My grandmother said.
I think they were wise words.
Always tell the truth, but don't tell all.
You know?
I think that some of that carried into my pastoral ministry from time to time.
And I've brought that with me into the research I've been doing with C.
S. Lewis.
Let me start with a story.
It was about three years ago, and I was sitting in McDonald's with my wife.
Friends of our family and our children
were busy playing in the play place, staying active, staying busy.
And my friend was a therapist, still is a therapist.
And we started chatting about our different professions.
He was part of our church, and we become friends through the years.
And the topic of our own work came up and we asked he asked me, well, would you
or asked him, would you have be friends with your clients?
Would you socialize with them?
And it was very clear he was like, oh, no, I couldn't do that.
And it kind of dawned on him that he was
like, I suppose that you're doing this right now, right?
And kind of socializing socializing with me.
And we kind of laughed.
We kind of laughed about it and was able to have a pastoral moment where we were
able to share the difficulty of giving support to your friends.
And I think I said something silly and flippant, something like and
it's very difficult when all your friends are losing it.
What I should have said was something like
it's difficult to provide spiritual, professional, pastoral support to your
friends who are engaged in events that are seemingly disintegrating in their lives,
relationally or professionally or spiritually or something like that.
And the reason I should have said
something far more couched, far more professional was that about 18 months
later, my wife and I had the opportunity, responsibility to walk him
and his wife through a period of separation.
And suddenly, in that, my mind is just racing back.
Have I said something that has kind of
given up the opportunity I've had to be a pastoral presence in his life?
Is something that I said trying to be
funny or to be flippant or even just to share the ups and downs of pastoral life
with a person who was and is my friend is something I said didn't jeopardize that.
Which brings me to some of this tension
that if you are pastors or in spiritual leadership or in helping professions of
some sort, you, I think, have probably experienced it.
A tension between self revelation and pastoral leadership.
Maybe asking questions, something like
this will the other person know more about me?
If they know more about me, will it ease their pain, anxiety and isolation?
How much of myself do I share?
How much vulnerability is appropriate?
Can I entrust myself to a person to whom I
am a spiritual authority without sphere of judgment or maybe discouragement?
Will telling about myself threaten to dominate the conversation or create an
expectation that my experience is normative for them.
Are there other questions that you have had in this tension of selfrevelation and
leadership that you would want to put on the slide that you can say, this is a
question that I have asked in this tension?
Any questions that you would add to those?
I think for myself, as a psychotherapist,
the question which drives me in is this for them or is this for me?
Sure. Say more about that regulatory bodies.
Okay, sure.
Is this for them? Is this for me?
What are my professional expectations?
Maybe written unwritten?
Recent book called Emotional Intelligence
for Religious Leaders gave a couple of experiences around this topic.
A couple of pastors gave these reflections.
They said, I guess for me, one of the biggest ways I've been successful in
influencing others is just by being real with people.
Another pastor said this you can see the real me if you want to.
You don't have to go through a lot of levels.
As I started to reflect on this question that I certainly had asked a number of
times in my own professional ministry, I suppose it kind of boiled down to this,
well, what might see us, lewis, tell me about this challenge.
Of course, he's not really around to tweet and to ask him his direct opinion.
So I went back to some of my own
experience, which, if it's like yours, reading The Chronicles, Narnia, maybe the
Space Trilogy, maybe some others of his fiction, whenever you are a child or a
teen, or maybe early on in your pastoral ministry.
And I began to reflect on, well, just as
my grandmother's phrase, always tell the truth, but don't tell all you know, became
embedded in me as something of a norm, something of some wisdom.
I wondered, is there some philosophy that
Lewis maybe has already given to me around this tension through his fiction?
And if there is, can I try to make it more critically aware of it?
Can I try and find some wisdom that might
pertain to these kinds of questions from his fiction?
One of the challenges, of course, of spiritual leadership is that it requires a
management of various aspects of the self, our emotional and spiritual burdens.
It requires developing habits of authenticity because they are vital to the
management of the typical strains of pastoral work.
