Ten years ago today, I sat in Westminster Abbey, quiet and drawing all in. About a thousand people from around the world had gathered for a dedication of a marker in Poets Corner for the writer C. S. Lewis. It was all very moving. The abbey choir sang a beautiful anthem composed by Paul Mealor and specially commissioned for the service using Lewis’s own poem “Love as Warm as Tears.” Douglas Gresham, younger stepson to Lewis (and who has tried in recent years to preserve the integrity of the Narnia stories as they have been filmed), also spoke at the service.
The "sermon" was delivered by former Archbishop Rowan Williams, an eloquent speaker and gentle scholar in his own rights. After Archbishop Williams’s remarks, the marker stone was unveiled where it had been placed in the abbey floor, and Walter Hooper, then 82, knelt down to lay the remembrance bouquet on the memorial stone. During parts of the service, I wept for this belated recognition by the English academic and religious bodies, not for any personal recognition to Lewis but that we might better understood his wanting us not to see the world as what our egos can construct but to learn to see and care about one another as spiritual beings.
You can find his full talk in online searches, but here is some of what Rowan Williams said. He had been talking about Lewis’s book Perelandra:
“But this wonderful and eloquent satirical scene is very typical of one aspect of Lewis’s apologetic that we sometimes overlook: his profound, sophisticated, and witty sense of the terrible things we do to language. You might even say that, for Lewis, the abuse of language is one of the things which would tell you immediately that you couldn’t trust someone, that the person you were listening to didn’t understand what it was to be human.
“Lewis is interested in de-mystifying the myths that we tell ourselves – the myths about the intrinsic nobility of the human race, entitled to exploit not only its own planet but every other one in the universe; the myths we tell ourselves about how our will and our imagination can somehow make us more than human. And in spelling that out, he shows us how the aspiration to become more than human leaves us profoundly less than human....
“Only the Word, the Word incarnate with the most capital of Ws, can save us, not only from nonsense, but from the self-consuming boredom of endless inhumanity, Unmanhood. And when we allow the Word to speak in us and to us, that is when – he says in a paper of the 1940s – that is when we learn how ‘to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that we call realistic omits.’”