One Amateur To Another

I have read and reread and loved much, though by no means all, of the CS Lewis canon over the decades (including works like The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, for example), but had never run into his Reflections On the Psalms until my friend John (RIP, my friend) gave me a copy a few years ago. Of that gift I wrote in my journal (May 20, 2014)–

“Grateful this morning for the birdsong, the avian matins, for the darting chimney swifts, a day off to rest and fall asleep reading, that Shakespeare’s sonnets got published on this date in 1609 and saved for posterity, and for the revisit with CS Lewis afforded by John’s giving me his Reflections on the Psalms.”

I was not yet publishing a twice per week blog called Notes From the GratiDude. It’s May 20, 2019, five years later now, and here I am again rereading CS Lewis almost as if in a cycle. Who knows the deep reasons we do what we do, why interests disappear and then resurface later.

This reading it has occurred to me that some of Lewis’s own introduction to Reflections on the Psalms is a brilliant statement of what I’ve been poking at with these notes. All I have to do is substitute the word gratitude in for psalms

Some examples–

CSL–This is not a work of scholarship. I am no Hebraist, no higher critic, no ancient historian, no archaeologist. I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.

GDUDE–I have no PhD in anything, much less gratitude. I’m interested in how to live a gratitude-inspired life. I’m asking questions every day.

CSL–If an excuse is needed (and perhaps it is) for writing such a book, my excuse would be something like this. It often happens that two school boys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. The fellow pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in such a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t.

GDUDE–I don’t know who the “masters” even are, with respect to this inquiry. No idea who could actually tell me how to get up and courageously ask “What’s great about this?” in every situation, no cherry picking just the easy stuff, and say “yes” to everything. We’re all in this inquiry together.

CSL–In this book, then, I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained, when reading the Psalms, with the hope that this might at any rate interest, and sometimes even help, other inexpert readers. I am comparing notes, not presuming to instruct.

GDUDE–Yes, yes, how could I say it better? Instead of “when reading the Psalms” I might say “when getting up and opening my eyes and asking what there is to be grateful for in this moment.”

CSL–I have not attempted of course to cover the subject even on my own amateurish level. I have stressed, and omitted, as my own interests led me.

GDUDE–Every day I look out this north-facing window onto a street in an old textile city on the Merrimack River. I go to work and swim at the Y and read books and have opinions and wonder how I’m so blessed and that’s what I write about. My life isn’t yours nor yours mine. I ask questions about what I see and experience and muse on them here.

TO BE CONTINUED

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