As the Ruin Falls

It's funny how things come back to us at odd moments in our lives. Just yesterday, I heard someone read C.S. Lewis's poem, "As the Ruin Falls," on the radio. I'd not seen it, heard it, nor thought of it in years. Looking at it now, I'm certain I didn't understand it then--especially not in the way I do now.

In the 1950's C.S. Lewis was unmarried, a world-renowned writer and professor at Oxford. In Joy Gresham, a divorced American poet with a small child, Lewis discoverd an unlikely friendship and then, unexpectedly, surprisingly a deep and profound love. After finding great love, Lewis experienced great pain when Joy developed terminal cancer.

In the brief space of the poem, Lewis speaks of how Joy awakened true love in him and also of his grief as her ravaged body failed--thus the title, "As the Ruin Falls."

The true story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham is wonderfully depicted by Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger in the Richard Attenborough film, "Shadowlands." If you've not seen it, do yourself a favor and rent or buy the DVD today!


============================================

As The Ruin Falls

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love—a scholar's parrot may talk Greek—
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

C.S. Lewis