C. S. Lewis: The Thrill, then Real Work, then Happiness

C. S. Lewis reminds us that most important activities in life begin with duty and end with joy. 

"St. Clive" Icon?

      He offers that all good things—like love—start with emotion, but become better when  work hard, become less enthralled, then we move past mere feelings to where real enjoyment can be found. This is the path of obedience. For example, Lewis wrote to Edith Gates in 1944 that 

we have no power to make ourselves love God. The only way is absolute obedience to Him, total surrender. He will give us ‘feeling’ He pleases. But both when He does and when He does not, we shall gradually learn that feeling is not the important thing.

In other words, feelings do not constitute our love for God; they are the result of obeying God. It is our will—or the center of action, which the Bible calls “the heart” (not to be confused with our emotions)—that is central to God. God wants to move us to action and that is why the heart matters to God.

      So feelings come and go. But when Lewis looked at the central form of Gift-love or charity, he described this as “an affair of the will.” God “will give us feelings of love as He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right.” In this regard, Lewis followed his great mentor, George MacDonald. In a sermon on “The Temptation in the Wilderness,” MacDonald presented a quite different vision from today’s popular Christian spirituality: “A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread, but by the Truth, that is, the Word, the Will, and the uttered Being of God.” Similarly, Lewis, built his near disdain for feelings on the conviction of God’s constancy. However we may feel, God’s love for us is certainly not subject to the vicissitudes of feelings: “Though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not.”

      When I visited Wheaton College’s Wade Collection, where Lewis’s own books are kept and are wonderfully available to researchers, I poured over Lewis’s own copy of George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, I noted the places that Lewis underlined or set particular quotes in a type of index he created at the back of the book. In his sermon, “Suffered Unto Death,” MacDonald comments “A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread, but by the Truth, that is, the Word, the Will, the uttered Being of God.” Lewis was marked by the insights of his mentor, including this in his anthology of MacDonald as well.

      Faith—as the rest of Christian behavior—is about the will, guided by reason. When Lewis addresses faith in Mere Christianity, he notes that faith and reason may be overcome by emotion and imagination, just as when the anesthesiologist puts a mask on our face, a “childish panic” may begin even if reason tells me that I have nothing to fear and that anesthetics are useful. And so, to be healed, we must submit to another.

      Similarly with love: In his section on Christian marriage, he warns his listeners (and later his readers) that we cannot stay with the thrill of “being in love” with anything:

People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on ‘being in love’ for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change — not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and become a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening.

Here we meet that fundamental conviction that there is a progression: first thrill, then loss of thrill to be accompanied by hard work, then something really good, true happiness. I would also note—along the lines of experiences that all human beings share—Lewis uses flying and gardening, not playing the church organ and studying the Bible—to exemplify his point. I’m fairly certain he didn’t even have to make this decision. For him, all of life naturally fell under God’s watchful eye and grace.

This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go — let it die away — go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow — and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.... It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.

Lewis warns us that feelings come and go, but “the quieter interest and happiness that follow” come later. And we ought not to miss them… despite, I'm afraid, how many do today, if they live by the tyranny of feelings.

A Thought on the 10 Books that Shaped C. S. Lewis

During the early 1960s, the Christian Century published a series of answers by prominent authors to the question, “What books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?” The 6 June 1962, issue featured C. S. Lewis. Here are the ten books in his list:

1.     Phantastes by George MacDonald  

2.     The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton 

3.     The Aeneid by Virgil 

4.     The Temple by George Herbert 

5.     The Prelude by William Wordsworth 

6.     The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto 

7.     The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius 

8.     Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell  

9.     Descent into Hell by Charles WIlliams 

10.  Theism and Humanism by Arthur James Balfour

 What strikes me is the mixture. Some have a particular engagement with secular philosophy, and here I particularly highlight Boethius’s sixth century Consolation, and his profound critical reception of Platonism. Others are especially Christian, like Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, which offers a Christian vision of all human history, and which affected Lewis profoundly in his atheist years; similarly with MacDonald’s Phatastes, a book that “baptized” Lewis’s teenage imagination. He read both before he became a Christian—one provided a rational vision, a supposition of how to make sense of history from Christian faith. But others are not in any way Christian, like The Aeneid, written a few decades before Christ and which Lewis loved so much he began a translation of this classic. This too moved and shaped him.

