Monday Morning Music Ministry

2-26-24

I am going to take you on a brief tour of some surprising places. I have had the wanderlust all my life, and have discovered that some legendary places (the “Room with a View”) can be mundane; and some very memorable sites greet us unannounced.

For instance, strolling around Venice (yes, one can walk around that city), I once turned a corner and came face-to-face with a plaque identifying a modest building as the birthplace of composer Antonio Vivaldi. It seemed to me like holy ground.

In Rome I stood in the plaza in front of the meticulously preserved Pantheon, where once stood the Temple Agrippa. Inside are the tombs of the artist Raphael and the composer Arcangelo Corelli (I think one of the most beautiful names ever borne by a person) but the plaza is where St Paul, having arrived in Rome by foot along the Appian Way, first shared the Gospel in the seat of the Roman Empire. I stood where he stood. Holier ground.

In Ireland, at a roadside stop by a modest chapel, I saw in its even more modest cemetery the gravestone of the great poet William Butler Yeats… revealed by no special markers nor arrows. By pure serendipity I found myself on holy ground, as it felt to me; secular – but you may know what I mean.

I had a similar experience at the other corner of Ireland, so to speak. A friend and I had traversed, roughly, the perimeter of that wonderful island over two weeks. Near the vacation’s end we sought lodgings outside Belfast. Rather by chance – without, that is, any premonition of another “holy ground” experience in the offing – we found ourselves in a little village called Crawfordsburn in County Down. There was an ancient Old Inn (it calls itself), rambling and half-timbered. It had charms and, most importantly, a room to rent and a restaurant.

I was startled to read an unpretentious plaque on the wall when I registered. It stated that decades ago members of the legendary Inklings group occasionally met there (otherwise, more famously, in Oxford, in England). That was the famous circle of literary friends that included C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. Moreover, since its establishment in 1614 the Old Inn had been a meeting place for writers including Swift, Tennyson, Thackeray, and Dickens. Holy ground, of sorts, for me, a writer.

Most pertinent, or compelling, according to the plaque, was that the Old Inn was where C S Lewis and his wife Joy Davidman spent their honeymoon.

Most readers will be quite familiar with Lewis’s classic stories in the Chronicles of Narnia books. I had not read them (almost alone among my friends and my own children). I hope that you readers are familiar with Lewis’s life and his tragically short marriage to Joy; there have been books and movies about them. Married late in life, Lewis was a former atheist who came to a saving, and influential, relationship with Christ. He fell in love with Joy, an American Jewess who died of cancer only four years into their marriage. Shadowlands is one telling of their remarkable and bittersweet life together.

The feeling of a presence on “Holy Ground” was scarcely related, I have said, to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe or such classics. But C S Lewis was also known for his writing (and BBC broadcasts) as one of the greatest of all Christian apologists of any era; he was gifted to explain the Gospel in logical, layman’s terms. (By the way, Lewis’s favorite poet was Yeats; what a trip of “coincidences” that was for me!)

I am only one of millions whose faith has been awakened, challenged, informed, illuminated, inspired, and fortified by the simple truths C S Lewis powerfully explained and gently shared. Of his many works in the field (The Screwtape Letters; A Grief Observed; Surprised by Joy) the thin collection of essays Mere Christianity is the enduring classic.

I can paraphrase his powerful refutation of the common human tendency to acknowledge (really, dismiss) Jesus as “merely” a great teacher:

I want to prevent anyone from saying, “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing you cannot say! A man who was merely a man but made the claims Jesus did would not be a great moral teacher; he would either be a lunatic – like a man who says he is a poached egg – or evil. Or the biggest of all liars.

You must make your choice. Either this Man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon… or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.

He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Such is the beginning – perhaps, even, the culmination – of arguments you can make about this Jesus with atheists, agnostics, skeptics, scoffers, and, actually, your own self when you have moments of doubt.

C S Lewis brilliantly allowed us to relate to the Incarnation of God Almighty. Mighty? Yes. Distant, unapproachable? No. We can know Him as the Lover of our souls.

And, knowing Him… we can stand on holy ground.

+ + +

Click: Jesus Lover of My Soul