From the book Emotional Intelligence for Spiritual Leaders, West Rights failing to
learn the difference between between healthy emotional self control and
maladaptive psychological tendencies can be harmful.
Our emotions are powerful forces that must be accounted for.
Just as we must plan for a power surge in
our home in the event of a lightning strike, so they are very much advocating
for ways that we can be self revealing in this time.
Maybe looking approvingly at those
conversations that I had in McDonald's with my friend.
Another voice in this.
This is from Willeman.
His book Pastor, which has become probably
a classic even over the last 20 years, not quite 20 years since its publication.
Some of the wisdom that Willeman writes,
and he uses the psychology of Karl Young to describe personas or masks.
Willeman writes, the persona is not necessarily an actor deceitful charade.
It helps us protect it helps protect us by keeping parts of ourselves hidden.
It's the professional face that we must
present or that we present to the world in order to fulfill our responsibilities.
The pastor is not necessarily being
deceitful when he goes and expresses sympathy for the care of James Smith.
The pastor is putting his own personal feelings aside in order to accomplish the
greater good of offering pastoral care to a grieving person.
So if, very briefly, west and his coauthors are advocating a sense of self
revelation, will Willeman is advocating something of a persona or
putting on a role, putting on a mask, which can be a little bit ambiguous.
We'll talk more about it as the presentation continues.
But certainly another side of wisdom in this question.
So, bringing this to Lewis.
Why might Lewis be a good conversation partner on these questions of tension?
Why might he be a good person to access for wisdom?
Number one, I began to see the themes of
the face and masks very prominently in two of Lewis's key pieces of fiction.
First, his first piece of fiction, Post Conversion, was Pilgrim's Regress in 1933.
And then his final piece of fiction, co authored with his wife, Joy.
This was the final piece of fiction that
he published before his death, which was Till We Have Faces.
Let me describe these briefly for you.
If you haven't read them, then hopefully I
won't give enough away that you'll still be able to enjoy them, but maybe with a
couple of lenses to read them, at least with this question in mind.
So in the Pilgrims Regress, there's a young boy named John.
It describes his experience in his pursuit of God.
And very early on, he comes into the
contact with a steward, which is another word for pastor.
And at first John finds the spiritual teaching, he finds the steward pleasant
and welcoming until the pastor, the steward, begins to talk about God.
Then the steward puts a mask on.
Prior to the mask, lewis describes the man
with a red round face and describes him as very kind and full of jokes.
But prior to speaking of God or the
landlord, the steward took a mask down off his wall with a long white beard on it,
attached it and clapped it to his face so that his appearance was awful.
In the steward's coaching of how John
should respond to the question of whether he had broken any of God's rules or the
landlord's rules, the steward instantly takes off the mask, looks at John with his
real face, says Lewis, and said, better tell a lie, old chap.
Better tell a lie easiest for all
concerned, and then popped his mask back on, all in a flash to the question of
whether or not John had broken any of the rules.
He said, oh, no, sir.
Just as well, said the steward through the mask.
If you did break any of them, the landlord got to know it well, it would be bad news.
And I'll shorten the description there in Lewis's.
Later on in Pilgrim's Regress, lewis will use this language of the face and a veil
to describe the work of God or the landlord.
In speaking of the metaphor of the veil
and the work of mythology, lewis writes this of the landlord.
The landlord says, but this is my inventing this mythology.
This is the veil under which I have chosen to appear, even from the first until now.
For this end I made your senses, and for
this end your imagination, that you might see my face and live.
If you know the story I've CS.
Lewis, you understand some of the way that
he became was always appreciative of mythology and how it became such an
important avenue for him to come to understand God.
Whereas we sometimes think of if there's a presence of mythology that might
illuminate some of our own Christian stories or Jewish stories, we think that
that might be a threatening thing for Lewis.
He said that's not all the bad for Christianity.
He said that's all the better for mythology.
He said that's exactly what we should
expect, and puts it in these kinds of words.
This is God's veil that he was using to
draw us to himself so that we might ultimately see his face.
So why Lewis?
It's a pertinent theme in the early and late fiction I think I missed.
I'll come to it in a second.
I want to tell you about my method as well.
So why Lewis?
