it really comes from inner insecurity

[soso]

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On disagreeable, nasty people; and on avoiding obsessing about their bullying.

10 March 1954

I am sorry things are not better. I am very puzzled by people like your Committee Secretary, people //who are just nasty.

I find it easier to understand the great crimes, for the raw material of them exists in us all;

[the mere disagreeableness //which seems to spring from no recognisable passion] is mysterious.

(Like the total stranger in a train //of whom I once asked ‘Do you know [when we get to Liverpool’]

and who replied ‘I’m not paid to answer your questions: ask the guard’ 월급받는 직원 아니니 묻지마라는 말).

I have found it more among boys than anyone else. That makes me think () it really comes from inner insecurity

—a dim sense //that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody,

and a belief //that this can be achieved by arrogance.

Probably you, who can’t hit back, come in for a good deal of resentful arrogance

/aroused by others //on whom she doesn’t vent it, because they can.

(A bully in an Elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man () he dare not fight, says ‘I’ll go home and beat all my servants’).

But I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her:

that, after all, is almost the greatest evil () nasty people can do us—to become an obsession, to haunt our minds.

[A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects,] is the thing, if one can only stick to it.

I hope () the other job will materialise. . .

I too had mumps after I was grown up. I didn’t mind it /as long as I had the temperature: 

but when one came to convalescence and a convalescent appetite and even thinking of food started the salivation 

and the pain—ugh! 

I never realised ‘the disobedience in our members’ so clearly before [Romans 7:23]. 

Verily ‘He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart’ (or in his glands) [Matthew 5:28].

I shall wait anxiously for all your news, 

always praying not only for a happy issue but that you may be supported in all interim anxieties.

Not that you and I have now much reason to rejoice in having bodies! Like old automobiles, aren’t they? 

Where all sorts of apparently different things keep going wrong, 

but [what they add up to] is the plain fact //that the machine is wearing out.

Well, it was not meant to last forever.

Still, I have a kindly feeling for the old rattletrap.

Through it God showed me that whole side of His beauty //which is embodied in color, sound, smell and size.

No doubt it has often led me astray: but not half so often, I suspect, as my soul has lead it astray.

For [the spiritual evils //which we share with the devils (pride, spite)] are far worse than [what we share with the beasts]: and sensuality really arises more from the imagination than from the appetites;

which, if left merely to their own animal strength, and not elaborated by our imagination, would be fairly easily managed.

 

~C.S. Lewis, from a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, November 26, 1962

For reflection on Isaiah 46:3-4

This shows a more down to earth side of C.S. Lewis

as the reader sees Lewis 's caring side with a lady () he' s never met in person and yet considers a good friend

and sister in the Lord.

Peripheral’ CS Lewis

https://lexloiz.wordpress.com/2020/12/11/out-of-the-ordinary-cs-lewis/

One of the unexpected blessings of this year has been the extra time to read. 

And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed [dipping into some more ‘peripheral’ CS Lewis].

An easy, and pleasant starter, is the Letters to an American Lady (published by Eerdmans, or Hodder)

a compilation of letters to Mary Willis Shelburne, a widow //who wrote to Lewis about a variety of troubles in her own life.

As part of his own commitment to Christian humility Lewis decided he would not only use his writing skill to publish,

but to privately respond to every letter () he received from readers.

This became an almost impossible workload /as his popularity increased,

but Lewis felt that a hidden ministry of service like this was valuable both to those writing to him and as an act of ministry before God.

[The letters to Mary Shelburne] are full of Lewis’s characteristic wit, humour, and, as ever, his ability to illustrate.

He talks of how he was bullied at school, of his resistance to reading newspapers,

on the fact that if you can’t change a circumstance you can at least change your own response to it,

of his inability with maths, taxes, and ‘business’ in general, of how black American soldiers were more popular in England after the war than their white comrades, and his praise of the National Health Service in Britain.

The letters span thirteen years and also include the loss of his wife, Joy, to cancer.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack

This is a book written by C. S. Lewis of letters he exchanged with Mary Willis Shelburne

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-American-Lady-C-Lewis-ebook/dp/B00HU5NG3G/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

On October 26, 1950, C. S. Lewis wrote the first of more than a hundred letters he would send to a woman he had never met, but with whom he was to maintain a correspondence for the rest of his life.

Ranging broadly in subject matter, the letters discuss topics as profound as the love of God and as frivolous as preferences in cats. Lewis himself clearly had no idea that these letters would ever see publication, but they reveal facets of his character little known even to devoted readers of his fantasy and scholarly writings—a man patiently offering encouragement and guidance to another Christian through the day-to-day joys and sorrows of ordinary life.

Letters to an American Lady stands as a fascinating and moving testimony to the remarkable humanity and even more remarkable Christianity of C. S. Lewis, and is richly deserving of the position it now takes among the balance of his Christian writings.
_____________________________________________________________

Mary Willis Shelburne – "The American Lady"

Mary was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1895. When Mary was three, the family moved to Richmond, where Mary was educated at Chatham Episcopal Institute and later Westhampton College.
On 30 June 1920, she married William Boyer in Tazewell County, Virginia. Her first husband unfortunately passed away, and Mary married Jacob Shelburne in Richmond in 1933. After nine years of marriage, Jacob sadly passed away, leaving Mary twice widowed.

Mary was an established poet, occupying a position on the board of the Poetry Society of Virginia as well as being a member of the Poetry Society of America. She was published in Poet Lore, the New York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post. She won the Barrow Poetry Prize of the Georgia Poetry Society in 1952. The follow poem appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in April 1947

Love is like water; it may run
Smooth as silver under the sun;
Dance to the music of the wind,
free as breath, and unconfined,
Sing its song in liquid, cool
Polished depth of a woodland pool
Surge with wild emotion, caught
in tumult that a storm has wrought;
hold in hidden caves of wonder
Passion swift and hot as thunder,
or sweep the debris all away
and love again another day.

After the death of her second husband, Mary moved to Washington D.C. in 1946 to work as an executive assistant to the Canon Precentor of Washington Cathedral. Continually haunted by the possibility of poverty, Mary worried for most of her life about meeting her financial obligations. In her correspondence with Lewis, she discusses her fiscal woes. Lewis, at first, could not contribute any money due to national restrictions. However, thanks to Lewis's friend and attorney Owen Barfield, Lewis was able to assist Mary financially through his American publisher. Hooper remarks that these payments continued after Lewis's death. She died in 1975. Their correspondence has its own volume: Letters to an American Lady.

From his letter to Mary Shelburne dated 28 June 1963:

Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener's good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/197830185/mary-willis-shelburne