I love authors who feel like old friends.
For the most part, they are the writers I loved when I was a kid. There is some magic to a book, how it can play itself in you. It makes the words come alive, as if the writer said “Friend, let me tell you a story.” And by story, what they really meant was they had some secret about life they wanted to share with you. Just you.
I don’t think we ever lose them (I really hope so) — seasons of life change, a book gets dusty, bounces around a few shelves, and apartments. But one day we take it down, open it, and part of us goes home.
London, England. I’m in Westminster Abbey on vacation with my mom.
The spires reach toward a dismal blue sky. Sparse cloud cover has shrouded the abbey, turning the limestoned walls gray.
I’m from the Bible Belt. We say things like “I could just feel the darkness there.” And we mean spiritually, as if we were in a place so far from the light of Christ, from the presence of God. “There is no fear of God in this place.”
I felt like London was a city where God, Christianity, and religion were relics. That visiting Westminster Abbey was fitting because the place was a tomb; a memorial to a dead religion.
I’m not saying dark, spiritually dead places don’t exist. They do. And I’m just as likely to find them where I’m from as anywhere else. But just because I’m in a different country where most people don’t know the words to “How Great is Our God” does not mean they’re all God-hating reprobates reading Richard Dawkins books.
What I was experiencing was being in a place where no one knew me. I was a faceless stranger, not Sam Scott from Johnson City. It was the fourth day of my trip which is usually when the “new” starts to erode and the “strangeness” takes over.
For me, the strangeness was in my own soul. Here it was because I was an American from Tennessee. In life, it’s because shame is the loudest voice in my mind placing a wall between me and everyone else.
In Westminster Abbey, after you wonder through the tombs, and memorials to the dead, you come to the Poet’s Corner in the south transept where writers, artists and poets are buried and commemorated. Chaucer is buried here, as is Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Spenser and Tennyson.
I wandered through looking at the names as sunlight glanced through the stained glass onto the floor. Chiseled into the stone was a memorial to C.S. Lewis.
Have you gone to a party where you didn’t no anyone? Or maybe your only lifeline of a friend was late, leaving you to make just enough awkward small talk to allow you to find a corner to sit quietly. And then your friend walks in the room and everything changes. That’s what I felt when I saw Lewis’s name.
When I was a kid, the power went out at our house. So my mom sent Dad down to the Old Mountaineer to get some D-Cell batteries for the portable boombox and we listened to a CD of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I later read the books as a middle schooler and then as an adult along with Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce.
I found my mom and asked if the next day we could visit Oxford, where Lewis lived. So we boarded a Great Western Railway train at Paddington Station bound for Oxfordshire.
We went to the Eagle & Child Pub, the original Rabbit Room where Lewis (called Jack by his friends), J.R.R. Tolkien and their fellow Inklings gathered to exchange gossip on Tuesday mornings. We went to Blackwell’s Bookshop, where Lewis and Tolkien shopped. I snagged The Weight of Glory from a shelf and read it in the store. I experienced for the first time, or rather consciously for the first time, a writer putting words to realities I’ve always felt:
We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.*
We took an Uber to Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry where Lewis is buried. A tired, kind churchwarden named Aidan let us in, showed us where Lewis would sit and talked about how he didn’t like the music much.
He was buried a short ways away. Light rain was falling through the trees surrounding the church graveyard. People had written little notes and left them on Lewis’s grave, but I felt that would be silly.
“Do you want to write a little note?” Mom asked.
“Yeah I do.”
And I cried. I cried at the grave of a man I’d never met like he was an old friend, because he was.
I think the authors we love make us feel the way we do because what they say to our souls is “I understand.” This experience of being known is a gift to people who every day feel further from home.
But as my old friend said:
The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things.The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.*
Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. William Collins, 2013.
Man, this hits. C.S. Lewis is the author I go to most to learn about Christ and living (second is Frederick Beuchner, third Timothy Keller, a theologian not novelist). It’s a beautiful way to think about books, especially in the face of SO MUCH STUFF coming our way every day. Look for the stuff that makes you feel like you’re hanging with a friend you’ll miss this much when they’re gone (or when you’re met with the realness of their already-goneness).