the kilns

On Saturday afternoon, a group of us made our way to the home of C.S. Lewis, the Kilns. We happened to time our visit during the one week the house is empty, and thus we had the great privilege of wandering inside the house. After a tour of the house by Nicole, we spread out on the lawn for a picnic dinner, and then ended our evening by walking down to the church where Lewis worshiped regularly and is now buried.

The beauty of the home and grounds surprised me -- it was an aching sort of beautiful, the kind that evokes a melancholy sort of delight. Perhaps this was partly due to a knowledge of the joy that occurred amongst those walls and gardens, but also of the pain, the struggles, the mental wrestling, the deaths that also took place in that home. It seemed to be a rather sacred place; God's presence seemed near, evidencing itself in the carefully cared for home, the heavenly pink flowers on the lawn, the notes left on the fridge speaking of the communal atmosphere that has inhabited the home for many years.

To commemorate my visit (and the fact that I have been spending significant amounts of time with his writings the past few weeks), here are some of my favorite Lewis quotes.

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 the 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 things itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. 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.
-- from "The Weight of Glory"

Ah, the Saved... what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts, memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water.
-- from The Great Divorce

Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.
-- from A Grief Observed
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