definitive of who you are, or is it just descriptive of an event? And I, I talked to Tolkien's son John, and I said, what is this? I've read that your dad and, and Lewis had a falling out. He says, I, I read that in some biographers too, and I had no clue what they were talking about. For Lewis's last year of his life, I would drive him every week so that he could visit with Lewis for at least a couple of hours every week. So somebody picks up on something and they project the whole of that person. That's not being honest with that person. That's being self referential and projective, not learning the reality. And I think sometimes we have friends and they may have a bad day. What do we do? Do we project that on the whole of them? Are we able to see it in a larger context and understand? And I think this is helpful to us when we see Lewis approaching friendship holistically, approaching friendship realistically. And I think this is very positive. Something that might help us here is learning words. Learning words. I remember when I first learned the first word I ever fell in love with. I was in Mrs. Reinhart's first grade class. She was going through, she was going through flashcards. And I thought it was a golden day if I got the word swish. I still love that onomonopoeic word even before it's popularized by a clean shot in basketball. I remember when I Learned the words perplexed, subtle. When I learned the word ostentatious, way too ostentatious for my vocabulary. But I remember one word I learned that helps me. Here I was in third grade. We lived in South Central Los Angeles. I wanted to go eat at the cafeteria at my school, but it was prohibitive for us. It cost 31 cents. My mom always made us a lunch, a sandwich, a couple cookies, a piece of fruit. But I saw those kids go to the cafeteria and I wonder what that life was like. One day, to my complete surprise, my mother gave me 31 cents and I was going to get to eat in the cafeteria. But now I was nervous. Being unfamiliar with the sociological protocols of elementary school cafeteria life, I wondered if I did something wrong, would everybody make fun of me? So I watched the girl in front of me in line. She gave the lady at the register her 31 cents. I did the same and felt the relief of getting rid of that burden. She grabbed her fiberglass tray. I did as she did. She put her cutlery on the tray. She put on that chrome roll bar counter. I did as she did and she came up to the first item. String beans. I hate string beans. I thought, this cafeteria life isn't all I thought it was cut out to be. And apparently the girl didn't like it either because she said to the cafeteria lady, do you remember her? She was kind of heavy set. She had white hair and a hair net, a white outfit with a white apron with smudge marks on it. She was the ubiquitous cafeteria lady who worked in every elementary school cafeteria in the world. And the girl said, I'll have a small portion of those, please. I'd never heard the word. The lady dipped down into a big pot with a big spoon that had one holes in it so juices could go through. She grabbed a little tiny bowl, put three string beans in it, and handed it to the girl. I'd never heard the word before, but I said to her, I'll have a small portion of those two place. She did the same for me. I went down the line, put different things on my. On my tray, and when I got to the end, what was at the end of the cafeteria line in elementary school desserts. And I saw the most economically cut pieces of chocolate cake I'd ever seen in my life. And. And I wondered if this word might have other applications. So I said to the cafeteria lady, I'll have a large portion of that, please. She cut me the biggest piece of chocolate cake I'd ever seen in my Life. And I thought to myself, that's a good word. I want a large portion of God. Psalm 73, 25, 26. Whom have I in heaven but thee, and besides thee, I desire nothing on earth. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. I want a bigger portion of him. I want to see life as it is, not as I would have it be. I want to see life as it is, not project on it. I want to see my friend, not project on them. CS Lewis says, I want God, not my idea of God. I want my neighbor, not my idea of my neighbor. I want myself, not my idea of myself. Friendship is a means of grace to open our eyes to a wider world. But we must first consider, I think, some preliminaries to understand how this might be so. We live in a very broken, fallen world where we've been hurt by others, and we have done our fair share of hurting others. And if we don't see that, we'll be dishonest with ourselves, and we will marginalize the realities of ourselves and not be able to enter into relationship with others. Our friendships will not be as honest. They'll be truncated. One time I was lecturing at Oxford University. Actually, I was speaking in the evensong service at Hartford College. The chaplain was a man named Michael Chantry. He was a friend, and he invited me to do high table with the faculty after the chapel was over. The evensong service was over that night. High table at Oxford University is something else. You have long tables that run the length of the hall. That's where the students sit, elevated and perpendicular to them, elevated three steps, is the high table where the faculty sit. There are huge paintings of famous benefactors and graduates. Harper College got William Tyndale, the Bible translator. You've got John