PWJ: S2E17 – TGD 11 – “The Mother and The Lizard”
This week we meet two different ghosts, both of whom have disordered loves. The first is a mother who “loves” her son so much that it obscures everything, even God. The second is a man who struggles with lust, represented by a lizard on his shoulder. Fortunately, we finally have a ghost who chooses Heaven! Yay!
Today’s episode we continue discussing disordered loves and how certain kinds of love can be mistaken more easily for the real thing and, in setting themselves up as gods, become demonic.
S2E17: “The Mother and The Lizard” (Download)
If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe manually, or any place where good podcasts can be found (iTunes, Google Play, Podbean, Stitcher, TuneIn and Overcast).
Time Stamps
In case your podcast application has the ability to jump to certain time codes, here are the timestamps for the different parts of the episode.
09:25 – Chapter 150-word Summary
10:30 – Chapter Discussion
43:36 – Haikus
Show Notes
• Since Matt and I were recording this episode very early in the morning, we kept things non-alcoholic. We were both drinking tea. Matt also had a La Croix, meaning that I had many belches to cut out during editing…
• The quote-of-the-week comes from the Bright Spirit named Reginald:
“…no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• Yesterday I had interviewed Justin Thomas, a Pastor with the congregation behind The Great Divorce Project. I was amazed to find out that Matt had watched the video associated with today’s chapter! Maybe I won’t fire him?
• Matt told the story of how our endorsement of Hallow was received by the team behind the app.
• I had just finished listening to the “Unbelievable?” audiobook. It was written by Justin Brierley, the host of the Unbelievable? podcast. Each week he gets Christians and non-Christians together to debate some topic. This book is, in the words of the tag line: “Why After Talking with Atheists for Ten Years I’m Still a Christian”. I commented on this book because he quotes C.S. Lewis extensively and alludes to him even more!
Matt asked me to compare this book to Trent Horn’s “Why we’re Catholic”. I explained that if your focus is simply on the existence of God and the believe that Jesus rose from the dead, then you may be better served with Justin’s book. While it goes into less detail, the coverage of Trent’s book is far broader.
• Matt and I pointed out that our podcast is superior to Pints With Aquinas because we have two hosts, not just one. I then quoted the lyrics to “Two Heads are better than one” by Power Tool, which is part of the soundtrack to 80’s classic, Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure.
• Matt tried to spread heresy about the “correct” ordering of the Narnia books, aided and abetted by the listener Jeff whom he recently met. If you want to know the controversy, I’d suggest watching this video.
• Matt then read the chapter summary:
A ghost named Pam meets a Bright Spirit, her brother, Reginald. She had been hoping to see her son, Michael, but Reginald explains that she would appear invisible to him at this point. He says he will be able to see her “when you learn to want someone else besides Michael…”
150-word summary of Chapter 11 of The Great Divorce
Pam is annoyed and declares that “If [God] loved me He’d let me see my boy”. Reginald says that her maternal instinct “was uncontrolled and fierce and monomaniac”. MacDonald leads Lewis away, and they have a conversation about natural affections.
They then meet a ghost with a little red lizard sitting on his shoulder, symbolic of his lust. An angel offers to kill it. After much delay, the man eventually agrees. Not only is he transformed, the lizard becomes a great stallion which he uses to ride into Heaven.
• We recorded this episode shortly before Mother’s Day and published it shortly afterwards. I pointed out that we celebrate Mother’s Day at a different time, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent.
• The first Ghost we meet is one of the few Ghosts we meet who is named. She is called Pam and Lewis sees her just as she’s meeting a Bright Spirit who is her brother, Reginald. She is disappointed, hoping that her son Michael would have come to meet her.
Reginald explains that her son is up in the mountains, but that he won’t be able to see her until she is “thickened up” a bit. It’s okay though, because he specializes in this sort of work. The ghost recoils at this, snapping “Oh, it’s work, is it?”
Her brother explains that her inability to see Michael isn’t a punishment, it’s just not possible. She just needs to become more substantial. The ghost asks how this is to happen…and somehow manages to sound threatening in the process!
