It's Holy Week, and I'm a little worried about my progress this Lent. As grown-up life has crept up steadily on me, I've found the trivial...and sometimes not quite so trivial...business of material existence creating more and more static.
I'm grateful that I can still recognize the static for what it is.
One tool that I have found useful for at least recognizing where I've fallen short of the mark this Lent has been Charles Williams' The Place of the Lion. My mom stuffed it in my Christmas presents since Williams ran in the Lewis/Tolkien circle, and it's been suggested that Williams leonine imagery had an influence on his companions.
I have about thirty pages left, so I'm not fully prepared to give it the Peter Terp Imprimatur (it's a short book, but, as I mentioned, there's been a lot of static). Nevertheless, I highly recommend the book for anyone who is, has been, or hopes to be involved with graduate studies in the humanities. Almost a hundred years after the fact, and Williams' depiction of Damaris writing a dissertation is still uncanny.
It's hard to say why he's uncanny without giving too much away, but he essentially depicts the destructiveness of separating academic humanities from sincere spirituality...and the danger is on both sides. Isolated from one another, both academic inquiry and faith in the supernatural corrupt those who would pursue them. Both, according to Williams, become exercises in self-reflection and self-aggrandizement, whether through the prestige of publication or alleged power through neo-pagan superstition.
Williams also challenges the reader by showing the dangers of completing separating reason and emotion. A faith based solely on emotion becomes either blind zealotry or complete self-gratification. On the other hand, a faith based solely on reason lacks genuine compassion and empathy. Neither faith is fully effective because the purpose of faith is to put us on the path to God, who is Love.
True love might be an act of the will, but, as Williams' protagonists discover, will is a hybrid of reasoned choice and emotional drive.
If you read the book, you'll see why it's a particularly Lenten reflection, and how it shows the paradox of human intentions. When we attempt to use prestige, power, subtlety, beauty, attention, or even love as stepping stones to our own apotheosis, they become stumbling blocks. It is only when we recognize how those things we want can become stumbling blocks that they become stepping stones to the Divine.
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