Dunn, the poet. And they're looking down at you while you're eating, I think, to make sure you use the right knife, fork and spoon. Everybody comes dressed in their academic gowns. The meal begins with a Latin prayer. The wine pours freely. Latin prayer. We sit down and chaplain introduces me as having just spoken in the evensong service. And this woman who taught history said, so Jerry, really loud, why are you a Christian? I thought maybe she was asking because she wanted to know. Somebody else told me they thought she was probably trying to make me the entertainment that night's dinner. I could have probably entered into a philosophical or theological discussion. How many of you came to Faith because of some slick argument? No, I didn't And I said to her, you know what? I became a Christian because I was aware of deficiency in my life. I was aware of failure. I was aware of the fact that sometimes I have sharp words with the people I see I love most in the world, even though I believe in the high ideal of love. And I live beneath my own. My own values. And I don't think I would make it in life if I didn't know that God could forgive me for those things and if he loved me in spite of it. Well, she was taken back by that answer. She said, well, I can appreciate that, but that's just not my issue. I said, really, I think I understand what you're saying. I didn't become a Christian chosen my first year of college, and I didn't put it all together. It took two, two weeks at least before I had it all together, and it was perfect. And the whole faculty just started laughing. I said, your laughter just betrayed you. She said, what do you mean? I said, you and I just met, so you couldn't know the specifics that made that last statement. Nonsense. But either your read of history or your read of your own heart shows you nobody has it together. And she said, you got me. I said, I'm not interested in getting anybody, but I am curious if you're aware of your own weaknesses, what gets you by? She said, I have faith in humanity. I said, I'm very open to anything that will help me. Let me ask you about your faith in humanity. Have you ever been wounded by another human being before? She said, of course. I said, have you ever wounded another human being before? She said, well, I suppose so. She was softer on herself. I said, how does this faith in humanity work when we've been people who have done our fair share of wounding and we've also been wounded? And just then the man sitting next to her taught friendship, said, how does it work for Christians? And we spent the rest of the meal talking about things honestly, looking at reality, which is important if we're going to have a proper understanding of life and certainly a proper understanding of. Of friendship. Friendship, I really believe, means that we have to have the grace to open our eyes to that wider world, to recognize that we live in this broken, fallen world, to be tender towards other people who are, like ourselves, are struggling, and to be honest with them. I think we gain our sense of self by how we perceive others perceive us. My best friend at Wheaton College is a theater professor, Mark Lewis. He used to perform on Broadway in New York. He was on the Soap operas with his wife Mary. And Mark is a really interesting guy. He was born in Argentina. He was the eighth born child in a family of eight. His parents were missionaries. His dad, I knew him, he was a really nice guy, but he was on the rigid side of evangelicalism, kind of on the fundamentalist side of evangelicalism. Mark was an artist, and his dad didn't have categories for art. He couldn't see, he couldn't be objective about it. And Mark, when he was six years old, wanted to show his parents how much he loved them. So he spent the entire day painting a mural up the back wall of their white house with his crayons and felt tip markers and his paints. And the whole time he's thinking, when dad and mom see this, they're finally going to see my artistic proclivity and they're going to know that I love them. Well, it didn't quite go that way. When his parents came home, he got what for. Which one of us would say, wow, tell us about this, Mark. This is fantastic. You know what? We're not going to be able to keep it all, but tomorrow we'll go to a frame shop and we'll buy a frame and we'll put it over that part that you think is best. And we want to keep it there. Well, it didn't go like he thought. And his parents spanked him. And he says it wasn't that his parents spanked him that made him so sad. It was that they didn't see what he was trying to show them and how much he loved them. Fast forward many years later, Mark was directing the autumn play. He was out late in the evenings doing rehearsals and he was tired. And one night he came home for dinner before he had to go back to school. And his daughter Ruby, 6 years old, was standing in a chair at the sink with a plastic basin in the sink and the water's going and water splashing everywhere. Mark says, I came home from some rest. I have to clean up this mess. Ruby, honey, what are you doing? She burst into tears. Mark's wife Mary said, mark, she knew you were weary. She was just putting water in a basin so she could wash her feet. And all of a sudden, Mark realized his own story was now coming up in the Next Generation. He says, oh, Ruby, honey, let me help you. He picked up the tub, he brought it over to the floor and he said it was the coldest water he ever