CS Lewis and the Woman He Loved, Joy Davidman

[Applause] thank you all for coming and first I would like to thank Hugh Paterson Hugh has been remarkable several years ago we took you over to the kilns in headington near Oxford where Lewis lived and we tried to leave him but but Hugh came back and we're so glad what we're going to do is I'm going to give you a brief introduction to Lewis in his life and set him up for your understanding of joy when patty will introduce her now was in Ireland in 1898 that you had this idyllic life of Jack Lewis CS Lewis and his older brother Warren E they had books they they crawled in their attics they enjoyed everything they did until the age of nine when his mother died of cancer he felt guilty about it and he had prayed and God did not answer his prayers and to make matters worse his father who was a barrister didn't know how to deal with these boys he had a temper and so he sent them off to boarding school they went to four boarding schools separately one of them was run by an insane master which is very common among most administrators today but what you have to realize as Lewis was a bachelor he was living among men his whole life was among men after going through the schools he had a male tutor William Kirkpatrick a Scottish atheist and Lewis lost his chastity he lost his faith he became an atheist he became a Freudian he started smoking everything went haywire for him and then he went to the war and he was in the front line of the trenches where he was with men he came back from the war started teaching went to Oxford got first and everything he took what was among men then he made friends with Hugh Dyson and junior are talking and these two Christian men began to persuade him into the faith in their madlyn College on Addison way they would walk on a summer night a September night and the wind was blowing in leaves rushing around and suddenly the Holy Spirit came upon him and we begin to see how God entered his life for the next ten years he became a dawn at Oxford modeling college he had a wonderful time in fact Time magazine put him on his their cover and they said isn't the life of a professor really dull and he said I like monotony and monotony was going to continue until 1950 when suddenly coming from New York there was going to be a surprise thank you for having me I'm gonna tell you a little bit about joy and then we're gonna have a conversation you can just listen in so joy was born in what was called the Jewish ghetto of New York in the year nineteen fifteen when CF Lewis was about sixteen and a half years old she had no idea who he was he had no idea who she was she was born into a family of Russian and Polish immigrants so she was born into a home that was very big on assimilation and accomplishment she was raised in a very strict household her father was a teacher and they wanted her to assimilate they was you know as immigrants they wanted her to be part of something bigger but she was a prodigy a genius they didn't know what to do with her by 14 years old she graduated from high school by 19 years old she graduated from graduate school with a master's degree from Columbia in New York by her 20 she had won the Yale younger poets award she was a genius and she was a writer and a poet and so she married she got through her 20s and a lot of broken hearts and in her early 30s as an as a communist and as an atheist when she was nine years old she read HG Wells history of the world and she marched into her parents living room and she said I'm I'm an atheist she proclaimed herself an atheist mostly to appalled her family because she is what today we might call the strong-willed child so an her early 30s she met another novelist named William Gresham and he was kind of on the uprising too they fell in love they met at the American writers league and they fell in love and they married and had two sons and at this time we're gonna kind of flash-forward she's married with two young sons William Gresham had become famous at this time for a book called monster Midway that was made into a movie of a Tyrone Power and they were kind of flush with cash at this moment so they bought a really beautiful farmhouse in upstate New York and moved there with their two children but bill had been in the Spanish Civil War and he had what we might today called PTSD and he had a lot of problems with depression he had attempted suicide at one point so he called joy one night when she was home alone with their two children and he told her I don't I can't do this anymore I don't know what's gonna happen to me but this is it and he hung up on her and at that moment she had what she calls a mystical experience she says and God came in that is how she described it she said her ego cracked she said she had taken until that minute life watered down and diluted and that if her previous knowledge of life had been true then God was knocking down all those walls and nothing was true she almost had to start over she was humbled and so she spent the next two years trying to figure out what that mystical experience was another woman might have put it on the admin shelf is just an experience that she had and get on but not joy joy was an intellectual she was a seeker she wanted to know what it meant and she didn't give up she wanted to find something that would satisfy her intellect her logic and her heart and she spent two years researching all the world religions and believing she would return to the Jewish faith which is what her family had send it from and then she said she realized that Christianity was the only religion that answered all the