            
Since Lewis as a literary man foremost, they also indicate the three sides, and the three sets of crises, I will analyze in C. S. Lewis in Crisis: first those related to moving away from atheism, second, those that had a theological focus, and finally, those that expressed common human themes.

Lewis's Argument from Desire (Part Two)

Here's the second half of my current draft on C. S. Lewis's argument from desire. Let me know what you think.

C. S. Lewis’s argument from desire is simple, yet potent because I have found this discontentment with the world and the desire for something beyond it to be well-nigh universal: We have a desire for something that cannot be satisfied by this world. But our hunger demonstrates that we need something beyond this world. 

Lewis, likely talking about the argument from desire

      Imbedded in his comments on the theological virtue of hope, Lewis writes this:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

 This citation is embedded in Mere Christianity’s section on our hope for Heaven to which I return below. But it is worth noting from the outset, that joy and hope are pointers to God’s fulfillment.

      In order to grasp the progression of this argument, I will first outline that desire—and thus pleasure—can be trusted as a good. Then I will fill out more fully the three principal places that Lewis addresses the argument from desire. I conclude with an evaluation of this apologetic, especially on the question of whether it delivers what it promises.

Pleasure comes from God

Before we see how Lewis unfolded this apologetic argument, we must grasp what is implicit: for Lewis pleasure is ultimately good because it ushers from a God who loves to give good gifts. This may strike us as contradictory because almost every use of pleasure we see is against Christian faith. Either Christian moralists warn us about money, sex, and power as things that lure us away from God, or secular culture presents the argument that all the best things are sinful.

      Lewis moves in an entirely different direction. Lewis is drawing on an older tradition, which he does so effortlessly that the reader might miss how much scholarship lies in the background of his satirical wit in the citation below. (Lewis always carries his considerable scholarship lightly.) At any rate, this older tradition tells us that God is the ultimate good. The first chapter of the book of James (1:17) enunciates the connection between goodness and God quite clearly: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” Similarly, God is the source of beauty because God is beautiful, “And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us” (Psalm 90:17). “From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth” (Psalm 50:2). And beauty gives us pleasure. Therefore to know God is to experience what is best and what is most pleasurable. Lewis sets this best in the mouth of the tempter, Screwtape, as he talks about his adversary, God:

He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore.” Ugh! I don't think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working, Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.

Implicit in that word twisted is Lewis’s understanding of evil as a privation—that only good exists, and that evil is parasitic on good. As Screwtape puts it: “Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us.”

      For that reason, Lewis can argue that God can be food as we seek true pleasure, and the truest pleasure of all, God Himself, or glory. This, in the famous triad of Platonic transcendentals, Good, True, and Beautiful, is an apologetic for the Beautiful. And beauty lures us. It is what we desire. It is what makes truth interesting. In some ways, beauty—as a synonym for joy—constitutes the goal of human life. As he phrases this in his magnificent sermon, “The Weight of Glory” at Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on 8 June 1942:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else that can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

 This desire for beauty leads to our feeling an emptiness.

Desire leads to glory

As Lewis preaches his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” to a crowded congregation of Oxford undergraduates, he describes his own discovery: At first he was shocked to find that great Christian writers as different as Milton, Johnson, and Aquinas depicted heavenly glory as approval by God. Lewis had rejected this previously as simplistic, but when he took in this connection, he also resolved the relation between desire and glory:

If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could see no connection at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that connection is perfectly clear. Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed…. welcome into the heart of all things. The door on which we had been knocking all our lives will open at last.

 This longing for something greater leads us to desire its consummation. In his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis argues that joy leads us to glory. “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.” And “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.” Our yearning for something more will be satisfied by God’s promise of heaven.