put his feet in in his life. And he said, you know, my folks didn't get it right. I Got it half right. Maybe one day Ruby will get it all right. Why does that story mean so much to us? Because we've all been the one that was misunderstood. And we've all been the one that did the misunderstanding. If we want to enter into friendship, there needs to be, in some senses, that security of self so we could see these kinds of nuances and see them well. Donald Miller, who wrote the book Blue Like Jazz, wrote a sequel called Searching for God Knows what. He said when he was in high school, he longed to be in the inner ring of the popular group at his school, but he was always on the fringe. One day he was at home and he was reading a poem, and he liked it, so he memorized it. About three weeks later at school, somebody said something. He says, oh, that reminds me of a poem. And he recited the poem. The other kid said, miller, you are smart. Wow, you are really smart, Miller. He said it was the first time he ever felt good about himself. And two things happened. He realized he needed to gain a sense of himself based on how others looked at him. But he also realized everybody who he was looking to for a sense of self was insecure as he was. The other thing that happened was he started memorizing lots of poetry after that. The key is we're trying to understand our identity. And in that process, we often neglect what we might be projecting on somebody that we would want to call friend. But we can't enter into the full, robust understanding of friendship because we're struggling with all these other things ourself. There's only one person who can give you a proper understanding of yourself, and that's the God who loves you with intensity. Lewis wrote, this man approaches God most nearly when he is, in one sense, least like God. Jerry Sitzer, in his book the Adventure, explains it like this. When we're most like God in the world, in other words, we're going to be most like God in our friendships with others. When we are least like him in relationship with Him. How's that work? Let me say it again. We're most like God in the world when we're least like him in relationship with Him. He alone is independent, non contingent. We come to him, unlike him, dependent upon him, that we might go into the world more like him, independent of the world. So we could be a giver rather than a user and a taker. We come to him in all of our unloveliness. We receive from him his love, unlike him, that we might go into the world more like him, more loving. We come to him in all of our impatience and we receive from him his patience that we might go in our relationships and be more patient, we can be a better friend. We come to him in all of our unkindness and receive from him undeserving kindness, unconditional love that we might go into the world more kind. In other words, we come to him so that we could become better friends. In Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote this. All sorts of people are fond of saying God is love, but they seem not to notice that the words God is love have no meaning unless God contains at least two persons. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, he was not love. Lewis writes about this in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity. Christians believe that the doctrine of the Trinity is a teaching about the very character and nature of God. If you want to look at theological underpinning for friendship, that's where you start. And how does it work? I remember years ago I was coming back from a lecture that I was giving and I got in a limo. The college had a limo service and if we came back from something, the limo service would pick us up and drive us to college. And this guy's picking me up and he says, I'm taking you to Wheaton College. What do you do there? I said, I'm a professor. What are you a professor of? And I said, well, actually my degrees in philosophy of religion. He said, what religion are you? I said, I'm a Christian. How about you? What religion are you? He said, I'm a Muslim. His name was Hafiz Muhammad. I get in the car, he says, what's the difference between Christianity and Islam? And I said, you know, Hafiz, I've only read probably a quarter of the Quran. I haven't read the whole thing. I read my Bible a bunch of times. So I defer to you on the Quran, but I think I can give you a difference as it relates to scripture. And then I said, in the quran, in Surah 3 and Surah 6, it says Muslims don't believe in the Christian God because you don't believe in a God of Trinity. I said, let me ask you some questions. Do you believe God's a contingent being or a non contingent being? He said, what do you mean? I said, well, like this car, has it always existed or did it have a maker? And if it had a maker, then there must have been a plan for the making. There must have been material from which it was made, an efficient car maker to make it and a final cause that it could be used as a limo service that you drive. Do you believe God's like this car or do you believe he's non contingent, self existent, always existed? He says, oh, I believe he's non contingent. Second question, Hafiz, do you believe God's a God of love? I've had this discussion with at least 200 Muslims over the years and they all say he's a God of love. You might have expected them to say I believe he's just, he's good, he's merciful, whatever. They all say, yeah, I believe he's a God of love. He says