questions she had well at about this time Lewis was becoming a thing in the United States he had not yet written Narnia but he had written the Screwtape Letters mere christianity the great divorce and many others he'd been on the cover of Time magazine there was a man named Chad Walsh who had written an article about him in the Atlantic Monthly called a puzzle to the skeptics and joy read that and that appealed to her more than anything because she considered herself as skeptic so she wrote to CS Lewis and he wrote her back and for three years they were pen friends until she went to England in August of 1952 and this is the beginning of a romance or a seduction as some see it we disagree on this but that's part of the story let's let's start with how did you become intrigued with her what was it when she first stumble upon joy and what made you think this is a story so you know all of my this is my 13th novel and all of my novels have kind of explored the vagaries of love and I'm enchanted by impossible love stories how could and I ask myself how could these two have ever met she was a married woman in upstate New York and atheist with two kids and he was at Oxford on at modelling college the tutor of English literature he had not left Ireland or England except for the war in France his whole life there's no way these two should have met no way they should have been friends absolutely not fallen in love and impossible to marry and yet it happened so I wanted to know why and so I started to do some research and realized that she is often portrayed as the dying wife of CS Lewis if you watch Shadowlands or read some of the other words and I realized that the back story was the story so I started to dive into the research and you talk about her love I mean and CS Lewis was writing a book called the four loves and in fact he was doing it for the radio a four-top he was doing for talk for kind of a series that the Church in Atlanta was putting on but he had four kinds of love storge which is affection it's the kind of love you have towards your dog or a professor then there's even if you just yes yes I go then there's friendship friendship philia is when two people are interested in the same thing like CS Lewis third is eros eros is when you say this is the woman or the man I was meant for it's that beloved the one person the beloved and then finally agape agape is the love of charities the love of God the sacrificial love of course when the radio television Commission the Episcopal read it in the 1950s they said we can't air this because you talk too much about arrows and you bring sex into arrows and Lewis says how can you not bring sex into arrows that's what it is but they're but how are these loves shown in the relationship between these two people and I think that is what is so fascinating and part of what grabbed me in this story is that joy david min is the only person in CS Lewis's life who he had all four loves with they started out mine too mine iron sharpens iron he has told more than one person that he had never met his intellectual equal until he met her then there was the deep friendship one of my favorite CS Lewis quotes is probably one you know well which is you know do you find a friend when you look at each other and go you two you know that's when you know you found a friend and then when he finally fell in love with her and arrows they had everything together and then of course the agape because their love through Christ had grown from the very beginning and so when I when you read a grief observed his book about losing her to cancer what is so palpable in there is that he lost all four loves in one fell swoop so yeah what we see to in in eros because it's a kind of a slow process Louis fall in love at first I think you're really right we see the friendship between the two I mean their minds were just so agile and moving back and forth and the affection group warning his brother who was an alcoholic unfortunately he loved joy because she drank beer he said this is one of my best friends ever and so he loved her for more than this yeah but do you think did you think when she is dying yes and this is when things begin to change in my opinion but what do you see happening when she's on her deathbed she's discovered she has cancer and it looks like her life is going to be over yeah so I think in my not so humble opinion that Luis loved her earlier than that but he would not allow himself to to fall that way you know he mentions I think it was to Dorothy Sarah maybe yes that if that when a third rival enters you know you love and the third rival in this or the third in the triangle the rival was death and so that is when he professed it and that is when he asked her to marry him was on her deathbed but that's when the story gets really good because the deathbed wasn't her deathbed but what happens what tell them give them kind of a hint of what goes on at that deathbed scene in the hospital okay it's one of my favorites so she was on they had proclaimed her and told her that she needed to go home to die and Luis said I love you I don't want to live without you I have always loved you real love and we're going to get married but the church would not allow them to marry this was 1954 in England he was Church of England so he called an ex-student of his name Peter buyed who was an Episcopal priest and he asked Peter bide to come and he had already appealed to the highest source of the Church of England the what do you call that the Bishop of Canterbury and they had said no words bishop yeah the archbishop thank you and they had said no and so he