The Question I (Almost) Couldn’t Answer

On February 12, I had a marvelous talk with Cherie Harder of The Trinity Forum: digging deep into the friendship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and exploring lessons we can learn from their example. Click here to listen.

One of the delights of this particular interview was the number of listeners who wrote in with questions. There wasn’t time to answer them all! Look for new questions and more answers in upcoming issues of Bandersnatch News.

One listener (right at the end of the interview) posed a question I did not know how to answer. It seemed simple enough: “What is your favorite insight from your years of studying Lewis, Tolkien, and the Inklings?” Here is an edited version of my answer: 

“Trying to pick a favorite anything—a favorite book, a favorite song… it’s always very, very difficult. Hmm. I think I may be stumped. Maybe it’s something that I mentioned earlier: that we don’t have a very robust understanding of the idea of encouragement. What encouragement means. The word—Tolkien would be pleased if we would trace the etymology of the word—it means to put heart into someone. So something I learned from the Inklings and something that I have experienced in my own group, my own creative fellowship that’s been meeting over these past twenty years, is there are very real and robust ways that we can hold hope for one another.

I remember when I was working on The Company They Keep. That book took me twenty-three years to write. And there were times when I was working on that when I was just as discouraged as discouraged can be. Just like so many authors, I had sent out proposal after proposal, and publisher after publisher said, ‘There’s nothing new to say about the Inklings. There’s nobody who’s interested in these authors. We don’t need any more books about C. S. Lewis.’ And I was so discouraged. I went to one of these meetings with my group, and I told them, I said, ‘I’m—I’m finished. Honestly, I don’t believe in this project anymore. It has been rejected so often and some of the comments have been so dismissive and cruel—I just—I can’t. I just can’t believe in it anymore.’

And my friend Joe turned to me and said, ‘That’s okay. I’ll believe in it for you until you can believe in it again. I’ll believe in it for you.’ He said, ‘Diana, I can see you walking in this room, this very room, my living room, with a box of books. And I will believe in that until you can believe it for yourself.’ That’s encouragement. That’s the essence of encouragement. And I think maybe that’s—maybe that’s my favorite insight—that encouragement is something real, it’s tangible, and it’s a tremendous gift that we can give to one another: We can hold hope for one another. We really can.”