A Lesson from Professor Lewis

I opened up my inbox.

Amongst the endless spam (seriously, does ‘unsubscribe’ mean nothing these days?) there was an email from a friend. Attached to that email was a quote from CS Lewis.

My friend wrote that an acquaintance of his had recently posted this quote on Facebook. It had been posted with the following comment:

“Lewis on the difficulties of singleness and marriage”.

In my (single) friend’s email, he expressed his disappointment and bewilderment about his (married) friend’s decision to post this quote:

“I really wonder what they're thinking when they post stuff like this - whether for even an instant they consider how it might be received by a single person.”

I knew the feeling. I’ve often wondered the same thing.

But my friend also expressed his confusion about Lewis’ quote:

“Lewis's apparent equating of singleness with miserable solitude seems off the mark (though I haven't read the source for context).”

I agreed with my friend. This didn’t sound like Lewis. At least, it didn’t sound like something Lewis would say about marriage and singleness in particular. My interest was piqued. And so, I did what any good researcher would do. I went back to the sources.

Here’s what I discovered.

Straight to the Source

Lewis did write these words. He wrote them in a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, an American woman with whom he exchanged letters for over a decade, right up until his death. Several contemporary books include records of Lewis’ correspondence with Mary Willis. The description of one, Letters to an American Lady, reads:

On October 26, 1950, C. S. Lewis wrote the first of more than a hundred letters he would send to a woman he had never met, but with whom he was to maintain a correspondence for the rest of his life. Ranging broadly in subject matter, the letters discuss topics as profound as the love of God and as frivolous as preferences in cats. Lewis himself clearly had no idea that these letters would ever see publication, but they reveal facets of his character little known even to devoted readers of his fantasy and scholarly writings -- a man patiently offering encouragement and guidance to another Christian through the day-to-day joys and sorrows of ordinary life.

The words in the quote posted on Facebook were extracted from a letter Lewis wrote to Mary Willis, dated 8 November 1962. You’ll find the full text of the letter in question below.¹ However, before you read it, let me remind you of the excerpted text in the posted image which was described as being Lewis’ words “on the difficulties of singleness and marriage”.

8 November 1962

Dear Mary Willis,

Yes, I can well understand how you long for ‘a place of your own’. I norminally have one and am nominally master of the house, but things seldom go as I would have chosen. The truth is that the only alternatives are either solitude (with all its miseries and dangers, both moral and physical) or else all the rubs and frustrations of a joint life. The second, even at its worst seems to me far better.

I hope one is rewarded for all the stunning replies one thinks of and does not utter! But alas, even when we don’t say them, more than we suspect comes out in our look, our manner, and our voice. An elaborately patient silence can be very provoking! We are all fallen creatures and all v. hard to live with. It is not only Episcopalians who behave as if they had never read St James.

I hope the operation will turn out to be unnecessary.

Yours,
Jack

Perhaps you’ve already worked it out.

Lewis’ letter had nothing to do with his views on marriage and singleness. But if you aren’t quite convinced yet, well, let me give you some more context to his correspondence with Mary Willis Shelburne.

From his other letters to her, we can tell that Mary Willis seems to have been quite a troubled and, at times, rather unhappy woman. She had a very difficult relationship with her daughter and son-in-law. She was in poor physical health. Sometime around 1960 her doctors and family had deemed her unfit to continue living independently in her own home. At the time of this Nov 8 1962 letter, she was either (reluctantly) living with her daughter and son-in-law, or she had been moved into an aged-care ‘Home’. (Both were true at different points during their correspondence. I couldn’t quite tell which was the case at the time of this particular letter.) She also seems to have been quite financially impoverished, and heavily reliant upon the support of her family and friends (including Lewis).

On Nov 8th, Lewis replied to a letter Mary Willis Shelburne had just sent him in which she had expressed her longing for ‘a place of her own’. It seems she missed her independence and resented that (in her view) it had been stripped away from her, never to be attained again.

And here’s one final piece of important information you need to know. At the time this letter was written and sent both CS Lewis and Mary Willis Shelburne had been widowed. They were both single again.

What does all this mean? It means that Lewis’ words were not an exhortation about singleness and marriage. Rather than were an exhortation (and a gentle rebuke) to his pen pal, that she might remember that none of us was created for the kind of enduring solitude and independence that she was craving. Lewis was reminding her that we all need others, even as all of us are fallen people who are hard to live with.

