Lewis, Tolkien, and Allegory | Fr. Bonaventure Chapman & Fr. Patrick Briscoe
August 29, 2024
Fr. Bonaventure: And this is Father Bonaventure Chapman.
Fr. Patrick: Welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all who support us. If you like the show, please consider making a monthly donation to us on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts. Father Bonaventure.
Fr. Bonaventure: Father Patrick.
Fr. Patrick: I love that often the first thing we say on the podcast is our names.
Fr. Bonaventure: Oh, yeah
Fr. Patrick: Yeah, and you know, it’s sort of like a, an assertion of reality like in front of me.
Fr. Bonaventure: Here I am.
Fr. Patrick: …is a man existing. Yeah, and I believe he’s not just a fan-tasm or Something conjured from my memory, but a real person and that his name is more than, that his name kind of conjures his presence. And I want to share that presence by naming him to those listening. –
Fr. Bonaventure: Names have that way, isn’t it interesting how names have a magicalness to them? I mean, it’s not unsurprised in like secret names and codes, and you can be in a crowd. And just, you know, and there’s lots of noise going on, right? But then all of a sudden the name appears, and you’re drawn to it.
Fr. Patrick: That’s right.
Fr. Bonaventure: If someone says, “Bonaventure”, I’m obviously going to swing my head around. It’s a bit like, I mean, this is the wrong way of the analogy, but like the Alexa sort of thing where like it’s always just kind of listening. But it only kind of wakes up to consciousness when you use its name. It’s in some ways that’s kind of a thing we do anyway as well as the- I remember, I remember Movie was Mr. Smith goes to Washington some of the Jimmy Stewart movie and he’s got the you know his His daughter that a dance or something I remember crack late. It’s black and white. It’s great and oh Johnny whatever and his daughter is you know, she’s beautiful, but of course no boys dancing with her. So he’s got to kind of remind imagine would be possible. And maybe in the ’50s it was, it’s right, it’s bizarre. So we have to find like a date for her, ’cause she’s kind of sad about this. And so we just yell us out under the crowd. Hey Joe! And of course, of course, the most handsome man pops up. Because he just thinks like, well, Joe is a common of a name that there’ll be someone here who’ll hear Joe and respond to it. So names have this way of like, summoning us, from the day to day in the ordinary and the kind of confuzzy. I dig recalled like the forehanden just kind of existing with things to like boom, brought into presence by this name. So yeah, I like names.
Fr. Patrick: I think that can happen, you know, when you’re sitting in mass, for example, and there’s some guy a priest doing something, preaching. He’s rambling on and then all of a sudden he says, “As J.R. R. Tolkien once wrote…” Suddenly I leap forth from my slumber. How’s that for a transition?
Fr. Bonaventure: It is good transition.
Fr. Patrick: That leads us to this subject of today’s episode, which is to talk about some of the differences in the writing of J. R. R. Tolkien and his good friend, CS Lewis. But before we get too far into that, I think we should first pause to pay homage to these two great men. So one of the things, for example, that I loved about Tolkien was that his love for language and tradition was so great that very famously after the Mass began to be celebrated in the vernacular, Tolkien would shout loudly at the top of his voice the responses in Latin.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yes. Yes, his son recalls this sort of thing.
Fr. Patrick: Imagine a man of such conviction. I love this. Yeah, this is truly admirable.
Fr. Bonaventure: But he was still there. He didn’t leave, he stayed.
Fr. Patrick: Yes, he stayed. So faithful to the Church in Rome.
Fr. Bonaventure: Just noting his questioning of the dignity of the…
Fr. Patrick: It was certainly his preference.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yes, he’s preference. That’s right. I mean, C.S. Lewis strikes me as a, he’s a jolly figure in some ways. When I started, started over in England, I found out that English people don’t, I mean, he’s okay. He’s an important kind of, but he doesn’t have the same power that he has in America. And I remember an English person saying, yeah, you Americans really love C.S. Lewis, don’t you? Like, and I thought, well, shouldn’t you’re the ones who should really love him. He’s like the most English man alive, you know? I mean, Don and all this kind of stuff. But they don’t, yeah, they’re not. Never struck me as that particular attach. Whereas in the evangelical world, the Protestant world and even the Catholic world, of course, C.S. Lewis is a household name. And I was just not true over there. I also love the story how Walter Hooper, I think, his house pronounced, was an American, went to a good friend of his, went to visit him for the first time. And when he arrived, he needed to use, of course, the bathroom. And so we asked C.S. Lewis if he could go to the bathroom where the bathroom was. And C.S. Lewis was delighted in this, because his house, lots of British house, have separate toilets, which is the room of the toilet and the bathroom, which has the bathtub. And so Lewis took him to the bathroom and turned on the taps and got a towel for him and said, “Well, whenever you’re whenever you finish just let me know I’ll be waiting for you. And so he forced Hooper to say, “Oh, yeah, actually, I’m looking for the other, the toilet, is that okay?” You could say it, it’s not a bad word here. But America reminded me that Americans, we don’t, it seems uncouth. If I don’t, if I’m not going to the bathroom, I might go up to the washroom or something, but I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna, –
Fr. Patrick: The rest room.