“How?” said the Ghost. The monosyllable was hard and a little threatening.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• Reginald explains what needs to happen in order for her Michael to be able to see here:
“You will become solid enough for Michael to perceive you when you learn to want someone else besides Michael. I don’t say ‘more than Michael,’ not as a beginning. That will come later. It’s only the little germ of a desire for God that we need to start the process”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• Her brother corrects her when it becomes clear that her motivation is entirely focused on Michael:
“You’re treating God only as a means to Michael. But the whole thickening treatment consists in learning to want God for His own sake.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
The Ghost invokes her motherhood as justification…
“You wouldn’t talk like that if you were a Mother.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
…but her brother responds by making a distinction:
“You mean, if I were only a mother. But there is no such thing as being only a mother. You exist as Michael’s mother only because you first exist as God’s creature. That relation is older and closer. No, listen, Pam! He also loves. He also has suffered. He also has waited a long time.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
In reference to God’s desire for us, Matt referenced Mother Teresa’s “I thirst” letter.
• Pam asserts that, if God loved her, she’d let her see her son and then goes on to point out something she had previously decided not to mention, that God had taken her son away from her through death. Reginald responds by saying that God took her son away for two reasons: for his own sake and for Pam’s. When Pam says that they would have been happy for ever, Reginald responds that this isn’t possible:
“Human beings can’t make one another really happy for long”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
He goes on to explain why God to Michael:
“He wanted your merely instinctive love for your child (tigresses share that, you know!) to turn into something better. He wanted you to love Michael as He understands love. You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God…[your] instinct was uncontrolled and fierce and monomaniac… The only remedy was to take away its object. It was a case for surgery. When that first kind of love was thwarted, then there was just a chance that in the loneliness, in the silence, something else might begin to grow”.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
Matt references “A Severe Mercy” by Sheldon Vanauken which is focused on this idea. Matt and I recently found out that there is a move afoot to convert this story into a movie…
• Pam rejects all this and articulates her central error:
“This is all nonsense-cruel and wicked nonsense. What right have you to say things like that about Mother-love? It is the highest and holiest feeling in human nature.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
Her brother corrects her with this episode’s quote-of-the-week:
“Pam, Pam-no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
This is paraphrase of the quotation from The Four Loves which is a reformulation of M. Denis de Rougemont:
“[Love] begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
This was very similar to something which Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:
“…none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses—say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad… there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother’s love for her own children or a man’s love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people’s children or countries”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• I then dedicated this episode to my own mother, since she’s kinda great 🙂
• Reginald explains that his sister’s love for her son would have deteriorated over time, in the same way Pam has observed in Hell in the Guthrie family:
“What you have seen in the Guthries is what natural affection turns to in the end if it will not be converted.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
Matt pointed out that, while we’re talking about the relationship between mother and son, the same is true in other relationships, particularly in marriage. We find our ultimate fulfillment in God, not in each other. I told the story of Christopher West and his wife telling each other that they do not satisfy each other.
• Reginald criticizes the way Pam handled her son’s death, living only for his memory, pushing away her husband and her daughter:
“…ten years’ ritual of grief… It was the wrong way to deal with a sorrow. It was Egyptian-like embalming a dead body.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
Naturally, this assessment doesn’t please her…
“Oh, of course. I’m wrong. Everything I say or do is wrong, according to you.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
Rather surprisingly, her brother agrees with her! He says that when anyone comes to Heaven they discover that many of their attitudes and ideas have been wrong:
“That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• She becomes belligerent and defiant:
“No one has a right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
Matt points to a similar passage in The Screwtape Letters where a demon suggests the following:
The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so…
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Chapter 21)
…the word “Mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say “Mine” of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.
This idea of possession is turned upside-down in Heaven. God wants to give Pam everything, but not in the way she imagines:
“He will be [yours], Pam. Everything will be yours. God himself will be yours. But not that way. Nothing can be yours by nature.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
“What? Not my own son, born out of my own body?”
“And where is your own body now?
• The Bright Spirit then drops a truth bomb. It turns out that Michael was an “accident”:
“How yours? You didn’t make him. Nature made him to grow in your body without your will. Even against your will . . . you sometimes forget that you didn’t intend to have a baby then at all. Michael was originally an Accident.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
Matt and I talked about how it’s a rather scary idea that there will be no secrets in Heaven.
• Reginald points out that Pam is actually deficient in love, lacking love for either himself or her own mother. Pam accuses him of being jealous, but when he reassures her that nobody can be hurt in the country, she’s actually rather put out!
