Burdens and a Wardrobe

“Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” — Galatians 6:2 (KJV)

In public, the years after the war were the peak of Lewis's fame; in 1947 an American news magazine put him on its cover. In private they were among the hardest of his life. He was worn out from the war years, and the two people he lived with were both falling apart.

Mrs Moore was in her seventies, in pain from ulcers on her legs and less and less able to move. She grew more anxious and demanding, quarrelled with the maids, and wanted Jack at her side constantly. Visitors watched him called away again and again for some small crisis. Warnie's diary is full of fury at what he saw as her tyranny. Jack hardly ever complained. He nursed her, fetched and carried for her, and listened.

Warnie, meanwhile, was drinking. After the war it became binges that lasted days or weeks and sometimes ended in hospital. In 1947, on holiday in Ireland, he was taken into a hospital at Drogheda run by Irish nuns, and Jack crossed the sea to be with him. The nuns nursed Warnie back many times. In no record that survives did Jack lecture him. He worried, prayed, brought him home and forgave him. But there were times when the brother he depended on most couldn't be depended on at all.

In June 1949 Jack collapsed with a serious infection and exhaustion. Friends told him the household was killing him. He wouldn't hear of changing it. He had made a promise.

In April 1950 Mrs Moore had to move into a nursing home. He visited her almost every day, often crossing Oxford in the middle of a heavy working day to sit with a woman who was often confused. She died in January 1951, aged seventy-eight. He admitted to friends both relief and real grief. He had kept his promise to Paddy for more than thirty years.

Oxford never made him a professor. Some colleagues thought a scholar who wrote popular religious books and spoke on the radio wasn't quite respectable. He felt the slights but didn't complain in public.

And in these cramped, exhausting years he wrote Narnia. Since he was about sixteen he had carried a picture in his head of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. In 1948 and 1949 he finally wrote the story. Tolkien disliked it intensely; another friend loved it, and Lewis kept going. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe appeared in 1950, with six more books after it. He insisted they weren't allegories but stories imagining what the Son of God might be like if he came into another world. Children wrote to him in thousands, and he answered them patiently, never talking down. When one child worried about loving Aslan more than Jesus, Lewis gently replied that this wasn't really possible, because the things the child loved Aslan for were the very things Jesus had done and said.

In 1954 Cambridge offered him a new professorship, and he accepted. It was the recognition Oxford had never given him.

Paul says to bear one another's burdens. Lewis carried an old woman's decline, a brother's drinking and the letters of thousands of strangers, mostly unthanked and unseen. It nearly broke his health. Yet out of those years came the books that have gone furthest of all. Carrying someone else's load is never wasted time, even when it feels as if your own life is on hold.

One thing to do this week: notice one person at home who carries a heavy load: a parent, a grandparent, a brother or sister. Quietly take one job off them without being asked, and don't mention it.