called Peter and he brought Peter to the hospital and Peter married them and when Louis asked why he was willing to do it he said because he appealed to the only court that matter and that was God himself and then he married them on her deathbed and when the marriage ceremony was over they had communion and then Lewis asked Peter to pray over joy for healing and he did and joy had another three years of vibrant and beautiful life with Lois so not only did their I get chills every time I felt sorry because and Lois prayed to Lois prayed for what Charles Williams called substitution and it happened it happened it was a miracle joy had bone cancer it was metastasis from breast cancer and she started growing bone and Lewis started losing bone started getting osteoporosis as she got stronger he got weaker and they almost met in the middle and it was beautiful what we find - I think in their friendship Lewis writes in the fourloves he says the problem with a man and a woman being friends is that one of them for one of them eros begins to enter in and the other one feels very awkward and it's almost very autobiographical until you begin to realize when they had their honeymoon he said I feel like a naughty man going into hotels with this woman who's married to me and it was there but then after their time in Ireland they also went down to the Greek tires aisles yes and she climbed climbed the Acropolis and everything else right before she died they went to Greece and both of them said they'd never fly on a plane they were scared of planes and then eventually they did get on a plane but yes what was it about her that you think really attracted him from right at the beginning I Lewis talks about being in love and fall in love and there's the sense in which maybe he began to fall in love much more quickly he realized it as you could have mentioned Lewis was afraid of certain foods because he thought they're aphrodisiacs you there's certain foods you can't eat mashed potatoes are really bad okay I don't know why that they are okay but we find I mean this eros has fallen in love what were these qualities and I think you capture so many things about joy in the book it's just amazing they're lovely like I could see why Lewis loved her and I can see why Tolkien hated her yes and that is the most fascinating part I say I write I wrote this book from in the key of empathy because I wrote it from behind Joy's eyes it's written in the first person and when I researched it I didn't want to hear anymore what people had to say about her I want to hear what she said about herself and so we look from behind her eyes and Lewis I think loved a lot about her from the get-go we have one of war knees his brother he lived with his brother Warren in a home called the kilns and we have a journal of war knees that says that you know they both fell in love with her very quickly they both felt like she had joined them as almost part of a family but he loved her whit he loved her intelligence they had been pen pals for three years and talked about the big questions she liked to talk about things with him that he loved to talk about and the most fascinating part was that they had read the same books as children so they had these touch points they'd both read George MacDonald and they both discovered that they had read fantasy I never say that book very toasters fantastic at the same age they both read it at 12 years old they had all these little touch points then if you read his thing about saying you too they must have sat there a hundred times and said you too that's how much they had in common and he talks about how her wits sharpened his and his sharpened hers and they were ironed on iron so I think he fell in love with her mind and then he fell in love with her friendship and then he didn't want to be away from her he did not want to be away from her she was going to have to go back to America he actually married her twice he first married her in a civil ceremony because she was going to be sent back to America and he married her to keep her in England and some people can call that charity and maybe it was because he was a very generous man but you don't marry a woman in a civil ceremony just so she can stay in England and then help her buy a house right by your house there's something else but yeah one thing you do so well in the book she takes a lot of the writings of joy her sonnets and you begin every chapter with this wonderful little kind of couplet and each one kind of introduces things but it almost seems like at times joy is really has this design of capturing Lewis now was this intentional and or was it something that I'm just reading into it no I think it's a little bit about but I want to back up for one second because I didn't answer about tolki he didn't like her and he didn't attend her funeral which was so incredibly painful for Lewis because he had just lost not only the love of his life but all for loves in one fell swoop and his best friend suppose a dearest friend I don't think men use the word best friend his suppose of dearest friend did not show up at Joe's funeral and tolki didn't like her and we can only guess his reasons but many of them I think had to do most of it had to do with the fact that she was a divorced woman right he was and he was every Catholic dog Roman Catholic what about is a better word yes and and what we have to remember too as uncomfortable as it is is that in England at that time that was also still very much an anti-semitic attitude in England and she was of the Jewish heritage so and he also didn't like women in pubs he just didn't think that