Pilgrim’s Problem C. S. Lewis By now I
should be entering on the supreme stage Of the whole walk, reserved
for the late afternoon. The heat was to be over now; the anxious
mountains, The airless valleys and the sun-baked rocks, behind me.
Now, or soon now, if all is well, come the majestic Rivers of
foamless charity that glide beneath Forests of contemplation. In the
grassy clearings Humility with liquid eyes and damp, cool nose
Should come, half-tame, to eat bread from my hermit hand. If storms
arose, then in my tower of fortitude-- It ought to have been in sight
by this—I would take refuge; But I expected rather a pale mackerel
sky, Feather-like, perhaps shaking from a lower cloud Light drops
of silver temperance, and clover earth Sending up mists of chastity,
a country smell, Till earnest stars blaze out in the established sky
Rigid with justice; the streams audible; my rest secure. I can
see nothing like all this. Was the map wrong? Maps can be wrong. But
the experienced walker knows That the other explanation is more often
true.
C. S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis, is best known
for his prose works but he wrote a fair amount of poetry as well. Born
in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898, Lewis was a reader and writer from an
early age. Raised in a Christian household, “Jack” (as he was always
called) began to consider himself an atheist in his teenage years.
Always a brilliant student, Lewis received a scholarship to University
College, Oxford, in 1916, on the eve of World War I. He entered the army
and experienced trench warfare on the front line at the Somme Valley. He
was injured in friendly fire and had a long physical and mental
recovery. After the war he resumed his studies at Oxford, where, after
gaining First Class honors in Latin and Greek, Philosophy and Ancient
History, and English, he remained as a tutor. Lewis’ rediscovery
of his Christian faith was nurtured by reading—especially the works of
George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton—and by conversations with
believing friends, like J. R. R. Tolkien. He famously wrote of his
conversion, “You must picture me alone in [my] room… night after night,
feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the
steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to
meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me…. I gave in,
and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that
night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
C. S. Lewis became one of the most famous and prolific of Christian
apologists. He died on November 22, 1963. Lewis loved the
natural world, and he loved to “ramble,” taking long walks – twenty
miles, sometimes—in the countryside. In this poem, he describes the
spiritual journey as a ramble, and at times playfully evokes the
language of a guidebook. This ramble doesn’t go according to plan. It is
late afternoon, and he has been walking a while already. Lewis writes:
“By now I should be entering on the supreme stage / Of the whole walk.”
The difficult part of the day—the heat, the mountains, the rocks—was
supposed to be over by now, and nothing before him but beautiful views
and easy walking. This far into his spiritual journey, Lewis
expected to have arrived at the Christian virtues: “majestic / Rivers of
foamless charity,” “Forests of contemplation,” “towers of fortitude,”
“Light drops of silver temperance,” and “mists of chastity.” But that
hasn’t happened. “I can see nothing like all this,” he writes. “Was the
map wrong? / Maps can be wrong.” The conclusion of the poem is tongue in
cheek. “The experienced walker knows / That the other explanation is
more often true.” The map wasn’t wrong – the rambler was.
“Pilgrim’s Problem” makes the point that the journey doesn’t get easier.
In the spiritual life, most of us do not make steady, continual
progress. We do advance, but we do not leave difficulties and temptation
behind. If we think we will get to a place where the virtues come
effortlessly, we are fooling ourselves—we are misreading “the map,”
which did not promise consolations—just the cross. Lewis’s poem
made me think of medieval labyrinths, like the one at Chartres Cathedral
in France. When we walk the labyrinth, we do not go straight to the
center. Rather, we follow a circuitous path, which takes us very close
to the center from time to time, but then moves away from it again. On
the spiritual journey, there are moments where we feel very close to
God, but there are also moments where the end seems far away, or where
we lose sight of the goal altogether. We can give in to discouragement,
and blame the map—or acknowledge, as the speaker in Lewis’s poem does,
that “the other explanation is more often true”—and adjust our
expectations.
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