A friend sent me a C.S. Lewis quote the other day and it brought that venerable gentleman to mind. When I was first converted, I simply couldn’t get enough of this man, who was probably one of the greatest Christian apologists of the twentieth century. Possibly the greatest. That was quite a long time ago, when a book was something tangible one held in the hand and bought in a bookstore with actual money. Before long, I’d gathered quite a collection. Unfortunately, I lost most of it. I met a woman who was going to Houston for chemo treatments for the third time for metastatic breast cancer, and I loaned her my collection. I learned later that she did return, but I didn’t have sufficient chutzpah to ask for the return of my books. I began a new collection but never gathered as many as I’d had.

One book I do still have is The Discarded Image, in which Lewis describes the universe as it was known to the medieval Christian mind. Many StAR readers will be familiar with the book. One line in particular has stayed with me: “…[T]he very air was thick with angels.” I remember thinking, Yes, it was. It still is.

As a very small child, playing outside our rural Georgia house (all playing was done outside in those days), I spent all my time exploring, seeing, and knowing the world as a place of wonder. A dandelion was a whole intricate universe in itself. I didn’t make up “explanations” for things. I didn’t have that restless adult need to understand things. Things just were and I never felt that I had to account for them somehow. I simply wanted to witness them, to participate in their being. It was a way of experiencing trees, clouds, dirt, rabbits and bugs, birds and squirrels. Today, when my arthritis lets me do a bit of gardening, I am still fascinated by every weed I pull, and the tall pines in my yard are still manifestations of pure majesty.

Someone once told me that, from the moment we are a fertilized cell in our mother’s womb, we experience personally the entire evolution of our species up to the moment of our birth, when we forget everything. I don’t think I believe that, but it would account for that phenomenon Jung called “racial memory,” or the feeling we get sometimes when we seem to remember periods in history before we were born, or places where we’ve never been.

Sometimes, I think I must have been a pagan child, even though I knelt at night by the bed and recited, “Now I lay me down to sleep….” If I was, I still am. It may be that you have to be a little bit pagan to see a universe in a dandelion, or majesty in a tree. I know better than to make declarations about what reality is. The thing about reality, says Lewis again, is that it never turns out to be what you expected. It may be that I went through the entire evolution before I was born, and it may even be that I remember a bit of it. Memory, says Aeschylus, is the source of wisdom.  

I still believe with Wordsworth, “…That, which having been, must ever be.” In any case, yes, the very air is thick with angels.