was right so she had a lot of strikes against her with Tolkien and a lot of the Oxford crowds so I believe that if Lewis hadn't really loved her the his Oxford group would have dissuaded him and he would have kind of moved away but he never moved away he never did she lived in London for quite some time before she moved to Oxford about 18 months she lived in London and he would go to see her he would travel there so to set her up as the pursuer is partly right because I believe she fell in love long before he did but also he was no innocent man that she got her hooks in and drew in yes he was no we all are kidding kitty I think knew how to take care yeah I think so in what ways do you identify with joy oh wow how much of you you how much of patty is in joy I think it's the other way around yeah I I came to the novel wanting to write it from 100% her point of view like I mentioned and yet as different as our lives look on paper there were all these little nodal points so on paper we could not be more different I'm still married to my husband I have three kids I'm a preacher's daughter I was raised in the faith you know I live in the year 20 but you know the 21st century there's no way that we seem to have that much in common but we do one of the biggest touch points was was that joy died of breast cancer and I had breast cancer and I'm totally fine joy did not have to die she did not have to die she knew there was a cyst in her breast and she told the doctors over and over and over there is assists in my breast there is a sister my breast and they ignored her completely they told said that you have rheumatoid arthritis you're tired you need a rest you have kidney dip they didn't listen to her so my heart broke for her that she had to die of this terrible thing well I standing here in the year 2018 was able what happened to me in 2011 but was able to catch it early and have treatment and be cured I identified with her struggled with being a writer and a mom she really had a hard time figuring out how to dive deep into her work and be a good mother to young children without her husband's help at all and and like Lewis's brother Morni her husband was an alcoholic that was another thing she and Lewis having was loving loving an alcoholic and trying to figure out how to live with that and so I identified with her struggle between being a writer and a wife and a mom and where your duties rested and where does your creative life come into your your duty as a wife and a mother I identified with her her kind of low self-worth put on her by the shame of society and how she had to struggle through that to be her what she would call find her inner light those were the words she and Lewis would both use when talking about the god about God in in in you and so she struggled to find that inner light I identified with her in that and I often say we we might not all need to do what joy did which is kind of light a match and toss it behind her and burn up her life and move on we might not need to pack up our kids and move to England I'm she left on the ship called the SS United States which always find ironic because she got on the u.s. to leave the u.s. she we might not have to do that but she teaches us that we might have to pack up our expectations that others expectations of us and other people's and society's demands on us and so I'd identified with her and mostly in those ways I don't write poetry so I can't you will you know the one thing I think you do really well is show the relationship of suffering and love where do you see that how do you see love responding to suffering when when someone you love is suffering how does love change actually the conversation you and I had I think I want you to answer that because you really explained it better I thought you had a really good take on it need love versus gift love I think let you take that one there may be a time I think when if you have a very strong wife like all of us do you have a need to be needed it is only when someone suffers that you feel called out of yourself to help someone else and so when you see suffering it calls the best out of you to do something good for that person if you see your wife or your other spouse has been independent you don't have a need she does have a need so you feel kind of left out he's useless yeah and so I see Lois at the time of her suffering of the cancer that's when eros begins that's when this passion really comes to the forefront there but the other thing you do so well in this book is the humor of both of these people during suffering the worst times in the hospital of the deathbed they're laughing and joking yes so how did you bring this humor in well I mean I think you know you wrote the book on it Lois we do yeah we'd like to think of Lois if we think of him at all as this kind of stodgy man on him on a pedestal Lois was hilarious and witty and I might argue sarcastic was miss flippant yeah it was very flippant I get what would cheeky call in England and she was the same she was very cheeky and which is why some of the men of Oxford didn't like her and she very quick very quick see I think that's what he liked too when they were at dinner parties she would be amusingly abrasive to these other dawns that didn't like Lewis anyway because he was a Christian and she could say fu to them and they didn't know what to do they didn't and she was from Brooklyn she was from New York and that's what you said when you wonder greet a British she wasn't quite that abrasive and that brings up and that brings up a great point that or a great topic to talk about which is that what I call