Rowan Williams on CS Lewis

via Wesley Hill–it’s Anglicans all the way down on this fine Guy Fawkes Day:

Lewis is a brilliant storyteller; he’s not one of the world’s great novelists. But even so, what he does, he does wonderfully. He is always very good at depicting something about joy.

If you look at an extraordinary episode in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Lucy finds herself reading a story in a magical book, when she puts the book down she can’t remember the details of the story. She just knows that it’s the best thing she’s ever read, the most enriching and beautiful thing she’s ever encountered. As she’s talking to Aslan afterward she says, “Will you tell me that story again?” Aslan says, “One day I shall tell it to you forever.” It’s that kind of moment where you realize that Lewis has got hold of something that very few writers do manage to crystallize, a sense of absolute immersion in the richness of the moment. …

But what he does with it then, instead of making it a cozy, backward-looking thing, he unites it to all of these great moral challenges, the challenge of facing up to yourself, the challenge of going on being faithful in prosaic ways day by day. It’s really only by doing the next thing—being faithful in small particulars—that you come to this joy. It’s not magic; it’s not nostalgia. It’s a very fine balance that he deals with remarkably.

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