what they've said to me. Third question, Hafiz, who's the object of his love? And he said, well we are creation, we are. I said if God needs us to fulfill his nature then you've got a contradiction in your theology. If God is non contingent then he should be able to have all that fulfillment in Himself. Relational attributes like love and a non contingent being presuppose that relationship must be necessary in that being. Hafiz said, Jerry, I'm tracking with you, I get what you're saying. And he was taken back by it. I said, Hafiz, the reason why this is so important for us is because Christian theology begins with the love of God and it's at that place that Christian friendship begins to emerge as well. We believe God is a God of love. He creates us in his image. He gives us the capacity for love and thereby he gives us the capacity to for friendship. And Hafiz, again it's essential to Christian faith and practice. We can add is essential to a robust understanding of friendship. Another preliminary thought in this whole process that we'll be talking about this weekend. This relational God who creates created us in his image that we might be more like him in the world until we find our fulfillment in Him. We look for our fulfillment in the need to be needed. We look for our fulfillment in other things rather than him and they leave us insecure. It is a self referential practice to have the need to be needed, to have people have to attend to us instead of our breaking out of the dungeon of self to attend to others. And this need to be needed can keep us from relationships. CS Lewis writes about it in the Four Loves and he writes about this woman, he calls her Mrs. Fidget. Let me read you. It's an extended reading but it is so eye opening on the self referential need to be needed. It's a preventative for Christian friendship. I am thinking of Mrs. Fidget who died a few months ago. It is really astonishing how her family have brightened up. The drawn look has gone from her husband's face. He begins to be able to laugh. The younger boy, whom I'd always thought an embittered, peevish little creature, turns out to be quite human. The elder, who is hardly ever at home except when he was in bed, is nearly always there now and has begun to reorganize the garden. And the girl, who is always supposed to be delicate, though I never found out what exactly the trouble was, now has the writing lessons which were once out of the question, dances all night and plays any amount of tennis. Even the dog, who is never allowed out except on a lead, is now a well known member of the lamppost club in their neighborhood. Mrs. Fidget very often said that she lived for her family was not untrue. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it. She lives for her family, they said, what a wife and a mother. She did all the washing, true, she did it badly. And they could have afforded to send it out to a laundry. And they frequently begged her not to do it. But she did. There was always a hot lunch for anyone who was at home and always a hot meal at night, even in mid summer. They implored her not to provide this. They protested almost with tears in their eyes and with truth that they like cold meals. It made no difference. She was living for her family. She always set up to welcome you home if you were out late at night, two or three in the morning, it made no odds. You would always find the frail, pale, weary face awaiting you like a silent accusation. Which meant of course, that you couldn't with any decency go out very often. She was always making things too being in her own estimation, I'm no judge myself, an excellent amateur dressmaker and a great knitter. And of course, unless you were a harless brute, you had to wear the things. The vicar tells me that since her death the contributions that family alone to sales of work outweigh those of all his other parishioners put together. And then her care for their health. She bore the whole burden of that daughter's delicacy alone. The doctor, an old friend, and it was not being done on national health, was never allowed to discuss matters with his patient. After the briefest examination of her, he was taken into another room by the mother, for the girl was to have no worries, no responsibility for her own health. Only loving care. Care, caresses, special foods, horrible tonic wines and breakfast in bed for Mrs. Fidget, as she so often said. Would work her fingers to the bone for her family. They couldn't stop her. Nor could they, being decent people, quite sit still and watch her do it. They had to help. Indeed, they're always having to help. That is, they did things for her, to help her to do things for them which they didn't want done. As for the dear dog, it was to her, she said, just like one of the children. It was in fact, as like one of them as she could make it. But since it had no scruples, it got on better than they, and though vetted, dieted and guarded within an inch of its life, contrived sometimes to reach the dustbin or the dog next door. The vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is. But what's quite certain is her family. So here we've got this idea of the need to be needed, which is tyrannical, and it keeps us from seeing other people as they are and entering into a proper understanding of relationship. Lewis develops this concept in a book he wrote called the Arthurian Torso. His dear friend Charles Williams had written a book of Arthurian poetry. And