the name-calling right is that that that term is awesome also often used for her and yet that that's the term Terri might use in the term a lot of people use where I would say she was forthright and she was audacious and she was raising brazen you know so we can take these names we put on her and we can we can flip them on their heads and you know we can also judge but it'd be best if we don't because we didn't grow up in New York with very harsh immigrant parents and we didn't have to find our way in a world that was telling us we couldn't be who we never meant to be and so she learned as this wounded woman she was also very sickly as a child she had thyroid disease she stopped to wear a radium collar which is how they think she got breast cancer is that in the 30s they put a radium collar on her for her thyroid I know I hear the murmurs right that was just that was a treatment oh and I have I had thyroid things too but anyway so I've identified with her I did not have to wear a radium color but but she you know she was very wounded and so she had this kind of armor that she wore that was very New York and very abrasive that was what she grew up in and so I wouldn't call her abrasive but yes the men in Oxford most definitely would have used that word and I think when you look at her living at the kilns there would be trespassers that would go to their preserves in the back these boys and she would get out the shotgun and yell at him and shoot the gun at him and he would she would she used to enjoy that had her pistol and everything else so she was a wild woman like I said a strong-willed child how did she and Lewis work together though what did she contribute to his later writings because we see this change of emphasis in Lewis's style when he writes till we have faces and reflections on the Psalms so what happened so I often say this Amani of even already said it a couple times today which is that to stop talking about the woman behind the man and start talking about the woman beside the man because that's who she was to him she co-wrote till we have faces with him I mean Terry and I both agree on this and most experts do agree she was his mute which is rarely given credit except for with Terry tonight for the muse best friend love inspiration and co-writer and editor that she was to him she typed his pages she has this great quote I'm actually gonna read it because this is she talks about writing with him and she has this quote where she is talking about this isn't a letter she is writing to her house ex-husband because they remained close letter writers their whole life until she passed away even though he was mean and he was cruel and he once wrote a letter to CS Lewis and told him that joy went there to get him he was very mean he was quite a cruel man but she is she we might call this codependent she wrote to him all the time still trying to help him even as he I'm not gonna give too much away of the book but she says if you ever feel it would be any help don't hesitate to consult me on any plot you're having trouble with this is when they're divorced and she's with Lewis and we can mullet over all night by airmail I don't kid myself in these matters whatever my talents as an independent writer my real gift is as a sort of editor collaborator like max Perkins and I'm happiest when I'm doing something like that though I can't write 1/10 as well as Jack I can tell him how to write more like himself and I love that he is now about 3/4 of the way through his new work what I'd give for that energy and finds my advice indispensable but she says I can tell him to how to write more like himself and I just think that kind of nails it he we don't give her credit and he he became a better Lois in his work because of the way she worked with him that's great he wrote several books that we are doing studies with agali near Christianity he was on the BBC he was the second most popular voice in England during the war behind Churchill is behind Winston Churchill yeah so and then Screwtape Letters he wrote we're discussing that reflections on the Psalms I think we're the kind of the Jewish influence looking at the Hebrew Psalms and how wonderful and robust they are and that's something that joy that vitality brought in and then finally his a grief observed what about a grief observed do you see joy in a new light how do you see joy through that prism well first I'm going to touch on you talked about her writing on the Psalms with him joy wrote a book and was working on a book when she wrote Louis his first letter she was working on a book called smoke on the mountain and it is 10 essays on the 10 commandments and so she had already had some experience trying to take things like the Psalms or the Ten Commandments and when she got ill she was actually writing a book about the seven deadly sins called the seven deadlies and so she did influence the Psalms so they would take these but a grief observed Wow when you read a grief observed you feel the palpable pain of Lewis when he lost her and if you don't you're you're broken because that book is painful to people it's wrong and when he first published it he published it under a nom de plume clerk and W I have one and I bought it at Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford I have one of the original and W clerk of grief observed and in it he is totally raw and that's why he didn't want to put his name on it and he calls her he uses the initial H in it her first name is Helen her name is Helen joy David men and so when I reread that book after starting to do my research I had read it years ago but when I