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elfsThis week my family had an opportunity to go see The Secret Garden at the Fifth Avenue Theater. The musical, based upon Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 book of the same name. The play follows the book for the most part, but what interested me most are how the themes in the play match the themes in CS Lewis's The Great Divorce, and how both of them sync up with some of the most basic teachings of Buddhism.
In The Secret Garden (the musical; I can't speak to the book), everyone is attached to a vision of him or herself that's at odds with their happiness. Archie sees himself as a failure, and rather than act to resolve the problem runs away. Neville seems himself blocked from the life he could have had by his brother's success and by his own conflicted responsibilities to his brother. Mary sees herself as both an imposition on others and imposed upon by the accidents of her birth. Even Mary's mother, who is portrayed as a ghost throughout the play, remain unreconciled to her sister Lily's decision to marry the physically disabled Archie, as well as her own failings as a mother to Mary.
By the end of the play, every major character has clearly identified what causes him or her to suffer, and with the exception of Neville, has taken steps to reconcile and transcend that suffering. (Neville is forced to take a step into his new life, and while it's most of what he wanted, he goes into it embarrassed by his failings.) What causes each and every character to suffer is their attachment to something that has passed from their lives: Lily from Archie, primacy and practice from Neville, parenthood from Mary's mother, stability from Mary. Every one of them wants, and it's wanting more than what they have before them that hurts them.
In CS Lewis's Great Divorce, you can almost see the same sort of progress at work. First off, I think Great Divorce is a bit of universalist literature: Lewis doesn't intend for the damned to stay in Hell forever, and the bus comes regularly. What Lewis does say is that the damned are attached to something other than their own salvation: the artist wants to keep making art, the fat bishop wants to not have been wrong, the poet wants to be smarter than everyone else, the big man wants to never have been humbled, and the mother wants never to have a love for anyone greater than her child.
In all these cases, the want is more of a fear: a fear of every being smaller than the vision of themselves to which they are attached. It's this attachment to themselves, to an image of themselves, that causes them to suffer, and to be unable and unwilling to enter Heaven.
It's interesting how every modern religion's idea of self-worth comes from being able to give up toxic attachments. Buddha went further and argued that all attachments are ultimately toxic in some way, but Lewis's Christianity isn't very far from Buddha's, down at the bottom.
In The Secret Garden (the musical; I can't speak to the book), everyone is attached to a vision of him or herself that's at odds with their happiness. Archie sees himself as a failure, and rather than act to resolve the problem runs away. Neville seems himself blocked from the life he could have had by his brother's success and by his own conflicted responsibilities to his brother. Mary sees herself as both an imposition on others and imposed upon by the accidents of her birth. Even Mary's mother, who is portrayed as a ghost throughout the play, remain unreconciled to her sister Lily's decision to marry the physically disabled Archie, as well as her own failings as a mother to Mary.
By the end of the play, every major character has clearly identified what causes him or her to suffer, and with the exception of Neville, has taken steps to reconcile and transcend that suffering. (Neville is forced to take a step into his new life, and while it's most of what he wanted, he goes into it embarrassed by his failings.) What causes each and every character to suffer is their attachment to something that has passed from their lives: Lily from Archie, primacy and practice from Neville, parenthood from Mary's mother, stability from Mary. Every one of them wants, and it's wanting more than what they have before them that hurts them.
In CS Lewis's Great Divorce, you can almost see the same sort of progress at work. First off, I think Great Divorce is a bit of universalist literature: Lewis doesn't intend for the damned to stay in Hell forever, and the bus comes regularly. What Lewis does say is that the damned are attached to something other than their own salvation: the artist wants to keep making art, the fat bishop wants to not have been wrong, the poet wants to be smarter than everyone else, the big man wants to never have been humbled, and the mother wants never to have a love for anyone greater than her child.
In all these cases, the want is more of a fear: a fear of every being smaller than the vision of themselves to which they are attached. It's this attachment to themselves, to an image of themselves, that causes them to suffer, and to be unable and unwilling to enter Heaven.
It's interesting how every modern religion's idea of self-worth comes from being able to give up toxic attachments. Buddha went further and argued that all attachments are ultimately toxic in some way, but Lewis's Christianity isn't very far from Buddha's, down at the bottom.
