Write without ceasing

I did and I did and I did, and what does it matter what I did?

—Orual, Till We Have Faces

Orual, the main character of C.S. Lewis’s last novel, Till We Have Faces, is a rude awakening for readers accustomed to his other work. Jarringly flawed compared to almost all of his other protagonists (particularly the amiable leads of his Narnia chronicles), she is sharply drawn, full of ragged edges. As the jealous older sister in Lewis’s retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Orual blackmails her beloved half-sister, Psyche, into betraying her god-husband by threatening to commit a murder/suicide. Orual’s ill-conceived plan succeeds, but not in the way she intends: the god punishes Psyche by banishing her into exile, her happy marriage and life destroyed. Even worse, Orual’s destructive behavior is not limited to Psyche. Throughout her life, Orual mistreats and exploits those closest to her. Even when her grandfatherly tutor, the Fox, chooses to remain in her kingdom with her rather than return home to Greece after she releases him from the bonds of slavery, she dismisses his sacrifice by refusing to spend time with him in his old age. She also works her captain of the guards, Bardia, to death by piling work upon him. Orual craves attention and drains her loved ones dry. Prickly, domineering, and above all, selfish, she is by far Lewis’s most unlikable character. She is also his most relatable.

The genius of Orual as Lewis’s creation lies in her general relatability through her specific, myriad character flaws, all of which Lewis exposes with surgical precision and unflinching honesty. In her, readers can recognize their own sinful behavior (most particularly and ironically, that of blindness to one’s sins), and Orual is a brutally harsh mirror. The wide array of Orual’s sins means that every reader can draw out a different facet to identify with. The power-hungry perceive Orual’s controlling ways; the envious instantly identify her jealous streak. Given my own life experiences with loneliness—frequent childhood moves, an isolating young adulthood beset with familial and personal health struggles, and now the geographic distance of many friends—I see in Orual the exacerbation of natural selfishness by loneliness. Although nothing in the novel is truly simple—it is as multi-layered as reality itself—one of its truths is simple for me to understand: at her core, Orual is lonely as a result of suffering, and from that black pit, she lashes out like a wounded animal. The tragedy of her early life, extended into her young adult years, is undeniable. Her mother dies, leaving her at the hands of an abusive father and a cruel nursemaid. Those surrounding her, even and especially her father, constantly remind her of her physical unattractiveness, which renders her unsuitable for marriage, despite being the eldest daughter of a king.

Proverbial wisdom recognizes the reality that suffering is painfully isolating, but the darker truth, rarely acknowledged, is that suffering itself is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can increase the sufferer’s empathy by heightening her sensitivity to the need to reach outside herself. On the other hand, because suffering by its very nature forces its victims to develop a keen sense of self-awareness, it can easily morph into a slippery slope of self-centeredness. Orual embodies this uncomfortable truth in her abuse of Psyche, the Fox, and Bardia, the only people to whom she has left to cling, in an attempt to fill the hollowness inside her.

To the modern reader, perhaps Orual’s most relatable coping mechanism to deal with her loneliness is her approach to her work: she buries herself in the duties of her vocation, in her calling, as queen. Not only for a few hours, or even a few weeks or months, but for decades on end. At the end of her life, after describing the many—and great—accomplishments of her reign, she utters this howl of loneliness: “I did and I did and I did, and what does it matter what I did?” The line cuts razor-sharp. The workaholic temptation stalks our age and claims more victims than ever in our increasingly atomized society, as more people turn to their work for solace in this era of declining religious belief and vanishing communities of family and faith. I am certainly not immune: much of what drove the incessant nature of my own vocation, my writing, in the past was a desperate attempt to fill the holes and edges of the all-too-ample time on my hands. I know all Orual’s little tricks to stave off loneliness. She commits herself to increasing her land’s knowledge and literacy through books; I have also immersed myself in my own studies. She busies herself with improvements to her kingdom, such as building cisterns and improving livestock, just as I have busied myself with everyday tasks. She admits to dragging out conversations with Bardia just to delay the emptiness and silence that follows, and I readily confess to having done the same with friends to stave off yet another evening yawning with the void of loneliness.

Most of all, I’ve heard the siren song of Orual’s longing to lose herself in the “bustle and skill and glory of queenship.” To let myself slip into that “senseless repetition of days and nights and seasons and years” that leads only “to my own chamber to be alone with myself—that is, with a nothingness.” But ultimately, Orual’s choice is one unavailable to me as a Christian. Orual’s freely admitted motivation behind her self-imposed isolation in adulthood stems from her desire to “cheat” the gods and distance herself from them as she tried to bury her true self in her persona as Queen. In short, she treats her work as a numbing agent.

Christians, however, are to work as unto the Lord, and especially in our giftings and talents, to live out the vocation—literally, in Latin, the “calling”—to which He individually summons us. Orual’s treatment of her work thus must be off-limits to the Christian. We are not to utilize these vocations simply as anesthetics to deaden the fact of our existence; they are instead meant to serve as our gateways into the glorious realities of God’s good world and the communities He wishes us both to experience and create with them.