I noticed this presence of the mask and persona and veil in his early fiction and
in his late fiction really standing out as bookends.
And then also this curious little passage
from George McDonald, whom Lewis described as his master.
Lewis described McDonald as his master, one from whom he he learned so much.
And there's a letter that George McDonald writes to his wife in 160, and he
describes one of the functions of stories like this.
He's describing stories that weren't very
good because they were missing out on this.
He says, as stories, they just want one central spot of red.
The wonderful thing which, whether in a fairy story or in a word or a human being,
is the life in depth, whether truth or humor or pathos, it's the eye to the face
of it, the thing that shows the unshowable.
While on its own, this quote might reveal very little.
Seeing the bookends of Pilgrim's Regress
and Til, we have faces present in Lewis's own writing.
And then this quote gave me a hypothesis
by which I wanted to consider the Chronicles of Narnia, right, one of
Lewis's best known pieces of fiction, with this question in mind.
So I used a method called
sensory aesthetic texture, which was looking in the text for ways that it kind
of leaps out at us, ways that it kind of attacks us.
If you're familiar with the work of New
Testament scholar Vernon Robbins, he uses this work quite a bit.
It's a way to read text to see how do they
impact, how do they impact us, how do they, in a sense, attack us.
So I began to use this method by
specifically looking for themes of face or language of facial features like eyes,
ears, mouth, nose, hair and their influence on other people.
And here is some of what I found first.
In The Chronicles of Narnia, the face is
used to reveal a character's inner life otherwise hidden to other characters and
to reveal a character's true identity when it's in doubt.
I'll give you a number of examples through these.
I won't give all of them, but no doubt if
you're familiar with the stories, some of them will come to mind for you.
So, for example, in Prince Caspian,
caspian's tutor Cornelius Caspian is said simply to assume that he is human.
He is said to have a very wise, very ugly, yet very kind face.
And while the young prince still considers him to be a man, even after Cornelius's
teachings about old Narnia, when Cornelius reveals his face clearly he is recognized
as a dwarf, though he is actually part man and part dwarf.
Later on in the voyage of the Dawn Treader, Caspian is on this quest to
discover what's happened to friends of his fathers who have been banished and left
the kingdom whenever his uncle Maraj took over.
And at one location it's said that Caspian is caught and brought to the slave trade.
Upon capture, his identity is specifically told to be kept secret.
But at the market, Caspian is purchased by
the Lord Byrne, who says, quote, I bought you for your face.
Upon revealing his true identity, even in
the face of the Lord Burns semi doubt Caspian is challenged as a result on how
the lord Burn should know the truth of his claim to being Caspian, to which Caspian
promptly responds, firstly, by my face, let's turn to Horse and his boy.
Where King Loon sees truth in Shasta's story of the impending attack from the
Calor means he sees truth in Shasta's face.
And Shasta's initial review of the king
reveals him as his character truly, where he is seen as an
apple cheeked and twinkling eyed man to go along with his jolliness.
At other points in the Chronicles of
Narnia, you'll see that the identity of talking beasts is seen in their face.
So Patter Twig has a squirrel, is a
squirrel whose face looks unlike any other, unlike any other squirrel.
And the badger from Prince Caspian as
well, is described as having a face unlike any other badger that you might see.
Another example of this sense of identity being revealed in the faces of Caspian at
Deathwater Island in the voyage of the Dawn Treader.
In the voyage of the Dawn Treader, you
might remember Eustace's very memorable encounter when he turns into a dragon.
After being turned into a dragon, euston actually finally recognizes himself when
he sees the dragon face in the pool and recognizes that it is his own reflection,
his identity is finally revealed to himself in this dragon face.
Lewis actually uses this theme, then, to carry on to describe who Caspian is.
While this encounter that Caspian has with his face or that
Eustace has with his face might be taken literally in the story, the dragonish
inner life of another character, Caspian, implies that Eustace sees his own
character truly when it is revealed in dragon form.
Caspian's greed for gold is revealed on Death Water Island, where he and Edmunds
squabble for the rights to this island and where the water turns things to gold.