Conversely, to reject joy is to live in hell, as the Dwarf Ghost does in The Great Divorce even when beckoned toward the joy of heaven by his wife on earth, Sara Smith, who could “awaken all dead things of the universe into life” with her unmitigated joy. I will have more to say on heaven as the fulfillment of human life in chapter nine; for now I am emphasizing the way this leads us to God. It is in fact the direction this argument takes us.

Evaluation: The connection of crisis

I offer myself as Exhibit A for engaging with this crisis. As I searched for meaning in the first year of college, I knew at some level that there had to be more. There had to be something beyond this material world. In Lewis I met a fellow discoverer.

      This apologetic certainly worked for me, but does this it work generally? Not if we believe this is a logical, deductive argument. And sadly, I have often heard Lewis presented as one more logical, evidentialist apologist. This is simply not his approach. Instead, his apologetics are better seen this way: When Lewis described what he was doing with Narnia, he steadfastly denied that these stories were allegories, where each particular element had an exact meaning. Here I’m thinking of Lewis’s own The Pilgrim’s Regress, but even more of John Bunyan’s landmark The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the Pilgrim, Christian, meets the Slough of Despair, which is not surprisingly about facing despair in the Christian life. Or Lewis points to the giant who represents despair:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like if there were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours. So in “Perelandra.” This works out a supposition. (“Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully.”

Lewis is drawing then a supposition, not an allegory or deductively logical argument. Indeed, as the citation above suggests, it is based on imagination. If it is an apologetic argument, it is an imaginative one. And I believe that makes it more powerful because it “baptizes” our imagination, just as George MacDonald’s Phantastes baptized Lewis’s imagination in February 1916.

         Does this apologetic work? It works for Lewis because of his formidable imagination. In many ways, this is a literary more than philosophical argument. It is important here to recall his preaching in that University chapel:

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each of you—the secret that hurts to much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolesence….

    This task—to open up our latent desire for something more than this world has to offer—is one I took up with a worship team in which we started with that beautiful Harold Arlen tune with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg from the playbook of American movies, Somewhere Over the Rainbow:

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream,
Really do come true. 

We played the song to remind our congregation that Lewis was right: we desire heaven almost as naturally as we breathe. It doesn’t even take Scripture to evoke those thoughts. They lie close.

C. S. Lewis's Argument from Desire and the Crisis of Meaninglessness

On this rainy day in Chico, I'm working on the third chapter of my upcoming book, C. S. Lewis in Crisis, and this is the opening section of that chapter. Since it's a draft--and thus incompletely articulated--let me know what you think. There's still time to make it better.

Speaking with a friend as I described my work on this book, we mused about dissatisfaction in life. Since we both love books, he recounted an experience of discontent: “You know when you see that title that you just know is going to be perfect.  It’s going to be the next ‘thing.’ You can hardly wait to have it in your hands. So you order it on Amazon and when it arrives it’s just not what you thought it was going to be. It’s an anticlimax. You sit with it for a bit. You wish it were different. And then you remember: no earthly event or thing seems as good as the expectation…. Greg, I think that experience is the basis of Lewis’s argument from desire.” 

      Admittedly, this is a tame example of discontent with the things of this world. And yet this experience of disgruntlement can bubble into a crisis… at least according to C. S. Lewis. If we continue to seek meaning in this world, we will never be satisfied. We will move from one experience, or even thrill, to the next.

      Lewis knew this sense of poignant longing. He described this as the search for joy, which forms the major theme of Surprised by Joy. “Joy” for Lewis represents an intense longing for something more. Sometimes he employed the German term Sehnsucht, which is “longing,” “yearning,” or more broadly, a form of “intensely missing.” Lewis described Sehnsucht as the “inconsolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.” In the afterword to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, he provided examples of what sparked this desire in him particularly. (I cite this as a reminder that Lewis’s imagination was always decidedly literary):

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.

      Lewis knew personal moments of such intense longing. For example, there was a moment of poignancy that Lewis remembers from his childhood (in what he calls, the “very early days” of childhood). His brother, Warren, and he constructed a toy garden on the lid of a biscuit tin. There beauty led him to Sehnsucht.

That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant…. As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden. And every day there were what we called ‘the Green Hills’; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery window. They were not far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing—Sehnsucht….

I am stuck on this phrase “my imagination of Paradise.” This early experience of joy or Sehnsucht formed what he would later imagine in his books at the fulfillment of life, in other words, Heaven. Later this experience of joy and longing came from a literary source: It occurred when Lewis read his favorite Beatrix Potter book, Squirrel Nutkin. By this own admission—and the content of his autobiographies Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim’s Regress—Lewis valued these experiences above everything else and spent his early life searching for it. This forms the basis for the apologetic argument from desire.

      But he also realized that joy, by its nature, cannot be fulfilled here. Here, in his childhood, Lewis found an ache for something more. The desire did not last long, but it sent him on a lifelong journey, according to his autobiography. Indeed it was this discontentedness that produced a crisis, which ultimately led him to desire God. Lewis had to resolve this crisis for himself. Is there something beyond this world? The fourth and fifth century BC Greek philosopher Plato had to resolve this crisis too: He did so by asserting the existence of the world of the Forms, beyond all we see in the material world. And in some ways, Lewis loved Plato, probably more for the sense of longing that his philosophy evokes. But Plato gave Lewis philosophical exposition for this longing. To many readers, Lewis never fully resolves the Platonist strains in his thought with Christian belief. But he did resolve that either way his atheistic materialism—as the last argument presents—is incomplete. Once we discover that fact, Lewis argues, we know there is something more.

      Although I will focus on the places where Lewis discursively addresses joy, Lewis also employed his considerable imaginative abilities to depict this longing. The Pilgrim’s Regress makes the case that there is something beyond. He never fully leaves this concern. By the time Lucy goes through the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe about twenty years later, Lewis has used his powerful imagination to depict what this movement to something beyond looks like.

      Some, of course, give up search or consider that the quest is futile. Some base this on scientific insight. Consider Lewis’s phrase in "Is Theology Poetry?": the “meaningless flux of the atoms.” Similarly, Harvard astronomer Margaret Geller believes that it is pointless to mention purpose in our universe: “why should it have a point? What point? It’s just a physical system, what point is there?” And, if the world and thus our place in it, derives its entire meaning from its physicality, then Geller is quite correct.

      Just a few years before Lewis began formulating this argument—first in 1931, in The Pilgrim’s Regress—the famous philosopher Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell expressed a similar longing.

The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain… a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite—the beatific vision, God—I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found—but the love of it is my life… it is the actual spring of life within.

Russell, however, decided there was no solution, except the searching. As C. S. Lewis took on what he describes in Surprised by Joy as the “New Look” with its implicit “realism” and scientific atheism, he struggled to include his longing for something more, a longing that he discovered through his literary studies. Another way to put this—as Lewis himself did—is that rationality found itself in the death throes with romanticism. Lewis discovered a resolution in his Christian faith.

      At this point, I need to be careful. In the full context of Lewis’s work—or “oeuvre,” to sound a little more elevated—the relationship between “joy” and God is curious. Joy in itself, as Lewis defines it, is simply a marker. On the very last page of Surprised by Joy, he says the subject of joy “has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.” He continues—and I’m adding some italics:

[T]he old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.

The “state of my own mind” fades away in the light of Heaven. Lewis’s subjective experience has the limited value when God’s objective fulfillment arises. It is like a flashlight in the dark when the sun rises.

      This second apologetic, C. S. Lewis’s argument from desire is simple, yet potent because I have found this discontentment with the world and the desire for something beyond it to be well-nigh universal: We have a desire for something that cannot be satisfied by this world. But our hunger demonstrates that we need something beyond this world.

      Imbedded in his comments on the theological virtue of hope, Lewis writes this:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

This citation is embedded in Mere Christianity’s section on our hope for Heaven to which I return below. But it is worth noting from the outset, that joy and hope are pointers to God’s fulfillment.

      To be a bit more systematic, it is helpful to analyze the argument from desire, this second apologetic. It is an argument that works on two premises:

1.     No natural desire is in vain

2.     There exists in us a longing that nothing on earth satisfies

The conclusion flows from these premises:

3.     Therefore something beyond is calling us through them.

      In order to grasp the progression of this argument, I will first outline that desire—and thus pleasure—can be trusted as a good. Then I will fill out more fully the three principal places that Lewis addresses the argument from desire, “The Weight of Glory” sermon, the brief but packed chapter “Hope” in Mere Christianity, and finally “Heaven” in the Problem of Pain. I conclude with an evaluation of this apologetic, especially on the question of whether it delivers what it promises.

Notes on C. S. Lewis and Science

As the 50th anniversary of Lewis's death is looming this November (the 22nd, to be exact), and because I'm writing a book on Lewis, C. S. Lewis in Crisis that I'll be finishing this October, I'm musing about an article on the three ways that Lewis faced off against scientific materialism that still resonate today. 

Undoubtedly writing on 1 of these 3 themes

Here they are 

1. The first one is materialism. The basic question is this: Are we just material stuff, or are we something more? In Miracles, Lewis argued that naturalism is self-defeating, and consequently faced off against the scientific materialism of his day, which seems to be enjoying a sort of resurgence today. (Think Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker.)
2. The second is meaninglessness, you know, Dawkins's "blind, pitiless indifference" and Weinberg's "pointless" universe: Why do human beings seek something transcendent, something (or Someone) beyond this world? Lewis maintains that we desire God more than anything we can find on earth.
3. The problem of anomie: Why do we have an innate sense of what’s right and wrong? This is Lewis’s argument from natural law and God as the Lawgiver. (Lewis presented this argument most forcefully in Mere Christianity.) Justin Barrett argues, from neuroscience--against others in his field--that this argument makes a great deal of sense in the ways our brains have evolved.

I have no interest in creating a hagiography of Lewis, but I would like to see in what ways his insight resonate, or need to be reworked, today.

Any comments?

Katie's Last Wedding (A "Reprint")

I found a blog entry tonight that I penned exactly one year after I performed a wedding on the Today Show in September 2005. For whatever reason (probably because it brought back good memories, perhaps because these were happier days at the Today Show), I decided to repost it.

The introduction by Al Roker defined the moment as unusual. “The wedding will be presided over by the Reverend Greg Cootsona….” Until then, I had tried to ease my jangling nerves that it was just another nuptial in my pastoral life.

You see I wasn’t immediately convinced about performing a Today Show wedding. A friend and producer on the show (whose wedding I had performed in New York City) called, with “an unusual opportunity.” Not sensing Amway in my future, and bolstered by her assessment that I “would be perfect,” I pondered. And balked. But eventually, I accepted the assignment. 

Smiling for the cameras at the reception

Two nights before my introduction by Al Roker, a driver met me at BWI’s baggage claim with a sign and (surprise!) bearing my name. This doesn’t happen often on my way to nuptials in Chico (although I could get used to it). Two days and two cars later, at the 5:15am call for the show (2:15 California time), a stretch limo transported me. As I entered the car, the driver phoned the show saying, “The Reverend is in the car.”

Now out of the car and walking toward the stage in front of the Cheasapeake Bay, I patted the tube of Recapit Cement safely in my pocket. The pressure of such a large audience squeezed out a strange neurosis: that the recently applied veneer on my front tooth covering a discoloration (itself a wedding honorarium from my dentist) would pop out in medias homily. I’m just not sure how I would have applied the bond in front of the TV audience, but such thoughts never occur to the neurotic.

Following the introduction, I walking on the runner set on smooshy grass and recalled the previous day and worries of an impending rainstorm (as a hurricane brewed to the south with Matt Lauer sent to the scene). That day of rehearsals, I had expected diffidence and attitude from the crew. Instead it was also fun and encouragement. On the stage for Trisha Yearwood’s concert following the wedding, I spied a gorgeous drum set (their petrified wood shells unearthed from the depths of Lake Michigan), and asked if I could take it for a ride. The crew encouraged me. After a brief solo, the soundman offered his assessment: “You might have missed your calling.” Perhaps not totally encouraging the day before the Big Event. Speaking of the sound man, the show’s attention to detail astounded me: The multiple camera men, sound techs, and general assistants making everything work flawlessly. That was change for me—I’m happy in church when the mic’s on. (Why can’t we have several professionals making sure the church’s sound works and the lights are on like The Today Show? That’s right. Congregations don’t gross half a billion dollars a year.)

The night before, I was eating pizza and drinking Cokes with the mostly 20something under-producers, pages, or whatever they were, and we discussed my former church, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian (which was in the midst of a scandal so it was pretty interesting). We sat out on the back porch of the Chesapeake Bay Beach Club (in Stevensville, Maryland, by the by), talking about life, about a homosexual brother, about faith, about the show the next day. Behind their words I saw the same ambitious eyes of youth that want to make a mark on the world and maybe to glimpse a bit of fame themselves.

Transported in the stretch limo, I arrived on the wedding set (that’s on odd combination of words) at 5:30 am. (Did I mention that that’s 2:30am California time?) As I walked in along a wooden ramp, I glimpsed some bright lights above the clubhouse. Katie Couric was already working with lights on and cameras rolling. Knowing that she had trained down from Manhattan the night before, it struck me as imminently tiring and a high price for fame.

But no one at the event would have ever know she was tired. Wearing her flip-flops on the set, cracking jokes with the wedding guests on commercial breaks. It was pretty charming. I finally met her for a brief moment, at the reception. Every moment she was mobbed by people, with barely a moment to herself. The price of fame, I suppose. And I asked her, “Could I do the fan-thing and take picture with you?” She was pulled away. And then a moment later, turned back to me, “I’m sorry. What did you ask me?” It was a moment of humanity. (And she hadn’t yet received my gift, a t-shirt from the church.) So I was sold.

Oh yes, how about the wedding? Once it started, the cameras disappeared. (Like a friend and TV producer prepped me: “Just imagine they’re video cams—you’ve seen those before.” Amazingly it worked.) Mark and Sarah were the most focused couple I’ve ever married. They had spent so many hours in front of the camera that they actually looked me in the eye as I talked of passion and commitment in the improvisations of marriage and jazz. Mark, this big, studly guy cried as he vowed his love, and Sarah serenely wiped his tears. (People, I’m told, were also crying from Times Square.)

Afterward, as I rode in the longest of four limos back to airport, I saw the moment fading fast. So I asked the driver to stop at a gas station and bought a San Pellegrino. I looked out from the convenience store and thought, “A stretch for me—that’s pretty cool.” With no more tricks up the sleeve, I begrudgingly headed toward the airport, and soon was in the United gates. I’d never waved goodbye to a limo before. Slowly I was slipping back into obscurity. Off to the plans for that weekend: Monterey Jazz Festival (the last one we attended with her mother before the latter suffered an acute stroke)—in my mind, a pretty sweet consolation prize.

My brother, during a brief sojourn with an Episcopalian church group, edited their newspaper, which he called “The Highly Parishable.” In that spirit: those three minutes and forty-five seconds of fame (and the days surrounding it) were certainly parishable fruit. One realization was, given the seven million or so who would view that day, I would preach to more in those minutes than I probably throughout my lifetime. But the fruit had been picked and was half eaten. My shelf had a few days more: two radio interviews on the Monday I returned. At one point a few weeks later, I was visiting a member in the hospital and someone in the next bed blurted out, “Weren’t you the guy on The Today Show?” It finally got to this: “I saw a little bit of your head in the picture of the wedding in US Magazine.”

Sarah and Mark have thankfully kept in touch as they entered post-TV life. Several months later would reveal that this was Katie’s last Today Show wedding. (Luckily, I grabbed a picture with her at the reception.) I’m doing hospital visitation, numerous church committee meetings, teaching and preaching, and yes, the occasional wedding without, of course, an introduction by Al Roker.