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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday January 7, 2002 Volume IV Number 1 |
FOCUS - Inklings
To suggest that Jack, as a turn-of-the-previous-century Belfast child, was bookish would be a considerable understatement.
His mother and younger brother Warren spent their days exploring the pages of their extensive library in search of adventure and ideas. Their conversations were lively. The boys soaked in their mother’s boundless curiosity. She breathed life into the words and phrases and dialogue as she read aloud to the boys. She connected emotionally to the literature. She was moved by the sentences and paragraphs and narratives – sometimes to tears, sometimes to anger, sometimes in sheer delight, sometimes in wonder, sometimes to laughter – and that emotional connection transferred to the boys.
One hundred years ago, Jack and Warren were unspoiled by the distractions of television and electronic games and arcades and even radio. They found their boyhood energies consumed by the unlimited offerings of writers who left stories and adventures and twists and turns on the high seas or deep in the dark jungles of far away continents or on the raging battlefield on the pages of books sitting on the shelves of their parents’ reading room.
Jack was just ten when his mother, the insatiable reader, their dynamic companion, their loving encourager and guide, suddenly took sick and died. Later he would write (in a rare moment of uninhibited self-disclosure in his one and only autobiography) of the indescribable pain of this terrible loss which only drove him deeper into an exhausting quest to find some sort of meaning and purpose to his existence. Reading and writing became more than a diversion – they became an obsession.
Jack had little interest in the athletics or competitive games of the children in the neighborhood. In his reading, the new wave of contemporary books on the technologies of industrialization and the new economic order had little appeal. They bored him. He was drawn instead to the headier stuff of what was once referred to in university curriculum as The Classics. He excelled in scholastic literature. To Jack, the mechanics of progress, the emerging sciences which exploded on the scene at the dawn of the New Century creating new disciplines and whiz-bang advances were dull and tedious. He couldn’t narrow his focus down to the nuts and bolts of the new machinery of modern life. He was, rather, drawn to the big ideas. Philosophy. Literary criticism. Civilization.
Branching out way beyond the sketchy religion of his childhood, Jack explored Eastern mysticism and classical theology and ultimately became a self-described Skeptic. For a period in his early career, he called himself an Atheist.
Jack’s teachers were not at all surprised that he would soon become a published author, his first work a book of poems went to press in 1919 at the age of twenty. Perhaps even more impressive to those school teachers back in Belfast, he became a distinguished professor of literature and criticism for over forty years at Oxford. The epicenter of prestige. (Unless, of course, you are a Cambridge grad.) He developed into a prolific author and brilliant lecturer.
An exhilarating conversation with another Oxford professor of literature was a turning point for Jack. Jack came to Oxford from Belfast. This colleague came from South Africa. He was a medieval scholar, a philologist, with a specialty in Anglo-Saxon literature. They arrived in England from very different corners of the globe, but they understood each other.
One fateful day, they engaged in a long and telling dialogue about the nature of truth. How to we know what we know? What is the role of symbols and archetypes and metaphor? How does the Novel communicate truth and values? Jack encountered an intellectual peer. He was challenged to rethink everything he knew. Everything he believed.
Clive Staples (Jack)
Lewis would become known to the world as C. S. Lewis. The colleague who
profoundly influenced him was another author, John Ronald Reuel (J. R. R.)
Tolkien.
And together, they pulled together a likeminded group of scholars who called themselves “The Inklings.”
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What a wonderful word – inkling.
My mother used it… she would say, “I have an inkling…” as though she was in possession of some special insight, like a valuable prize or a singular discovery. We kids all knew it was only a hunch. A suspicion. A feeling. She was highly intuitive anyway, and we were quite aware there was in all probability little hard evidence to support her point of view. But she always seemed sure of herself. It would be based on a glance. Or someone’s unintentional hint. Or a slip of the tongue. An inkling would never withstand the courtroom test of validity. Or pass scientific scrutiny. It was a guess. A glimmer. A glimpse of what just might be real. But it always meant something good was going to happen. And more often than not, against all odds, she was right.
When she told us she had “an inkling…” the announcement was accompanied by a smile and a sparkle in the eyes.
We wanted to know the whole story. Mom had an inkling. This is good.