When Caspian begins to realize the riches
that belong to the king who owns this island, Lewis writes his face flushed.
There's a dual meaning that could be used to flush both that he blushed and that he
realized he could be well supplied with money.
His face flushing brings Caspian's character to his face.
Caspian's face reveals his dragonish heart
in this scene through two other pieces of evidence.
First, the Dawn Treader itself is the
finest ship built under Caspian's reign, and it itself is a dragon.
And second, Caspian's cabin is said to be decorated with dragons.
Finally, where is Caspian transformed from his dragonish self in his cabin upon
seeing the face of Aslan with Aslan's, quote, terrible eyes from which Caspian
emerges with a transformed face, white and full of tears.
Whereas the water reflected Eustace's dragonish self in reflection, the water of
the island subtly revealed Caspian's dragonish self in his flushed face.
So the face is used to reveal the
character's inner life, who they are, which is otherwise hidden at characters,
and to reveal a character's true identity when it's in doubt.
Secondly, this use of
examining the Chronicles of Narnia with its sensory texture in mind.
I found that in the Chronicles of Narnia the face is said to influence others to
act, to stop acting, or to confirm that right action has taken place.
I'll start with Diggeri's face in The
Magician's Nephew right away in this story, we are told of his face popping
over a fence, a face that is wet with tears and quite dirty.
We are told soon after that he needed to hold back his tears.
It's revealing his internal condition.
We're reminded of Diggery's face just before he's commissioned to retrieve an
apple to undo the wrong he has brought into Narnia because he is desperate for
Aslan to do something to heal his own mother.
Who is deathly ill.
We are told that Diggery has a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes, and he
finally, after a time, dares to look into the lion's face.
And there what he sees that the lion has this tawny face bent near to Diggery's
own, and that Aslan has his own great shining tears that tell Diggeri that Aslan
might be sorrier about his mother than even Diggeri.
And these very tears confirmed to Diggery
later on that he made the right choice not to use the apple that he was sent to
retrieve for his own benefit, though the Witch had told him to do so.
A second example of this event, or of this
finding of the face lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is sent upstairs in the
magician's house to say a spell that will turn invisible things visible.
And so she is going through this rather remarkable and majestic book, magic book,
and it says that she comes across a spell to make the utter beautiful.
And in this account the face is prominent.
We are told that she, quote, peers at the pictures with her face close to the page.
She sees that one of those pictures is of
herself with her, quote, mouth open and a rather a terrible expression on her face.
She sees that this pictured Lucy and the real Lucy look into each other's eyes and
the real Lucy looks away, dazzled by the beauty of the other Lucy, though she could
still see a sort of likeness to herself in that beautiful face.
The result of the spell will be the loss of Susan's beauty as well.
And it is said that Susan has a nasty expression on her face as she witnesses
all of this going on within the story book's life.
Even so, in spite of all of these warnings, lucy decides to say the spell.
But when she goes to read the words, she
found the great face of a lion, the lion aslan himself, staring into hers.
She, quote, knew the expression of his face quite well.
He was growling and you could see most of his teeth.
She became horribly afraid and turned over the page at once.
So here we're having a sense of Lucy's identity revealed in her face and also the
effect of Aslan's face to keep her from taking this action.
Finally, the face is the locus of
transformation in The Chronicles of Narnia.
A few examples.
First from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Witch is said to have a white face
that is proud and cold and stern, with a very red mouth.
Upon eating the Witch's food, Edmond is
said to have a red face with sticky fingers and mouth.
So this connection of red face and the
prominence of the mouth in both these descriptions, the connection of Edmund's
transformation at the Witch's influence is confirmed by Mr.
Beaver, who says that Edmund had the look
of one who had been with the witch and had eaten her food.
You can always tell them, says Mr.
Beaver, if you've lived long enough in Narnia something about their Eyes
second example from the Silver Chair with Prince Rillian.
Prince, who has gone missing, and children have been summoned by Aslan to go on a
quest to look for him with Puddleglum the Marshwigle.
Prince Rillian from the Silver Chair also
has such a transformation revealed in his face.