The same sentiments are echoed in a letter he sent her just a month later. In a December 10th 1962 letter, Lewis insisted that:

One must get over any false shame about accepting necessary help. One never has been ‘independent’. Always, in some mode or other, one has lived on others, economically, intellectually, spiritually… We are members of one another whether we choose to recognise the fact or not.²

As Lewis wrote to this elderly, troubled, unhealthy, unhappy, poor, perhaps even somewhat embittered widowed Christian woman—a woman who longed not only for enduring solitude but independence from others— he was seeking to remind her that our creator has made humans for “joint life” with others humans. This kind of “joint life”, he writes, is better by far than isolation.

Lewis’ words to Mary Willis had nothing to do with marriage and singleness, per se. They were about the necessity of our being human beings in reliant relationship with others, rather than longing for relational solitude and independence apart from others.

To live in reliant relationship is to live the “joint life”.

Not in the Least Surprised

Am I surprised that Lewis’ words have now been removed from their context, excerpted and abbreviated in self-selective ways and reframed to bolster the contemporary evangelical obsession (yes, obsession) with idealising and idolising marriage as the ‘joint life’, and so depicting singleness as the miserable and dangerous life of solitude?

Not in the least.

I do not doubt that my friend’s friend who posted the meme thought that Lewis’ words were about marriage and singleness. I mean, why wouldn’t they? Those kinds of sentiments are precisely what evangelicals have been saying about singleness for decades and decades. Why wouldn’t this person assume that Lewis was saying the same thing? Why wouldn’t they assume that he was warning against the miserable dangers and tragic solitude of singleness? Why wouldn’t they assume that Lewis was affirming that “joint life” (i.e., relational life) belongs to those who are either a husband or wife?

But friends, that wasn’t at all what Lewis was saying. And given his rich, abundant and varied relational life — as a bachelor, then as a married man and then as a widower—I suspect he would be bitterly disappointed that anyone thought it was. I mean, this is the same man who reportedly wrote:

It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.³

Learning from Lewis

Guys, this evangelical obsession with making marriage the sum-total, the golden-goal, the ultimate form of the human relational life—the very definition of the “joint life”—is just so exhausting and demoralising and frustrating.

But more than that, it contradicts the teaching of Scripture.

The Bible celebrates, honours, encourages, commands and delights in all manner of relationships between human beings—in all the ways we are called to “joint life” with, amongst and to one another. It most importantly venerates the “joint life” of the household of God. The “joint life” of being disciples of Jesus. The “joint life” of being brothers and sisters in Christ. The “joint life” of being sons and daughters of God. The “joint life” that will be the eternal life of God’s people, in God’s place, under God’s rule.

Yes! The Bible honours marriage. It speaks so highly, so wonderfully, of the one-flesh relationship between a husband and wife. But it never—NEVER—makes that relationship the relationship. It never depicts it as the way to live the “joint life”. It never caricatures the unmarried life as a life of miserable, dangerous, isolated solitude. I mean, goodness gracious, the apostle Paul says that he wishes everyone was unmarried!!! (Even as he recognises that it is not “best” for every Christian person to be so).

Why then do we evangelicals—the ones who claim to really take Scripture seriously—persist in our obsessive idealisation and idolisation of marriage as the “joint life”? Why do we take words that speak about the richness and abundance and necessity of human relationship in all their forms and varieties, and self-selectively interpret them so they become about just one relationship? Not only that, but why are we so fixated on the one human relationship that ends with death? On the one (wonderful) expression of “joint life” that will not carry over into eternity?

Why, oh why, do we do this?

Well, I’ve written many a post, indeed multiple book chapters, seeking to understand and explain the answer to that question. And so, I won’t rehearse all that again here.

But friends, I do want to ask you if you’ll be part of the unwinding of this. I do want to ask you if you’ll be part of the changing of the script. I do want to ask if you’ll commit to understanding and applying the full and wonderful counsel of God on marriage, singleness, relationship and community more fully and faithfully, I do want to ask you if you’ll allow the gospel—and all its wonderful earthly and eternal blessings— to shape your thinking about what it means for those of us who delight in the fullness of “joint life” with our Lord and Saviour to so also delight in the fullness of “joint life” with one another.

For here too Professor Lewis has a lesson for us:

“But, 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 "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian 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 in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.⁴

1. Location 30441 of the Kindle version of C.S. Lewis’ Collected Letters Volume Three.

2. Location 30609, ibid.

3. I’m having trouble tracking down the exact citation for this quote. Let me know if you know where it is from!

4. C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, p.89