if you read the poems, they're kind of obtuse. We've got Professor King here as the world's leading authority on Lewis's poetry. He could tell us more about that. But the interesting thing is Lewis felt an obligation to his friend, whom he loved, and he wrote literary criticism of the Arthurian poetry so that other people would have access to William's ideas. This is a good friend trying to invite other people into knowledge of his friend. And in this particular book, Lewis quotes Dante's De Monarchia. Everybody knows of Ida Nuova about Dante meeting Beatrice on the streets of Florence. They know about the Divine Comedy, but between them he wrote two books, A Convivo and the Demonarchia. And in the Demonarchia of the Monarch, Dante says, function precedes essence. Function precedes essence. God assigned a purpose for me, and he assigned a purpose for you before he even gave us the essence, the qualities we would need to fulfill that purpose. That means he assigned a purpose for everybody you meet, and he gave them qualities. And if you're projecting on them, you're going to miss out on what God's trying to give to you and to the rest of the world through this unique person. Function precedes essence. In the creation account in Genesis, God creates light on day one, the function, but he doesn't create the essences to emit light, the sun, moon and stars till day four. He had purposes and so on. And Williams then says the fall was an alteration in knowledge. Lewis quotes us. What does that mean? Well, all of a sudden the essence is going to be primary and I'll create my own purpose devoid of what God thinks. I'll project on you what I think your purpose should be and how it fits into my world. And I miss out on on any kind of possibility of friendship occurring. We sever ourselves from the purposes of God. We sever ourselves from reality and seek to improvise. Lewis says in these Arthurian poems King Arthur makes this judgment. He looks out over the over the parapet of Camelot and he looks out into Camelot and he says does the king exist for the kingdom his purpose to serve? Or does the kingdom exist for the king? And all of a sudden there's an alteration in knowledge. He loses the capacity to see. And Lewis says Camelot falls apart. At that moment he's self referential. He doesn't see. Jade is Queen of Char, remember her? She becomes a white witch of Narnia. But in the Magician's Nephew she is so evil her whole world has mounted up in civil war against her. And she has learned by magical arts how to say the deplorable word that will destroy everybody else but preserve only herself. And she utters the deplorable word. And at that moment she becomes anti Aslan, the Christ figure of the Narnian books. Because Aslan gives himself to save others and she destroys others to save herself. She becomes anti Aslan, she becomes anti Christ. And Lewis makes it clear that our imitation of God in this life must be an imitation of God incarnate. The God who comes. And the God who comes does what Christ from the cross exhibits. The high courtesy of heaven. When he says, I offer my life for you, I give of myself for you. And you want to enter into good friendship, you start moving in that direction. It's essential to friendship. It's essential to self offering. There's a place in the Narnia books where Lucy, the most spiritually sensitive of all the people from our world to go to Narnia. In the voyager the Dawn Treader, the king Caspian now is in a quest to find the seven lost lords of Narnia who went out and never came back. They also have on board the most chivalrous mouse in all of Narnia. Reap a sheep as he longs to go to Aslan's country to fulfill a prophecy that's been uttered over him. And in the adventures they come to this island it's simply called the island of the Voices. And they get off the Dawn Treader and they. They hear these nonsensical people talking. I think they're a parody on us as humans. They. They can't get their identity right. They. They are monopods, but they go by duffel pods and. And they're just constantly all over the place. As far as what they're thinking is there's no stability and they've been made invisible. And they've been made invisible because their disobedience by the magician of that island and they want to be made visible again. They have swords, they have knives, they have spears because the Dawn Treader people can't see them. Nonsensical as they are, they're beholden to them. And these duffel puds say somebody has to go in the magician's library and say the spell that will make them visible again. And somehow it has to be a girl. There's only one girl in the Dawn Treader, and that's Lucy. And courageously, she says, I'll go. And she goes in this massive house, this big hall. There's a winding staircase up to the second floor. She goes to the library. The duffel pugs had told her the book was on the library. There's a big lectern and the book is there. Huge book. She can't open it at first, and she realizes it's got a clasp. She undoes the clasp when she opens a book. She said it had a nice smell. It was tingling to her fingers when she touched it. The calligraphy was with thick downstrokes, thin upstrokes, and she could see in the margin. It was illuminated and the illumination was animated. She didn't know where to go. The duffel puds didn't tell her where to go. And she says, I could be here for ages.