While he initially is transformed in a negative way upon the disappearance of his
mother, a change confirmed by the look in his eyes, writes Lewis.
His positive transformation is revealed later, using similar features.
While he is yet under the spell of the
lady in the Green Curdle, louis writes that he looked both bold and kind, though
there was something about his face that didn't seem quite right.
Upon destroying the chair, however, this
something wrong, whatever it was, had vanished from his face.
In Horse and His Boy, Shasta's transformation is connected with his face
as well, left behind by faster writers from Arkanland who are going to pursue to
the Carolyne soldiers who are preparing ambush, shasta is left to find a path
through the mountains between Arkanland and Narnia.
Aslan intervenes, however, providing a way
in the darkness, eventually illuminating the way by his own radiance.
Lewis writes after one glance at the
lion's face, shasta slipped out of the saddle and fell at his feet.
Here Shasta becomes speechless, and Lewis
emphasizes the point, writing he couldn't say anything, but then he didn't want to
say anything, and he knew he needed to say anything.
This is noteworthy because no less than five times earlier in the story, shasta is
told to be quiet upon seeing the face of Aslan.
He is a different person, and Shasta's
face is included as the transformation is completed upon Aslan's mysterious Parcher.
After leading Shasta through the pass,
Shasta wonders if it was all a dream, but of course it isn't.
Proof is the enormous paw print that
eventually produced a well and spring of water, which Shasta uses to wash his face,
be refreshed, and understand how he passaged safely through the mountains.
He has been transformed, and he has been
transformed to be silent, and he is now observant.
A final example of this transformation is
from the Magician's Nephew with the first King and Queen of Narnia, frank and Helen.
They are revealed to be new characters, people of new character by their faces,
lewis writes neither hair nor clothes that made them look so different from their own
old selves, their faces had a new expression, especially the kings.
All the sharpness and cunning and
quarrelsomeness which he had picked up as a London cabbie seemed to have been washed
away, and the courage and kindness which had always been there were easier to see.
Perhaps it was the air of the young world
that had done it, or talking with Aslan, or both the completion of this
transformation or the extent of the completion of this transformation is then
confirmed by the cabbie's old Horse Fledge, who has now become a winged horse.
And he says, my old master has been changed nearly as much as I have.
He's a real master now.
Summing this section up, what we see from
Lewis is that the face becomes that which reveals the unshowable and often stands in
for the self, revealing what otherwise is hidden and revealing transformation that
the reader would not otherwise know so clearly.
So how might these insights from the Chronicles of Narnia apply to our
questions of self revelation and pastoral leadership?
Number one, we might have a gentle
challenge to any sense of self idolatry in the self revelation of the pastor,
because it is Aslan's face that is saving, while other faces influence.
As we'll see in a moment, it's Aslan's
face which is ultimately the site of saving and judgment.
At the end of the last battle.
All creatures without any other option must look quote, straight in Aslan's face,
and their fate is revealed in the hatred and fear or the love, though with fright
expressed in their faces in response to Aslan's own face.
Second, we might have a caution that pastors,
along with others, truly are influencers, even if we try to hide ourselves.
Both the White Witch, who is the queen
in The Magician's Nephew influenced Edmund to look like her, and the chief of Police,
Mogrim, or Fenris Wolf, in an earlier editions of lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe are both said to have these red mouths.
Her authenticity was effective in influencing others.
Uncle Andrew as well.
Diggery's uncle is one who influences
through his own self revelation, authentic as he is.
He says, you must learn, child, that we would be wrong for you.
It would be wrong for you or any of the
common people, is not wrong for such a great queen or for me.
And indeed, Diggery becomes one who considers putting himself beyond the
rules, just like his uncle, as his Uncle Andrew did.
Third mask wears must be
mindful of the fact that there is a self or a face that is beneath the mask.
Here I want to delve deeply into till we have faces in the story.
Till we have faces.
Oroal is a character who dons a mask in order to become the Queen of Globe.
She's this hideously, ugly woman, and she
deals with this by putting this mask on her face.
After a time, she writes, the Queen of
Globe had more and more part of me, and Orewell had less and less.
