Lewis & Inklings Conference, 'A Speaker's Prayer'

I must apologise, dear readers. This week has not allowed much time for posting, and this weekend promises to be even worse. But part of the reason for that is the C.S. Lewis & Inklings Society Conference which I will be attending at my alma mater, Oklahoma City University, tomorrow and Saturday. Indeed, while I will be vastly overshadowed by Michael Ward and Diana Glyer, tomorrow I will in fact be presenting a paper, entitled ‘“were Ceremonie slaine”: C.S. Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost as a Contribution to the Ethics of Genre’. In a nutshell, I use Lewis’s account of the ‘specific delight’ of epic poetry as a corrective to Mikhail Bakhtin’s uncompromising championing of the novel, and try to relate both to our theology and life as Christians. Although I will not be speaking as an apologist, thank God, I thought mutatis mutandis some of Lewis’s sentiments in ‘The Apologist’s Evening Prayer’ were rather appropriate for my situation:

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die. [1]

The good news is that next week I should have some more time for blogging. No feastdays, no conference, no tutoring. Just me and my Logismoi.

[1] C.S. Lewis, Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego: Harcourt, 1992), p. 129.