Je Me Tiens à la Porte — When Our Hands Are Full

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Brittany

The feed places the Benimar at Saint-Goazec, in Finistère — in the Montagnes Noires, near the canal.

This is Brittany. They have arrived.

Fourteen days ago the papers were signed in Caldas da Rainha and the road north was still ahead. Portugal, Spain, the Landes, the Dordogne, the Charente — and now the far west of France.

On the third of August the reading was levanta-te, meu amor, e vem comigo, and the note said the road was still theoretical. It is not theoretical any more. It is behind them.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — An Honest Word About This Passage

This is a hard page, and it should be handled carefully, because it is frequently misused.

Lewis is describing a general mechanism, not diagnosing anybody's particular loss. Nothing here licenses telling a grieving person that God took something away to teach them a lesson. That reading has done real damage to real people, and it is not what the argument says.

And Lewis himself knew the limits of this book. He wrote The Problem of Pain as a young man, before his wife died. Years later, from inside actual grief, he wrote a very different book — and part of what it contains is a man discovering that arguments which satisfied him in the study did not hold their shape at the graveside. He never withdrew this chapter. But he did not pretend it was the whole story either.

So read this as a diagnosis of comfort, not a justification of suffering. Its subject is not why bad things happen. Its subject is what prosperity does to the attention.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Word Is "Plausibly"

The whole argument turns on one adverb, and it is easy to read past. As long as He leaves us any other resort where happiness can even PLAUSIBLY be looked for.

Not any resort where it can be found. Any resort where it can plausibly be looked for.

The alternative does not have to work. It only has to look as though it might. And that is a devastatingly accurate description of how people actually live.

Nobody keeps chasing a thing that has plainly failed. But a house, a salary, a plan, a settled arrangement — these never fail plainly. They fail slowly and ambiguously, always leaving room to think the fault was in the details. The next house will be right. The next year will be easier.

A plausible source of happiness is more durable than a real one, precisely because it never has to deliver. It only has to stay credible.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — We Find God an Interruption

Five words, and they are the most uncomfortable on the page. We find God an interruption.

Not an enemy. Not a burden. An interruption — the thing that arrives in the middle of what you were doing.

And Scripture has a picture of exactly this, addressed to exactly these people.

The church at Laodicea said: I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing. That is Lewis's we have all we want, word for word, nineteen centuries early.

And what does the Lord do with the church that needs nothing? Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

That verse is usually printed under a picture of a cottage and quoted to people outside the faith. It was written to a congregation. He is outside the door of the people who already have everything.

And a knock is precisely an interruption. Lewis's sentence and John's image describe the same moment from the two sides of the same door.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Full Hands

Lewis quotes Augustine loosely and admits it — as St Augustine says somewhere — which is a small piece of honesty worth noticing in a writer of his stature. He is not pretending to a footnote he does not have. The sentiment is thoroughly Augustinian even if the wording is Lewis's own memory of it.

God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full — there's nowhere for Him to put it.

Note that the obstacle is not wickedness. It is occupancy. The hands are not doing anything wrong. They are simply already holding something.

Which is why this journal has kept returning to the empty hand. On the nineteenth of August: faith is the empty hand. And on Monday, Solomon: what came to a young king who asked did not come to an old king who pursued. A hand that is reaching is also a hand that is full.

And the parachute line makes the same point with a joke. It's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.

The image is well chosen, because it is not a picture of an unbeliever. An unbeliever carries no parachute at all. This is a man with real confidence in the thing — he checks it before he flies and would not go up without it. And he hopes never to open it. The whole arrangement is: stay available, and stay closed.

A parachute unopened for years is a piece of equipment. A parachute opened is the only thing between a man and the ground. Same object; entirely different relationship. Which is why Laodicea got a knock rather than a rescue. They were not in trouble — and that was the trouble.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Hedge of Thorns

Lewis's closing question — what then can God do but make 'our own life' less agreeable? — is not his invention. Hosea puts it in God's own mouth, and the image is a fence.

Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns, and wall her in, so that she cannot find her paths... then she will say, 'I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better for me than now.'

The thorns are not punishment. They are a redirection. God closes the roads that lead nowhere, and He closes them because the woman kept taking them.

And notice what the hedge produces: not despair, but a sentence beginning I will go and return. The blocked road is what makes the open one visible.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Hands That Opened

One thing must be said plainly this morning, because this page could sit badly on a household that has just given up a home.

Lewis is describing the mechanism God uses on hands that will not open. That is not what happened here.

Nothing was taken from this household. The apartment was sold by choice. The furniture was given to a family who needed it. The car was sold. The hands opened, and no thorn hedge was required.

Which is not a compliment, and should not be read as one. Le has been clear all summer about what the loosening actually cost and how it came. Her own words in July were I was tired of my winning and my thinking was wrong. She was worn down first. The letting go came after that, and it came as relief rather than as virtue.

That is the mercy in it. The hands were opened gently, and from the inside. Lewis's chapter describes the harder route, which was not needed here.

And it explains the strange fact this journal has been recording since the middle of August: a woman with no address reporting fullness of joy, an olive grove, a meal in Eymet, a beautiful place she would never have stood in. Those are not the reports of someone under a hedge of thorns. They are the reports of someone with her hands already open when the giving started.