Some Pleasant Inns — But Not Home

On the twenty-second of August, parked at an olive press near Porto de Mós, Le wrote a sentence into this journal:

We would never enjoy this beautiful place living in an apartment.

That is Lewis's argument, arrived at independently, from the inside.

She had no security that morning — no address, no house, everything sold, the papers only just signed. And what she reported was not deprivation. It was an olive grove she would never otherwise have stood in.

Lewis says God withholds the settled thing and scatters the delightful things broadcast. Le had the experiment run on her for a fortnight and filed the same finding.

This passage is often quoted as though Lewis distrusted pleasure. He is arguing the exact opposite, and the sentence structure proves it.

What God withholds: settled happiness and security.
What God scatters broadcast: joy, pleasure, and merriment.

Scattered broadcast is a sower's phrase — flung by the handful, generously, over the whole field. Lewis is describing a God who is lavish with delight and stingy only with permanence.

And his examples are worth reading slowly, because they are so ordinary and so unspiritual. A few moments of happy love. A landscape. A symphony. A merry meeting with friends. A swim. A football match. He does not reach for religious pleasures. He reaches for a good afternoon.

Paul says the same thing without the essay, and Le read it a fortnight ago: God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy. Qui nous donne avec abondance toutes choses pour que nous en jouissions. The enjoyment was the stated purpose then, and it is Lewis's premise now.

Lewis then explains the difference, and the explanation is precise. The two things do not tempt us in the same way.

Security would teach us to rest our hearts in this world. That is its whole nature — it invites settling, and settling is the point of it.

But a symphony ends. The landscape is behind you by evening. The friends go home. The match finishes. None of these can be moved into. They are too brief to be mistaken for a foundation.

Which is why God can afford to be extravagant with one and careful with the other. A pleasure that passes leaves you glad and still walking. A security that holds would persuade you to stop.

And note the phrase Lewis uses for what security would create: an obstacle to our return to God. Not a sin. An obstacle. Something in the road — and the road was always the point.

Verse 15 is the one that carries Lewis's point in Scripture's own words, and most readers pass it by. If they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. Ils auraient eu le temps d'y retourner.

The road back was open the entire time. Nobody was preventing them. Abraham could have gone home to Ur at any point in the journey, and the writer says so plainly.

They did not stay pilgrims because they were trapped. They stayed pilgrims because they had seen something better and could not unsee it. Ils en désirent une meilleure.

Which is exactly Lewis's mechanism, described from the other side. He says God does not supply the settled thing, so that we keep travelling. Hebrews says they kept travelling because what they were travelling toward had spoiled them for the alternative.

And the word Le has read three times this season sits at the end of it. They desire a better country — une patrie. A homeland. Which is notre cité est dans les cieux, in a different letter and the same French.

Now the sentence, arriving at a household that has been sleeping in a motorhome for sixteen days and is presently looking at houses in France.

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

Notice how much Lewis grants before he qualifies anything. The inns are pleasant. The Father provides them. The refreshment is real and intended. Nothing here says the traveller should sleep badly or eat plain food out of principle.

The only correction is a label. Do not write HOME on the door of an inn. And that is not an austerity. It is an accuracy.

Which frees the house-hunting entirely. A house in Brittany will be a very good inn — and a person who knows it is an inn can enjoy it far more than a person who needs it to be the answer. The thing we lean on we cannot fully enjoy, because we are busy testing whether it will hold.

There is a small thing worth adding, because Jesus put an inn in a story once and it is not incidental.

In the parable of the good Samaritan, the wounded man is not carried home. He is carried to an inn — and the Samaritan pays the host, and says: take care of him, and whatever more you spend, when I come again, I will repay you.

The inn in that story is not the destination. It is the place a man is looked after, at someone else's expense, until the one who rescued him returns.

Which is a fair description of everything between now and then. Not home. But provided, paid for, and temporary in a hopeful direction.

One last sentence to sit with, because it is the bluntest on the page and it does not offer any comfort at all. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy.

Lewis is not being cynical. He is refusing to lie. Nobody in this world has ever been secure, and every arrangement people make to feel otherwise is a story they are telling themselves. Health, savings, papers, a solid house — none of them has ever prevented anything.

And it is easier to hear that sentence from someone who has just lived it than to argue about it in the abstract. A household that has given away its furniture, sold its home, and crossed two borders in a van is not being asked to imagine insecurity.

But notice the second half of the sentence, because Lewis put it there on purpose. But we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. The insecurity is real and the joy is real, and he will not let go of either one to make the other tidier.

Which is the same arrangement David reported six weeks ago, and it has not needed revising. Il y a d'abondantes joies devant ta face. Abundant joys — and no promise of safety anywhere in the psalm.