Just finished the last book in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. This book kind of felt like the series became a car crash with his other work, The Abolition of Man (which I enjoyed when I read it), a few volumes of Arthurian legend, a Boris Karloff movie (i.e. disembodied heads being re-animated) and Doctor Doolittle.  I found the resulting carnage quite strange and surprisingly different from Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.  At times, the book’s characters/events were disturbing (and corny enough, i.e. N.I.C.E.) to the point of becoming oppressive.  I actually wanted to finish the book as quickly as possible. 

Maybe it’s because I’m not British.  Maybe it’s because Lewis is a bit of a heady type writer (although I can follow him pretty well in Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, etc.)  Whatever the reason, I didn’t connect with this book as much as I have with some of his other works.  But C.S. Lewis is a great writer, nonetheless, and even though I didn’t connect with the book as a whole, there were many bright moments for me as I slogged my way through it.  I especially liked this account of Jane’s first moment of "encounter" with God.  It’s a brilliant description of a mystical moment (which are inherently difficult to put into words:)

"Then, at one particular corner of the gooseberry patch, the change came.

What awaited her there was serious to the degree of sorrow and beyond.  There was no form or sound.  The mould under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border, were not visibly changed.  But they were changed.  A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person.  Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between.  In the closeness of that contact she perceived at once that the Director’s words had been entirely misleading.  This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand.  It was the origin of all right demands and contained them.  In its light you could understand them; but from them you could know nothing of it.  There was nothing, and never had been anything, like this.  And now there was nothing except this. Yet also, everything had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed.  In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air.  The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded.  It was a person (not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of.  And the making went on amidst a kind of splendour or sorrow or both, whereof she could not tell whether it was in the moulding hands or in the kneaded lump.

Words take too long.  To be aware of all this and to know that it had already gone made one single experience.  It was revealed only in its departure.  The largest thing that had ever happened to her had, apparently, found room for itself in a moment of time too short to be called time at all.  Her hand closed on nothing but a memory.  And as it closed, without an instant’s pause, the voices of those who have not joy rose howling and chattering from every corner of her being.

"Take care.  Draw back.  Keep your head.  Don’t commit yourself," they said.  And then more subtly, from another quarter, "You have had a religious experience.  This is very interesting.  Not everyone does.  How much better you will now understand Seventeenth-Century poets!"  Or from a third direction, more sweetly, "Go on.  Try to get it again…"

But her defences had been captured and these counter-attacks were unsuccessful.

How many of you take into account the great benefit of truly understanding 17th century poets in your presentation of the Gospel?  It’s given me something new to ponder.  (Ha-ha)