So she becomes more and more one character
and less and less herself because of the mask she wears.
The mask donned by oru will changed herself.
Ultimately, this loss of self is revealed when Oral stands before the gods, which,
if you know the story, is exactly what she wants.
But in so doing, she finally realizes that she has become blind to herself.
Or Will writes, how can the gods meet us face to face until we have faces?
Or how can we know the gods as selves
until we know ourselves or we have a self, our self?
Underneath the mask that Ora will wears, there is less and less a self.
And in fact, what ends up happening is she
gorges herself on the selves of other people.
This ends up being attention because for Orwell, this wearing of the mask is
actually quite helpful for her in the reign that she has.
She describes her reign as a queen in these terms, and it's important when I'm
going to use this description, she's a reliable witness at this point.
She isn't always a reliable witness, but
at this point in the story, what she shares is reliable.
It has a ring of truth, in part because it is so humble.
Or Will describes herself
as more and more the queen, and yes, less and less Or Will.
But to these benefits, she says that she was a good queen.
Though she had two very good counselors, she does not glamorize her reign.
It's fact a rather humble account.
Rather than accepting praise that the
public bestows on her, she records a much more chastened reality.
So the sense of humility, the sense of
giving credit to honor makes her this reliable witness.
But she describes her reign like this.
She says that my second strength in leadership lay in my veil.
Or this mask.
I could never have believed till I had proof of it, what it would do for me.
From the very first, it began that night in the garden with Trunia.
As soon as my face was invisible, people
began to discover all manner of beauties about my voice.
In the persona created by the mask, the reader sees that aurawill changes the
culture of the palace by hanging an unjust, scheming busy body.
She sets slaves free, facilitates their marriages, provides them land and cottages
to make a life, and inspires their deep loyalty.
She develops systems of economic prosperity and social justice.
She finds education for her counselors and enables the building of a noble library.
Oral's just caring and fruitful leadership is facilitated by her mask.
In a brief, though similar event at the
end of The Last Battle, lewis writes this of King Tyrion you would not have known
from Tyrion's face that he had now given up all hope.
He masks his true self in order to continue engaging in leadership.
Both Oral and Tyrion performed admirably
and appropriately by masking their faces literally and emotionally.
Now, some of the challenge of this is that the negative impact that this has on Oral
at one point, as she's been wearing her mask for so long, it says that she's more
recognizable with the mask than without it.
Legends among the people grow about just what face is beneath Oroal's mask.
Some.
Say there's a great beauty or a great terror.
Some say there's an animal's face.
Oruil herself writes, the best story was that I had no face at all.
If you stripped off my veil, you'd find emptiness.
And so, writing, Oroal has written more
than she knows, because truly, beneath this mask, there was no self.
While her role as queen was facilitated
and performed admirably, at times there was a loss of self as to who Oral was.
What Oral will later come to name of herself is that rather than being
selfless, she interprets a story to be one without any self.
She engorges the selves of others and takes their lives into her.
Especially her counselors,
Louis We can surmise, would be a proponent of wearing masks to a certain extent, but
also to the importance of de rolling or taking off the masks from time to time in
order to be face to face with God and face to face with others whom we trust.
Willeman shares some of this wisdom back in the book Pastor, when he writes, when
too much energy is expended in keeping up this mask, when there is no chance to move
out of the role, take off the mask and let down our image, there's a fundamental
disjunction between who we are and the role that we play.
All right, so to sum up some of my
findings on this question here, what might Lewis tell me?
I think he would say, at times, you need to wear a mask.
At times you need to be mindful of covering over part of who you are.
At the same time, you need to have people around whom you can take the mask off.
If you only wear a mask, you become one who doesn't have a self.
You become only a masked person under whom there is nothing.
As I reflected on this with pastoral ministry, I think there are certainly
times when it is tempting simply to put on the mask of being strong and capable and
all things going well in order to service our people, which is good.
And yet something as well to be very weary of.
Something to be leery of and to be self critical.
Are we constantly wearing a mask, or we
have people around whom we can take the mask off?
Are we displaying that mask before God, or
are we being our authentic selves before Him as well?
I think that's it.