The word inkling in our world always had a positive spin. If the intuition related to something ominous or terrible or malicious or harmful, it would never be an “inkling.” It would be a premonition. Or a fear. Or a concern. Or a cause for alarm.
If it was an inkling, it was something we would eagerly anticipate. It was a prelude to serendipity.
The old English word is the basis for the more common word - inclination. We are inclined to believe certain things, even though the evidence may be somewhat less than compelling. For example, “He was inclined to believe the nice young man who claimed to have lost his wallet.” People are inclined to behave in a certain way when certain conditions are met. For example, “People are inclined to make donations when they understand in the merits of the project.” People believe and people give when they are in possession of an inkling.
So Lewis and Tolkien and their Oxford colleagues selected an apt name. Not only as writers did they live in a world of pen and ink, they also laid claim to an inkling – that their work would contain the seedlings of ideas that would germinate and grow in the mind of the reader.
They were in both senses of the word then - Inklings.
* * * * * * *
In a moment of truth that took the academic world of Oxford University by surprise, Dr. Lewis, the scholarly literary critic, admitted to the world that he had become a Christian. He found Christ. Insiders knew it was the friendship with Tolkien, and then thorough readings of the work of George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton that opened the way for Jack Lewis to consider the great claims of the Gospel, and make them his own. It was an academic exercise that gave way to the warm personal embrace of the God of the Bible.
In the offices of Drs. Lewis and Tolkien, others, including Jack’s brother Warren who already made a mark like his brother as a writer, and author Charles Williams, and occasionally writer Dorothy Sayers, would gather once a week to discuss their work. They agreed that from their position of influence, they would write about the things that interested them the most, in story form. Utilizing the genres of science fiction and childhood fantasy, these writers would personalize the themes of the Gospel and the Bible to a new generation. In their weekly meetings, themes would emerge and characters and story lines. They would read their work to each other, and sharpen the focus and tweak the language. Through the years, their work took shape. Books were published. A veritable plethora of rich volumes, timeless and true. And a generation was influenced.
On Tuesdays, they would meet at various Oxford pubs, most commonly the Eagle and Child’s, just across the street from the campus. When Carolyn and I visited Oxford, we found the Pub with a picture on the wall of Dr. Lewis and the woman he married later in life, Joy Gresham.
Tolkien and Lewis talked long about the adventures that captured their imaginations as young readers. Both were introduced to the world of literature by attentive and energetic mothers. Both, they discovered, lost their beloved Moms (Mums) in childhood – Lewis at age ten, Tolkien at age thirteen. Both believed that adventure stories and wonderful fantasies just may be the best possible way to communicate the values of Christian truth.
In their friendship, and the weekly meetings of the Inklings, Lewis gave the world The Chronicles of Narnia, among many other works.
And Tolkien? The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. And many more.
And here we are in a new millennium, and the work of the Inklings have become the talk of the nation. The toast of the box office.
Tolkien’s first in the Lord of the Rings trilogy – the Fellowship of the Rings. A major motion picture.
* * * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
I’ve got an inkling this week. An inkling that maybe this year, this brand New Year, you may like never before see the connection between your commitment to work and your commitment to meaning. Your efforts, your skills, your gifts, your interests, your energy all come together to communicate to the world what it is that you value most.
When Charles Colson hit bottom, when he crashed and burned falling from the White House pedestal of Counsel to the President to convicted felon, prison-bound, he read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity and it changed his life forever.
Have you got a place, a regular place, where you cultivate your professional skills with likeminded colleagues who help you to see how your efforts mean more than simply paying the bills? A place where you put your work in the context of what you believe? Where you sense that your efforts contribute to the advance of the Kingdom?
I envy Lewis and Tolkien for those Tuesdays and Thursdays with the Inklings.
Would that I could sit in the corner of the pub and just listen. Or wander down the hallways of the great university and take a seat in the back row. To listen to the planning. Observe the camaraderie. Hear the verbal jousting. Learn from the mutual admiration. Smell the sweet scent of burning pipe tobacco. Take it all in.
Let’s spur one another on as Inklings.
Your world needs it.
So does mine.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
LeaderFOCUS is brought to you by Good Stewardship Associates
Special Thanks for Design by my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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