Ann Patchett: The Dutch House, p/b, London, Bloomsbury, 2019

American bookseller, journalist and influential author Ann Patchett’s eleventh novel has a House as its central character! The Dutch House is an ecclectic,  over-engineered and richly furnished mansion in a quiet and leafy residential area of downtown Pennsylvania. The story is told through the eyes of Danny Conroy and his much loved sister Maeve and charts their story from childhood onwards through many twists and turns but the connecting link throughout is the Dutch House which exerts its own spell over them.  The novel has an easy flow which draws the reader onwards through all the normal tensions of childhood, growing up, unexpected changes, education, work and relationships, curiously oblivious to any political or major external events which might have made inroads into the story. If the centre of the novel is not the house it could be the inner psychological development and maturing of the mind of Danny Conroy. The novel is engaging to a degree, without in my view, ever reaching great heights.

Ann Patchett, author of the The Dutch House

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it.  But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had 

the treasure in it.  I realise now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas

C S Lewis: The Weight of Glory: A Collection of Lewis’s Most Moving Addresses,p/b, London, William Collins, 2013 (1949)

 p.30f:   A very famous passage from Lewis about heaven (glory) from the first essay: The Weight of Glory.

…a desire [for our own far off perfect country and place; something I used to dream about when I was a child]  for something that has never actually appeared in our experience…out commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past.  But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it;  what he remembered would would turn out to be itself remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things —the beauty, the memory of our own past— are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself ; they are only the scent of a flower  we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am: but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used fo break enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantments as well as for inducing them.

I have always found this passage deeply moving.  There is exceptional beauty on planet earth..in music, in drama, in writing, in nature, in persons, in architecture, in painting, in tapestry, in poetry, in nobility, in courage, in children, in love, and much else besides. Nevertheless such beauty is fragile, fleeting and leaves us at times desperate to reclaim it. Lewis helps us here to understand both heaven and the love of God.

Some Thought starters from the essay The Weight of Glory:

1. p.32;  … no social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics.  Have we come to grips with the inevitability of our own death? (Is corona virus also helping us to do this?)

2.  p33: Scripture is  symbolical when it speaks of the hereafter. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. Do we accept the authority of Scripture?

3.  p34:  The Five promises of Scripture:  (i) That we shall be with Christ

(ii) That we shall be like him.

(iii) That we shall all have “glory”.

(iv) That we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained

(v)  That we shall have some sort of official position in the universe.

What do we think of Lewis’s understanding of the Biblical view of “how heaven works”? How does this relate to the more current understanding of Heaven as the renewed kingdom of God on earth. 

4. p.36:   Traditional Biblical imagery of salvation such as palms, crowns, white robes, thrones and splendour, does not impress Lewis and most “moderns”; he places more store in God’s people endeavouring to be “good and faithful servants”, a “creature before its creator”. What do we think about this and the danger of the “deadly poison of self-admiration”? (p.37)

5.  p.38   Lewis plays down the importance of “how we think of God” …”how God thinks of us in not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it isrelated to how he thinks of us.”  What do we think of how we should think??

6.  p.41  …in this universe we are treated as strangers, but we have a longing to be acknowledged.  Is this how you feel?

7. p.41  St Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (1 Cor. 8:3) It is a strange promise …but he follows up with the dreadful warning of Jesus parable of the sheep and the goats: Depart from me, I never knew you! Can we cope with the notion of being erased from the knowledge of him who knows all”?

There are eight other essays in this 2013 William Collins edition, at least one of which is not printed elsewhere. The essays vary from complex philosophical and logical arguments to quite small sermons including his very last sermon preached in Cambridge. Here is simply note some ideas that jumped out at me in this challenging collection of essays.

From “Learning in Wartime”  (1939)

p.51  If you reject aesthetic satisfactions, you will fall into sensual satisfactions.

p.51  If you attempt to suspend your aesthetic and cultural life you will only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life. If you don’t read good books you will read bad ones.

p.51 The war will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is a finite object and therefore intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of a human soul. 

p52  A man may have to die for his country but no man must, in any exclusive sense live for his country. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesars etc…God’s claims are inexorable and infinite.

p.54  Whatever you do, do all for the glory of God: anything not offered to God is sinful.

p.55  Cultural activities are not in their own right spiritual and meritorious…poets and scholars are no more pleasing to God than scavengers and bootblacks.

p. 56 Our appetite for beauty and truth exists in the human mind and God makes no appetite in vain. and therefore it must have a purpose cf. Aquinas’ theological argument that sex is good and would have existed apart from the fall. 

p.57  Loving knowledge for its own sake is not a good thing.

p.58 We need an intellectual defence against the heathen; bad philosophy needs to be answered.

p. 58 We need an intimate knowledge of the past to understand the present. and to deal with the great cataract fo nonsense that flows from the press and the microphone of one’s own age.

` p.61   Leave the future in God’s hands. We may as well for God will certainly retain it whether we like it or not.

From “Why I am not a pacifist”  (1940)

p.64 Conscience is not a separate faculty like one of the sense, but the conscience can be altered by argument.

p.65  There are two forms of conscience: (i) the pressure a man feels upon his will to do what he thinks is right; (ii) his judgment as to what the content of right and wrong are. 

“Transposition” (1944)An interesting Pentecost sermon preached at Oxford about heaven. Lewis himself seemed not to be completely happy with this and in 1961 added a substantial argument at p. 107 printed  in this addition. Because he is so intent on examining “the beatific vision” which I certainly agree is very important, he does not address the notion of a renewed kingdom of God on earth which I believe is central to understanding life after death, and thus this essay held less interest for me.

“Is Theology Poetry?”  (1944)  I loved this essay but the lecture, given to the Oxford Socratic Club,  is so complex and involved and requires following up so many hares running through so many burroughs in both theology and literature that it is impossible to summarise or pick out “zingers”. Suffice to say that theology has some poetic components and nature but in totality it is much, much more! This is an essay to savour and prove over a year or two of thought.

 “The Inner Ring”  (1944) was the annual commemoration lecture delivered at Kings College and was a healthy reminder to the students that being “in” was a superficial and dangerous activity and goal, bound to end in distress and much better ignored. Salutary and helpful.

“Membership” (1945)  is an excellent lecture analysing  he dangers of attempting to be a “solitary” Christian. The Church, for all its tensions and shortcomings, is an essential component of Christian experience.

“On Forgiveness” (1947) is a short sermon reminding us that most often when we make confession to God in prayer we are often  actually making excuses for ourselves and letting ourselves off the hook very lightly. A plea for honesty in our walk with God.

“A Slip of the Tongue” (1956) was Lewis’s last sermon, preached at Evensong in the Chapel of Magdalen College in Cambridge. It is a beautiful little sermon reminding us of that voice we have all heard in our private prayers which says: …to be careful, to keep my head, not to go too far, not to burn my boats.  I come into the presence of God with a great fear lest anything should happen to me within that presence which will prove too intolerable inconvenient when I have come out again into my “ordinary” life. I don’t want to be carried away into any resolution which I shall afterwards regret…which will run up to big a bill to pay…for I know I shall be feeling quite different after breakfast! This sermon reminds me of the words of a former Archbishop of Melbourne who once admitted to a bunch of us meeting somewhere that sometimes in the morning he prays: “Lord please don’t let anything happen today!”.  Lewis’s final sermon closes with We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy Government. And this, so far as I can yet see, must be begun every day. Our morning prayer should be something like..grant me to make an unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet.