Now, what does her act of painting achieve? Perhaps this is why a child’s painting can be simple yet possess unexpected beauty. Rouse, said the hallmark of all great poets is plain, unaffected language. Though her strokes to an adult appear raw, a rhythm of joy flows across the page-felt more than seen. The vision of the sunset elevates her mind. Lewis, however, points to the fact that only God truly creates he alone brings something from nothing, and he alone brings forth existence itself. In her act of sky-building, she paints from her truest self.

She paints unaffected by forces telling her how to represent what she sees. Phoebe reaches for the awe trapped in the colors that dazzle her sense of sight. What does her painting show us? Is it mere mimesis? Or is it something more profound? She uses the materials given to her to paint what she sees. With her senses afire, she rebuilds the awe-full sky before her. So, Phoebe sits with her paper, looks at the melting colors in the sky, and smears wonder marks, filling her makeshift canvas. Phoebe’s mother invites her to paint the sunset. Lewis would have us be reachers and builders.Ĭonsider the painting of a child. In Lewis’s mysticism, we find hidden instructions for chasing beauty in our everyday callings and in our art. In Lewis’s final work of fiction, Till We Have Faces, when Psyche admits to Orual that the sweetest thing in all her life is to go to the mountain to find where all the beauty came from, we hear Jack’s voice pining for the One Thing behind the thing. When Lewis and his brother Warren reminisced about their childhood, Jack “lamented the lost simplicity of country pleasures: the empty sky, the unspoilt hills, the white silent roads on which you could hear the rattle of a farm cart half a mile away.”

Before breakfast, recalls Sayer, Lewis would walk the garden to drink in “the beauty of the morning, thanking God for the weather, the roses, the song of the birds, and anything else he could find to enjoy.” This affinity for the beauty of nature persisted in his life.

Lewis’s friend George Sayer said Lewis’s life experiences were not literary but “mystical experiences of the presence of God.”Īs a young boy, Lewis’s aesthetic experiences were mediated through nature. Lewis was a Christian mystic but not in the pagan sense, in the Tozer sense: he experienced his faith deep in his sentient being, always aware of God’s presence in his own nature and the world around him.

George sayer cs lewis