Blue flowers can grow…

The song Arcadia is largely based on the life of C.S. Lewis.  Most of the lines are either his direct quotations or a synopsis of his  thoughts throughout his life concerning God.  The story is so much bigger than you can tell in a 3:30-4:00 song.    I will try to tell the whole story as best I can. 

When C.S. Lewis was a child, his mother became very ill.  In those days, when someone was sick they were locked away in thier room.  The children were not permitted to go in.  It was very frustrating for him to know she was right down the hall, yet he couldn”t see her or be near her.  She had raised him on the teachings of Jesus and so he knew of the miracles that could come by his simple prayers.  He had read that Jesus healed the sick, and so he prayed for him to heal his mother.  He prayed fervently for her healing, but God would not hear him.  His mother soon died in her room, behind the door that kept him from seeing her in her final days.  Being a child, with the faith of a child, he prayed for her to be raised from the dead.  After all, he had read that Jesus could do that too.  It did not happen.  He became very bitter and dismissed prayer as the technology of repetitive action that we believed would produce the result of some type of magic.  He had such a negative outlook on the false hopes of prayer that when he was sent off to war he wrote a letter home saying he had never seen such atrocities as he had in war but that he would not stoop so low as to ask God for anything.  He wrote that he could hear the other men in the trenches praying to God, but he would not sink to that level.  To believe God would listen!  To believe God would care!  To believe God even existed!   For that was where his thinking soon led:  No God would let such things happen and so there must not be one.    He was searching for something that produced results, not silly fascinations of a child.   For a long time he sought the feelings of joy that he had only known as a child.   He referred to joy as the elusive blue flowers in one of his favorite childhood stories, Arcadia.

The song is about hope,  a hope that our future will be better than our past.   Horrible things may have happened in your life.   I know those who have seen the worst life has to give: children molested by their parents, those raised by the system because their parents chose drugs over them, children who grow up not understanding how God could let these things happen to them.  I cannot explain away these hurts, but I can tell you that they can be healed.   God can promise a future that defies the shadows of a dark past.    That is the story we are telling.

I know you are all wondering how the whole C.S. Lewis thing turned out, and it is such an amazing story, that I will tell you next time.  (Next time!  Next time, don”t forget!)

pardon the errors, i am too tired to be an author and an editor