Yet the fact remains that, even when turned to good ends, a vocation necessarily has a devouring nature. For instance, we can all surely name beloved teachers who poured their time and attention into their students. Similarly, doctors and nurses dedicate their lives to improving those of others, and artists devote themselves to their craft without reservation. These are only a handful of examples of the countless vocations God can place on our lives, and we must indeed follow Him when He calls. We must also, however, nevertheless remain clear-eyed about the inherent dangers in the all-consuming nature of a vocation.

T.S. Eliot’s words in his masterpiece, The Four Quartets, describing both destructive sin and the purifying action of the Holy Spirit as a fire capture the duality of the burning passion that characterizes a vocation: “We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire.” In his letters, Lewis describes the desire to write as like being “with book,” and in Till We Have Faces, he has Orual echo that sentiment when she sets out to write her charges against the gods for their supposed wrongs of her. I often similarly describe the urge to write as a fire, a constant burning in my bones that won’t be quenched until the flames are released in words. Engulfed in the blaze of my latest idea, I write relentlessly. Food becomes ash, the hand of the clock become meaningless, and sleep becomes optional.

Eliot’s characterization also applies to the concept of vocation, for depending on our choices, the very calling that might be the instrument of our destruction can also be wielded as the refining tool of the Holy Spirit. As Eliot acknowledges, we are free to choose the “pyre” upon which we burn: either Orual’s self-immolating fire of workaholism, or the purifying, preserving flames of the Holy Spirit that suffused Moses’ bush. The distinguishing factor lies in how we pursue our vocations. Orual closes herself off from the world in her work to alienate herself from the gods and others; she locks her heart in what Lewis calls elsewhere the “casket or coffin of…selfishness” (The Four Loves). There, as Lewis predicts, her shriveled heart hardens, becoming both unbreakable and irredeemable. This narcissism poisons Orual’s soul until her ugly reflection finally forces her to confess, “I am Ungit”—the cruel, ugly goddess she despises most. But Orual’s story doesn’t end there, for her vocation eventually manifests its dual potentiality. Once she channels her bottled-up rage at the gods into her work in the form of writing, it becomes the agent of her transformation, as the gods use her “own pen to probe [her] wound” and heal her. Orual’s reconciliation with the divine not only places her in community with the gods, but also restores her to her loved ones, as she reunites with both the Fox and Psyche in the novel’s final pages.

Although Orual doesn’t live long enough to see the fruits of this community, her reintegration into community by virtue of the efforts of her labor echoes the Christian calling to work in the community of the body of Christ. We are not to labor alone. Even the disciples, before the establishment of the church, were sent out two by two. This principle is even truer now, as we act as Jesus’ hands, feet, eyes, and ears in the corporate body of Christ. A vocation—particularly creative endeavors—can indeed be isolating, but if we are faithful to the work to which He has called us, we can rely on Him to place us into the fellowship of our brothers and sisters in Christ. This principle held true for me: I insisted for years on writing on my own terms, trying to pursue the writing career I wanted to have, and succeeded only in further isolating myself. Once I began following God’s call on my life for cultural apologetics, though, rather than writing for my own glory, I looked up from the small fire He called me to tend to find that He had sent one, then two, then more to gather around me in friendship.

We should not find this shared friendship of a common vocation surprising, for as Lewis writes, Jesus is the “secret master of ceremonies” who selects friends for each other. And as He promised, where two or three are gathered in His name, so also will He be present. Our contributions to our vocations, then, should take on a prayerlike quality. Just as Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-17 exhorts us to pray without ceasing, so we should strive to practice our vocations without ceasing. As writing is my way of processing God’s hand in both my life and the broader world, I have come to write without ceasing. Writing is my constant prayer to God for understanding, a plea to help sort the wheat from the chaff. As Christians, we should all strive for our vocations—whatever they may be—to yield some small splinter of light that pierces through Aquinas’s “double darkness” of sin and ignorance. As our Lord has proved time and time again, when we are faithful with a little, He will entrust us with much. Only then can we share in our master’s happiness and hear Him proclaim, “Well done, my good and faithful servant!”

Like the bright pinprick of the burning star of Bethlehem guiding us through the darkest nights of the soul in Advent, the fires of our vocations illuminate the path to the light of the Son. The wolves of loneliness will always be circling in the forest. The question is whether we as believers can kindle a fire bright enough to keep them at bay. Jesus calls us all to gather around this bonfire and contribute to it with the gifts and talents that further irradiate their Giver. We practice our vocations not to set alight feeble flares that light only our own feet, but to build the larger blaze that will bring radiance to many. And as I add my own torch to these flames, I pray that the rising incense of my offering is pleasing to the Logos who set my own soul afire for the written word.