Fr. Bonaventure: The rest room.
Fr. Patrick: Like a place to compose yourself.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, exactly. But I’m never going to say, do you know where the toilet is? Because rest, the toilet is not the room, but the porcelain thing there. And I would never let people know that I would be using a toilet in a bathroom. Right?
Fr. Patrick: So Tolkien and Lewis, they had, I think, most of our listeners certainly know this. They had a great friendship. They were part of this reading group that referred to themselves as the inklings that often, while they were first part of another group, which was dedicated to Norse mythology. And then out of that shared interest in Nordic mythology came this group, the Inklings, which was a group dedicated to reading and sharing their writings in kind of discussion. They would meet it a pub, which they nicknamed the “Bird in the Baby” and the Eagle and Child. And part of that group included, there are the Sayers, other great luminaries. So it was a whole collection of…
Fr. Bonaventure: Williams and that group too.
Yes, absolutely. And other students, you know we’ll mention a couple of them as the conversation goes on. And one of the things they would do, right, is they would exchange their writings. And they would sort of critique each other and share things around. And very famously, in that circle, when Tolkien was laboring, laboring, laboring over the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and creating his whole mythology of Middle Earth, very famously, Lewis was extremely complimentary towards Tolkien’s efforts and very famously when Lewis presented Tolkien with the Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien was not complimentary. And so I think that’s really the heart of the episode in there, a lot of complicated reasons why this is. So I wanted listeners to know this from the outside that we have a kind of fundamental difference between these two friends, namely that Lewis responded and he was very interested in talking with this project, he was very, very complimentary and perhaps Tolkien really needed that and appreciated it and perhaps also Lewis would have expected the same from Tolkien as Lewis undertook his project.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yes, but I suppose, you know, is it Aristotle says at some point when he’s saying some bad things about what he people he calls the friends of the forums who are Plato and his and his cohort and he was a student of Plato and at some point he says, well, we must say some bad unfortunately his bad things about friends. But we do at the end of the day, care more about truth than we do care about our friends and our friends care about that too. So it’s a sense of like, you know, true. It’s, you know, that you should always wrap this right approach.
Fr. Patrick: But this is the man shouting the Latin mass responses.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m sure I’m sure Lewis was probably not surprised. Taken aback maybe initially, but–
Fr. Patrick: He knows his friend.
Fr. Bonaventure: And the projects in some ways are, it’s fitting they’re very different if they had not had a difference about this, maybe not in particular, in a certain way. But they not had a difference. You would have been a failure to understand the differences of these two projects. I mean, the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they’re both kind of fantasy allegories, but very, very different and not just because of the audience, but the way they’re written, the aim that they have. I would say even deeper, a deeper vision of kind of evangelical Protestantism versus the Catholic vision of what the artist is to do and things and is expected of doing. So there are differences that, and it leads to, I think, interestingly enough, preferences that people have for them. I think some people are, C.S. Lewis fans, more than Tolkien fans in a way. Even though they’re both great, it’s a bit like, I know Father Gregory and I have done one on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I think before. And Dostoevsky in Tolstoy, you tend to be one of the other, although you recognize, like I’m a Dostoevsky fan, but I recognize the brilliance of Tolstoy. And they’re passages in Anna Karenina that are just impossible to neglect. And similar, I mean, so I’m more of a CS Lewis man. Myself, although I love the Lord of the Rings is read to me, my mother read to me. Lord of the Rings may have grown up. But I’m more of a CS Lewis man, but I suspect you’re more of a Tolkien man, although you respect CS Lewis, but I could be wrong. –
Fr. Patrick: That’s exactly correct.
Fr. Bonaventure: Okay, yes.
Fr. Patrick: You intuitive rightly how this conversation was going to go, because you know your friend.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, exactly.
