I just finished Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis and needed to come get out some of these thoughts swirling around in my head. I started talking about it on Christianne’s blog because I see parallels in the book to so many ares of the Christian life. It’s one of those books that you could pick up a dozen times and get something different out of it because you’re in a different place in your life every time.
It’s not a simple allegory. It’s not even a metaphor. It’s a story rich with metaphors. It’s like Lewis held a prism up to Truth, and it shot colors and light all over the room. You don’t know which one to follow first.
Lewis takes the story of Psyche and Cupid and pulls out Truth–a god who fell in love with a woman and a woman who fell in love with a god and the suffering they endured to be reunited. Lewis recreates the story with who I think is his most sophisticated and well-developed character, Orual.
What can I say about Orual? She’s lovable, pitiable, hateful, jealous, loving, comforting, mothering, spiteful. I am her and yet I hate her and love her and understand her and beg for her to change.
And then there’s Psyche, so full of joy and yet so willing to give it up in order to redeem Orual.
The story is written from Orual’s perspective, who takes up her pen to lodge a complaint against the gods who took Psyche, her beloved sister, from her. She tells the story, and Lewis pulls us into her point of view–her love and her sorrow. And though there are times that you can see Orual’s fault and you want to yell at her and tell her no!, there are also times when you’re so ingrained in her head that you never see how she failed until she learns it herself in the end. Ah, the brilliance of the book.
Lewis weaves in elements from the original myth in surprising ways. You see them and you think, what are they doing here? They belong over there. And then when you come to the end, it all makes sense. Can I say it again? Brilliant.
It’s a story about love and redemption and the Christian life. You are in need of redemption, and then you are God’s conduit to redeem another. You are fighting those who tell you to walk by sight rather than by faith, and you are the voice that’s a stumbling block to your sister.
Right now in my life, I’m Psyche trekking up the hill to this unknown death. I’m scared. There was so much promise. So many people said so. But now I’m being tied to this cross. I don’t know what’s next. At the first of this year, I told you about my most difficult prayer. It’s a prayer of insignificance (there were all these lovely comments on it encouraging me, but alas, those are lost to my old blog). And this insignificance at it’s heart is a death-to-self. Deliver me from service of self alone, as the prayer goes (from The Book of Common Prayer).
I’ve posted discussion questions for this book that you can steal for your own book club or interact with on Intersection.
