Leave the bulbs alone

I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer lately, and I came across this passage which really spoke to me:

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life…we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good….

It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore….

And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. “Unless a seed die…”

Thoughts? (I agree with Lewis, by the way. :))

Oh, I really like that analogy! We have to learn from the past, whether from mistakes, or from triumphs. But we can’t dwell on it. It’s saying our past paves the way to our future. So it’s going to have an influence on it, but you still have to face forward, you can’t always be looking back. Flowers, though, that’s such a great analogy, I love plants, and my parents have an insane garden every year :P

So,yeah, I also agree.

I also agree with C.S. Lewis on this one. Not looking back is sometimes difficult for me. This one really hit home and was much needed.

Mary: Exactly. We can’t let the past steal our future.

Sean: It’s so easy to look back, and memory can be strong enough that it’s very tempting to just go back to what we know, instead of dealing with the unknown future (and even the present).

Was this written after Joy died? It sounds like he’s going through a hard moment. On top of that, he sounds a little ticked off at God and feeling guilty for it. Poor guy.

Yes, it was published posthumously (1963). I don’t know about the ticked-off bit, though — it doesn’t come across that way to me. Sure, he misses Joy, and that’s painful (perhaps that’s where it comes from), but he seems to be okay with God’s turning the future into something different but still just as good. But then again I’m tired, so I could be wrong. :)

Maybe I’m reading too much into the anguished tone and the word “sulkily.” :) He seems to have accepted in his mind that God won’t give him last year’s blooms, but his heart is struggling to calibrate.

On second thought, I can see that. :)