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And she turns the first page, and she starts to see spells as she goes through it. There's a spell for how to make it rain after a drought, how to make it stop raining after a long rain. There's a spell for how to remove warts with a silver bowl full of water on a full moon night. There's a spell for how to give a man a donkey's head like they did with bottom. Midsummer Night's Dream. There's a spell for how to remove a swarm of bees. And she sees in the illumination there's a man removing a swarm of bees. And she finally comes to spell how to make one more beautiful than the lot of mortals. Lucy was always the one that was looked over. People paid attention to her sister, who is a little more beautiful than her. And she sees in the illumination there's a bunch of girls standing over here and they're all crowded around Susan. And she sees a girl standing at a lectern. And all of a sudden she sees the girl in the illumination utter a spell. And she sees everybody turns their attention away from Susan to look at the girl at the lectern. And all of a sudden people start fighting for her honor. She Ships are launched, wars are flying. It's like Helen of Troy. And Lucy says, I'm going to say that spell. And just before she could say it, Oslong comes out of the page and growls at her. She quickly turns a page. The next spell is how to listen into your friends to see what they're saying about you when you're not around. Have you ever had yourself saved from a bad temptation and you think you're pretty hot stuff and so because you were saved from a bad temptation, you feel like you deserve the next one? So Lucy quickly says the temptation and listens in and she starts to hear clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack. And she hears in a train car her biggest enemy at school goading her best friend at school to try and get her to say something nasty about Lucy. And the friend resists and resists and resists and finally says something nasty about Lucy. And. And Lucy starts screaming at the book. And she's weeping. She's lost the capacity because she's self referential and hurt at that moment to see beyond the momentary hurt to the bigger picture of her friend. Oh, she's so sad. She turns page and the next spell is for the refreshment of the spirit. And as she reads it, she sees it goes on for three pages. And not only does she see that it goes on for three pages, she wants to go back and read it again because she's never read a story like that before. And she finds out from that, from that spell you can only go forward, you can't go back. And it was about a green hill and a tree and a cup and a sword. And from that day on, whatever she meant by a good story, it was a story that reminded her of the story for the refreshment of the spirit. She turns a page and there's a spell to make invisible things visible. And she utters the spell. And the next thing you know, Aslan's standing right next to her. She says, aslan, when did you get here. Oh, I've been here all along, dear heart. Did you not think I would abide by my own rules? You've been listening in where you shouldn't have listened in. Oh, Oslo. Will it ever get better? What would have happened if I wouldn't have done that? Nobody's ever allowed to know what would have happened. But you can always find out what will happen. And then he says, come, let's meet the master of this house. And she says, oh, Aslan, will you ever tell me the story again for the refreshment of the Spirit? Oh, do, do, do, do. He says, oh, dear, that's the one story I will be telling you over and over and over again. It's, of course, the gospel story. The first story. How to make one more beautiful than a lot of mortals. That's the fall. We all participated in it, but she participated in it in a particular way. And that's a reminder of the story. Listening in on what she shouldn't have listened in on. The spell for the refreshment of the Spirit's the gospel story. It's about a cup. The cup that Jesus drank. The sword. The death that he died. The tree. Calvary. On. On the cross, on Mount Calvary. The hill, the green hill. You can only go forward from that one. And all of a sudden she gets to participate in making visible things visible. Touched by the gospel, she can enter into relationships with others, seeing them for who they are, not trying to project upon them what she might want them to be. It's a glorious, glorious story. And in the process of this story we find out, as in any friendship and as in any experience of life where we're seeking to understand ourselves and others in it. Lewis writes this. For a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret master of the ceremonies has been at work, Christ, who said to the disciples, you have not chosen me, but I have chosen. You can truly say to every group of friends, you have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another. The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste and finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men. But by friendship, God opens our eyes to them so we can see things as they are, not as how we would have them be. They're like all beauties, derived from him, and then in a good friendship, increased by him through the friendship itself, so that it is his instrument for creating as well as for revealing at this feast. It is he who has spread the board, and it is he who has chosen the guests. It is he, we dare to hope, who sometimes does and always should preside. Let us not reckon without our