The Ghost was silent and open-mouthed for a moment; more wilted, I thought, by this reassurance than by anything else that had been said.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• As they walk away, Lewis asks MacDonald if there’s any hope for that Ghost…
“Aye, there’s some. What she calls her love for her son has turned into a poor, prickly, astringent sort of thing. But there’s still a wee spark of something that’s not just her self in it. That might be blown into a flame.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• When Jack asks whether some loves are a better starting point, MacDonald says that the danger lies in them being mistaken for the Real Thing:
“Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil”.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• Lewis is concerned about speaking this kind of truth to a grieving mother. MacDonald promptly tells him that he’s not ready to do something like that, but that Lewis does need to communicate these truths more generally to a world which has forgotten them:
“No, no. Son, that’s no office of yours. You’re not a good enough man for that. When your own heart’s been broken it will be time for you to think of talking. But someone must say in general what’s been unsaid among you this many a vear: that love, as mortals understand the word, isn’t enough. Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
Things are “good” and “bad” in how they relate to God:
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It’s not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• The pair now encounter another Ghost. This is “dark, oily ghost” has a red lizard whispering in his ear, symbolic of the man’s lust who is talking him into returning to the bus. The ghost meets an angel who offers to silence the lizard, but when the man realizes that the angel intends to kill the lizard, he panics:
“You didn’t say anything about killing him at first. I hardly meant to bother you with anything so drastic as that.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
The ghost is scared that if the lizard is killed that he himself will die. The angel responds with this “encouragement”:
“I never said it wouldn’t hurt you. I said it wouldn’t kill you.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• The ghost then makes all the excuses we make when we know we should kill a sin, but we don’t really want to:
“I’m quite open to consider it, but it’s a new point, isn’t it? I mean, for the moment I was only thinking about silencing it because up here-well, it’s so damned embarrassing… there’s time to discuss that later… Please, I never meant to be such a nuisance. Please-really-don’t bother. Look! It’s gone to sleep of its own accord. I’m sure it’ll be all right now. Thanks ever so much.. I’m sure I shall be able to keep it in order now. I think the gradual process would be far better than killing it…I’ll think over what you’ve said very carefully. I honestly will. In fact I’d let you kill it now, but as a matter of fact I’m not feeling frightfully well to-day. It would be silly to do it now. I’d need to be in good health for the operation. Some other day, perhaps”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
It’s clear that the angel cannot kill the lizard without the man’s permission.
• We then begin to hear what the lizard is saying:
“[The angel] can do what he says. He can kill me. One fatal word from you and he will! Then you’ll be without me for ever and ever. It’s not natural. How could you live? You’d be only a sort of ghost, not a real man as you are now”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
These are the lies of lust.
• The ghost eventually relents and allows the angel to kill the lizard. The ghost is transformed into a huge man and the lizard is turned into a magnificent stallion which he uses to ride into Heaven. The land itself begins to sing a paraphrase of Psalm 110.
• Lewis and Jack discuss what they’ve seen in these last two ghosts and the two loves, affection (Greek: storge) and romantic love (Greek: eros). When Jack suggests that the mother had an “excess” of love, MacDonald swiftly corrects him:
“Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there’d be no difficulty… It it may well be that at this moment she’s demanding to have him down with her in Hell. That kind is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the soul they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
• MacDonald points out the pathetic nature of lust, but that it can be transformed into something great. He asks Jack to consider what other loves might look like if they were so transformed…
“Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed… if the risen body even of appetite is as grand a horse as ye saw, what would the risen body of maternal love or friendship be?”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
When these transformations take place, the loves are also being ordered correctly in relation to divine love (Greek: agape), much like what Lewis said in Mere Christianity about instincts and The Moral Law:
“Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the “right” notes and the “wrong” ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book I, Chapter 2)
• I pointed out the irony in the name of Pam’s son. She had put him in the place of God, but his name, Michael, means “Who is like God?”, a reference to the angelic battle between the Archangel Michael and Satan when he attempted to usurp the place of God…
• Matt connected the themes of this chapter to 1 Corinthians 15:44, as well as theosis, the process by which we move from the natural life (bios) to the supernatural life (zoe).
• As usual, we ended with some haikus:
The Mother
Haikus for Chapter 11 of The Great Divorce
The highest of loves
And by far the holiest
Is great “mother love”
My son is my world
I love him far more than God
My life’s great focus
The Lizard Man
Lust was a lizard
But an angel set me free/But by an angel was freed
It became my steed