Letter #182: The Opposite of Politics

What grows old shall pass away.

Dad,

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis imagines a scholar whose navel-gazing theories about theory have blocked him off from the original source of his delight in learning. He is so alienated from his own purpose that he can’t survive in heaven unless he snaps out of it. “Listen!” a friendly spirit tells him, “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.”

Another lost soul, an artist, is so infatuated with painting as a technique and a business that he’s forgotten what painting is for. But one of the blessed reminds him. “Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."

If there’s an opposite of Washington, D.C., it’s that: the childlike bliss of doing things because we love them and loving only what they naturally have to give. You write that “We stuff money in our bottomless wounds in the vain hope of filling them. We bully and manipulate our inferiors to erase our sense of need and smallness.” Reading that, I think, of course: playing politics and glad-handing and money-chasing are all ways of trying to force our way to getting what only love can freely give. It’s all a futile effort to cover up or work around our aching, primal child-need for joy.

One of the things I love about those Lewis passages is the idea that you could be barred from heaven for betraying your artistic or intellectual gifts—not at all because you’re being scolded for some naughty deed that God just happens to disapprove of, but because the very essence of him is the simplicity of love that makes a soul a soul. He has no other kind of life to give us, because there is none. He has no other way to be with us, because he has no other way to be. He has no happiness to offer us except his own.

It was Wordsworth—who else?—who saw that childhood is sacred not because of its ignorance or immaturity, but because of the immediacy with which children experience the goodness of things in themselves. “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light.” All this week we’ve been talking about normalcy—the miracle of mere existence. To really experience the world that way is, I think, the essence of childhood we’re supposed to recapture.

And that’s the revival we’re after. Though it’s a million miles away from what most people mean by “religion,” I think it’s just exactly what Christ meant by “life—and life in abundance.” That’s the childhood that I suspect will last forever. Even here and now, the joy that kind of childhood brings is the only inexhaustible value, the only enduring good. Everything else betrays or disappoints in the end. For whatever grows old shall also pass away.

Love,
Spencer