host. So this is the beginning of friendship. There's more we could talk about. We won't be able to get to it all, but Don and Wayne and I will do our best. Any questions? My question is this. I thought I read or heard that you are friends or have friendship with David Brooks, New York Times columnist. Friends. Can you tell us about your friendship with him? Yeah, I. I can. He came and spoke at wheaton college in 2008. It was right after he had written that article where he said, the news media doesn't really know what to do with religion. And so they filter stuff coming in and they filter stuff out going out. And he talked about religion in the media. And he said, when people in the media want to find out what evangelicals think, they bring out Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. And Brooks said, the evangelicals aren't reading Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. They're reading John Stott. And he started talking about John Stott, and He read about 15 of Stott's books. And he came to Wheaton College to talk to us about religion and the media. He talked about having friends in Washington, D.C. and I waited till everybody cleared out, and I went up to him and I said, did any of your friends try to buttonhole you? He said, you mean convert me? And I said, yeah. He said, only one. I said, who was it? He said, john Stott. John Stott didn't let people the gospel fall out. And I said, what happened? He says, I. I can't talk to you about it. So I started praying for him every day in 2008, and I haven't missed a day since then. And it ended up I was at the Luzon Congress on world evangelization with 15 of my students from Wheaton College. And I had an assignment of some things I was having to do. And I had a team of six where we would assess all. There is the largest gathering of Christians, of most diverse gathering of Christians in world history. Of the 213 countries. There were representatives of 198 countries at this gathering. And they all sat at tables and they all filled out cards. And my team took all those cards every day, and we did an executive summary of those cards so we could give them to the people who were planning the thing. This one woman was working with me, and her name was Ann Snyder, she was the smartest student I ever had. And Ann, she. She always got A's. I would always still. Even if I gave a person A on a paper, I would still engage with them in the margins of their paper because they deserve feedback from the Prof. But her spelling was perfect. Her grammar was perfect. Everything. Years later, she was doing a thing for Trinity Forum, and she asked me to write an introduction to the golden key by George McDonald, which was C.S. lewis's favorite fairy tale. And I would turn her. Turn into her. My introductions, and they'd come back with enough red marks on them, they look like they're bleeding to death. So anyway, she told me that she'd gotten a job with the New York Times working with David Brooks, and that when. When he would say to her, I want you to read these things and I want you to get this information for me, she would say, okay. But I also found that Augustine wrote some stuff that you might find interesting. He'd say, read this stuff and get this information. He'd say, okay, you might want to read, too, what C.S. lewis said about that. Well, read this stuff and get this information. Okay, you might want to read what G.K. chesterton said about it, too. And slowly, over time, he started getting very sensitive towards spiritual things. He would come visit us in our home. They stay with us. They ended up. David and Anne ended up getting married. And we've done retreats with him, and we've done writing retreats and spiritual retreats and so on. But it was in that process, with a few other things as well, that he came to Faith twice. He said, could you come Visit me in D.C. and we had lengthy conversations, and he's very open about his testimony of faith. And did you read the Road to Character? I think it was while he was writing the chapter on Augustine, when he came to Faith. And then he's got this other book called the Second Mountain, and he's very explicit there as well. And if you go online, you can go online and see a talk that he gave in. Claudia, where are you? Was it Tulsa, Oklahoma? Yeah, Tulsa, Oklahoma. See if you can find the talk he gave at Tulsa, Oklahoma. There were two. One in a very secular audience, and he was explicit about his faith. And then he gave a talk to a dinner with about 250 people that had been at that gathering. The gathering is about 2,500. But then this dinner, and he was very open about his coming to Faith. And it's very moving. He's deep, and he's got a new book coming out this next month in October, and I can't wait to read it. And it's about analyzing why is it that we're not listening to each other in our culture? My guess is he's going to have some pretty good insights, but I don't know if there's more. I could tell you, but I don't feel proper about saying more. Yeah, I love him and I pray for him every day.

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Thank you, Dr. Root. For more information on the annual CS Lewis Festival in September, please visit us@cslewisfestival.org this entire podcast has been made possible by the CS Lewis Festival and its generous sponsors. I'd like to thank the festival as well as podcast producer Zach Smith of Hands Media on behalf of the Lewis Festival. Thank you for listening.