My Essays

As the perennial reader may have noticed, when November—the month of Thanksgiving—rolls  around I begin to wax reflective about things for which I am grateful. The contemplation of funerals and the deaths of good people who are ready to move on to the next life, or who have moved on, as macabre as it may appear, fall into that category.  One man who died 50 years ago this month, November 22, 1963, was such a person who exerted a profound influence upon me. 

Scholar, essayist and novelist, Englishman C. S. Lewis was the man.  I have twenty-seven books written by or about him from which I have gained and I peruse regularly. I believe, but feel constrained to repeat it once again—C. S. Lewis was perhaps the most insightful Christian apologist and essayist of the last century.  His ‘mentor,’ and another giant in my pantheon, was Scottish preacher George Macdonald, a man Lewis never met in person,  but whose sermons and essays influenced him as both men did me. (Macdonald did not die in November but both men are of the ‘same cloth’ and so I think of them together.). A third highly influential essayist with whom I typically spend time with in this month of remembrance is the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in May of 1803, (neither did he die in November). 

These three great men wrote essays and gave addresses that, at least in times past, influenced thousands for good.  I, too, write essays, but acknowledge that many are pale reflections of the insights of these spiritual and intellectual giants.  Nevertheless, I write, hoping that some thought or insight I have had, will influence for good some reader as these men have influenced me.  

So that the reader does not expect too much from a 500 - 700 word  essay or opinion piece, let me explain what I think an essay is and what it is not.  An essay for me is not a dissertation or a treatise.  It is not an article.  It is not an explication or carefully reasoned and supported argument. But it is an introduction or exploration of a theme.  It is an idea, a tone, an attitude, what has been called ‘a spiritual signature.’  It has a flavor or quality or bent of thought that shows up in subsequent essays. It is part of a pattern—a communication of belief that is consistent with an overarching world-view. 

My essays are not poetry, although I have put in a piece or two, but they define my identity.  To use Lewis’s words, “In poetry the words are the body and the ‘theme’ or ‘content’ is the soul.” Literature is an art whose medium is words. For me, the voice of an educated conscience must speak. 

  

I hope the reader can appreciate the expression of these counter-point views, not contemporary or necessarily (or even usually) ‘politically correct but views that I find, upon rereading my own essays, are often an echo of a voice crying in the wilderness or twilight of a collapsing culture. 

Three cheers for the ‘old’ literature.   Thanks for reading this.