reread that book through the prism of is a I'm gonna start crying it was it she takes on you see why he loved her in that book he calls her my mistress my wife my best friend my whole world air sea water he named something he called her that and he lost all of those and when you read that number one you're like wow what kind of love is this and then you see her under under this light or this prism of his affection his enchantment his his devotion to her yep we're gonna be taking questions in just a bit in about a minute one thing about a grief observed the critics have looked at that book and said see Lewis lost his faith because he's railing against this great cosmic sadist and Lewis does not Lewis is just honest with his faith and the questions he has the doubts he has he lays out there but by the end of the book he's coming back and the book that follows that is letters to Malcolm chiefly on prayer and you see his heart has been softened by this whole experience of grief because he knows we only live in the Shadowlands we are not yet at the home we are meant to be and when his friend Charles Williams died he said my idea of Charles Williams didn't change but my idea of heaven became much more attractive I realized who else is there waiting for me and so Lewis I think with joy they have these kind of tender moments and they help all of us but now we'd like to hear a time for a couple questions from you if you want to kind of speak out or we can keep talking because we're good at that oh really what was her relationship with her sons yes yes yes because we both met one of them yes so it was a very good relationship now the boys were buried so he kept them when she passed away her husband bill threatened to come get them and bring them back to America and when joy thought she was dying so Louis took her back to the kilns and she believed she was on her deathbed they set her up in the middle of what they call the common room what we would call the family room and he set her up in there and she had a day night and day nurse and a night nurse and Bill wrote a letter and said when she dies I'm coming to get those boys and Louis and she made Louis promise if I die never let those boys return to bill or to America and Louis promised her that that would not happen and he wrote probably one of the harshest letters of his life in in response to Bill and so he had he had a very good relationship with them now the boys themselves were very different we've discovered since so they have two sons Davey and Douglas Davey has passed away Douglas is still with us he's an incredible steward of the Lewis estate he lives in Malta I had to look it up okay it's an island in the middle of Indian Ocean he owns it he pretty much owns Sol LeWitt so but Davi we have discovered because now that David has passed Douglas has told us Davey had schizophrenia and so I think Lewis had a much more difficult relationship with Davi than he did Douglas but he did the best he knew how don't you think is this a confirmed old bachelor yes very much and the book that they read when they came to the kilns was The Magician's Nephew which is a story about a boy that tries to save his dying mother and Lewis is being autobiographical for his own mother but then we have Doug Gresham reading this in realizing this has happened to my mother too and so kept capturing kind of a dub poignancy of these boys but Doug Doug is a character I mean he looks like he walked out of 1890 or something he wears a white turtleneck and riding boots and a big big cross every day looks like he walked out of a 18th century Anglican Church he did yes or Eastern Shore don't you know I'm sorry that's just a joke any other questions before I get in trouble I think we'd agreed somewhere else my favorite part but I would guess that the different parts were his favorite at different times in their relationship yeah wouldn't wouldn't you I think so too I I think he always enjoyed her mind and her spirit it was just so delightful but he did feel he said what had passed me in my 20s I now have in my sixties so the the erotic element for him was something so fresh and unexpected in his life so hilarious when you read the four loves and he talks about arrows he's talking about laughter in the marriage band yes wives are always laughing at their husbands okay she had some she had her share her best friend so her best friend in New York was her college roommate a woman named Belle Kaufman who wrote the book up the down staircase yeah so that was her best friend in New York and Belle's father actually wrote fiddler on the roof just some useless trivia in case you're ever playing Trivial Pursuit and so but she did not have a gaggle of friends she did not have a bridge club or she was not that tight but she she did have deep friendships with the people that she was close to she was best friends know her pen pal in London yes she had a pen pal in London that she wrote very good she was very dear friends with Michelle Williams Michael Williams who was Charles Williams one of the Inklings widows she was very close to a woman in Oxford that she met after she married Lewis named Jean Wakeman and actually the box of love sonnets that were recently discovered she wrote CS Lewis 45 love sonnets we kind of skipped over that that start each chapter little pieces of the sonnets start the chapters that was my fault you asked it I and Jean was her best friend and recently that box of love sonnets was found in Jean Jean Wakemans closet so she had she had some deep friendships yeah she was jealous though I think Ruth pitter a woman that Lewis almost had a relationship with was a poet wonderful lady and then Roger Greene one of the biographers of Lewis but they went in the Hollywood I mean honeymoon down to the Greek Isles together but his wife was sitting there one day in the kilns and she hadn't which he had met her before but had forgotten and she was just angry what the H are you doing in this house who are you and get out get out and just yelling at this woman but she says I'm Rogers wife and just so you can see that she was really afraid that other woman would encroach upon her little area now The Kills was really kind of a stinky place before she moved in remembered Lewis and his brother would smoke all the time in ashes were always on the floor you didn't need an ashtray there they're a bachelors and the dog would come in and urinate in the bedrooms and so it would stink this is the house she moved into this is Lewis that you never smell okay this is the other Lewis that's out there she died Lewis you never smell or at least in town that's true Wow so you're asking me in my research what was the hardest to find out and what was surprising that I found out the hardest thing to discover was when they really fell in love because all the letters in communication with them have been destroyed and everybody has their own opinion about that so I dug deep and far and wide for that to come to my own conclusion and not somebody else's conclusion what was most surprising for me was how little credit like I already said was given to her as the woman she was beside him so much credit is given to her as the wife of or you know the man the woman that died well with a new faith but when I discovered the integral part of her life with him I was surprised that I had never heard that before time for one more question really that's all oh I don't think there was anything unhealthy about it no I think it was a very good solid marriage in many ways just a model what what seemed unhealthy to you like what part of it felt okay go ahead you go first I think they both recognize the flaws and the sins in each other and forgave each other there's a remarkable amount of grace and forgiveness in this relationship where you just overlook things and you realize okay this is the kind of person I meant let me help sanctify them as they help sanctify you and a good marriage does that and if you're in mad passionate arrows those are the words you use you know my everything might and neither one of them felt like they were everything and excluded Christ or God they were both people of great faith and and Lois was still very involved with his friendships and his writing and she would admit over and over that one of the one of the things that one of her greatest foibles I might say instead of sins was her jealousy and her anger it was left over from childhood and she would repent of it again and again so it wasn't like this we might be making it sound like this kind of exclusionary you're my everything nobody else it was nothing like that that was just an aspect of a very human relationship and and that's part of why we talk about this and part of why I wrote the book is that neither one of them deserve to be on a pedestal we put him on one son we go looking for her to be this kind of image of the woman that someone as great as CS Lewis would marry and we come to them realizing that they're broken human beings Lewis had a past and a storied one that there are a lot of things about Lewis's life before he converted that are very broken and there was a lot in her life too and they came together at this period in their life in a redemptive way so I don't if anything I think their marriage was incredibly healthy and I would stay away from Shadowlands with Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins I mean he's Hannibal Lecter he's not CS Lewis okay that he is he's too prissy in this whole thing too he's always cleaned and dressed up Lewis was like an unmade bed as we said he was a mess and he loved it that way and I think when you see the humanity of him you are attracted to him much more you realize he's just like us you would never recognize him just walking in Oxford he looked like a ruddy face butcher just walk is like losing his hat and everything else no please [Music] [Music] I'll start cuz I there's a lot this is a whole lecture series but I would say one of the the greater joys for joy plan words there is that she realized she could be loved without being worthy that she could be loved just as she was because he's gonna make me cry he confessed his love for her which she was at her weakest she was dying she could not help him she couldn't do anything for him she couldn't prove her worth she couldn't make his life better and he loved her anyway and she was stunned into the realization that she didn't have to spend her life proving her Worth and I think that was one of the greatest lessons of of God's divine grace through Lois do you agree I agree wholeheartedly and I would I would go to the other side though to and emphasize that Lewis learned the unexpected comedy of God even pull these together one of his favorite authors was Samuel Johnson and Samuel Johnson once wrote marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures and he discovered the pains but the pleasures as well and it was a wonderful gift [Applause]

Channel: Patti Callahan and Patti Callahan Henry

Views: 27,338

Rating: 4.8547215 out of 5

Keywords: #becomingmrslewis, #cslewis, #joydavidman, #cslewiswife, #cslewislove, #terrylindvall, #Shadowlands

Id: zUToc6kVkLA

Length: 46min 37sec (2797 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 08 2018