Fr. Patrick: So, well, let’s really jump into this here and kind of unpack it. So when we say Tolkien wrote an allegory and CS Lewis wrote an allegory, what do we mean?
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. So allegory, of course, is some symbolic representation or a story about something else that’s referring to it, has a sign value to it. So their stories are saying one thing and directing us to another. And the interesting point, of course, is how far away that direction is. You could think of it as sometimes a CS Lewis criticism of Tolkien would be, you’re asking me to turn my chair around to see what I’m supposed to see, whereas Lewis just asked you just to kind of wander your eyes just a little bit. Of course, Tolkien would come back and say, well, why don’t if you’re making it such a slight move in allegory, why not just say it outright? Like why give it the cover of anything? Like what’s the part of that you basically took, you took a Christian truth and then just kind of changed a human for an animal, like Aslan for Christ, whereas instead you want to see the deeper kind of realities. That’s another way I suppose is how close to the surface are the deeper realities to be? You could have Lewis be on the more statilian side of things of a kind of the forms are right here, they’re present, we’re looking at them. Whereas maybe there’s a more plate-nistic sense, you know, looking away from the form, from the things, the story of the narrative to the real eternal truths that are behind that. And that’s, again, distance and depth.
Fr. Patrick: So one thing that gave me a deep appreciation for Lewis, and this is a book which I highly, highly commend to listeners with a really fantastic work, done by Michael Ward, published by Oxford University Press. So this is a serious book in 2008. It’s been around for a bit. And this book has a very particular thesis about the nature of the Chronicles of Narnia, which is very interesting. So an allegory broadly, right, as Father Bonaventure was referring to, is that there’s something fantastic, a story, a poem that can be interpreted so as to reveal a hidden meaning and that something is going to come to light and often that meaning in an allegory is moral or political. And in Lewis’s sense, people have always said that that meaning was the Gospel and this is based on, of course, the Aslan – Christ figure in the Chronicles of Narnia. And I don’t think any of that is incorrect. I think that’s very true. So Michael Ward’s book, Planet Narnia though, advances a new thesis, which is based on a work of C.S. Lewis on literary criticism called “The Discarded Image.” And in that work, C.S. Lewis presents a view of the medieval cosmos. And in a nutshell, what Michael Ward argues is that in the Chronicles of Narnia, each book is based on a medieval conception of the cosmos and each book symbolizes that conception’s understanding of a particular planet. Yeah, okay, so there’s a very long sentence, but the medievals had such a rich understanding of the universe that the planets weren’t just like things floating out there in space. They were personalities. The medieval cosmos is very, very rich and a whole way of understanding the world was inherent in lurking behind the understandings of the different planets.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, that book is really worthwhile for readers to take a look at. It’s very short essay. At the end of that essay, “The Discarded Image”, in this book, “Collection Literary Criticism.” It has a proto-Kunian. What I mean by that is Thomas Kuhn was a famous philosopher of science in the 20th century 1962. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the structure of scientific revolution where he introduced the idea of paradigm shifts. But “The Discarded Image” is before that, and the discarded image has at the end of it talks about the medieval paradigm or the medieval framework that means you understand the world in this particular way. So you bring this grid of intelligibility, the medieval set of these living structures and all of this, the organic model. And then you look at the world through those lenses and the modern shifts out of that and looks at it with different kinds of lenses. Charles Taylor picks this up, of course, in the secular age and those images, in the same way the disenchantment model. But it’s just to say, C.S. Lewis is no joke, and he’s right to say that you see things through particular lenses, including this medieval paradigm, which he knew very well. So it’s not like his allegories, just some random nice thoughts about things. He’s got behind him a very well developed notion of the world. So that perhaps, perhaps not as fair for Tolkien to say that he hasn’t developed it. He just doesn’t show you it…
Fr. Patrick: Exactly.
Fr. Bonaventure: …in a way, the Tolkien shows his structure much more clearly and the meaning kind of slides back, whereas see as Lewis, you might say puts them for some, the meaning quick and the structure is in the back on the chapter. No, and Ward’s work has done to bring this sort of structure out.
Fr. Patrick: Exactly. So what kind of meaning is there to be just original, just so listeners can get a really robust sense of this. So the medieval world understood, let’s take “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” the first book of the chronicles, according to one particular order. Namely, the order in which it was written. But “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” is dedicated according towards interpretation of the planet Jupiter. And Jupiter in the medieval cosmos is the great planet of joy and of feasting. And that Jupiter’s virtues are kingliness and magnanimity, in particular that kind of pleasure that comes in late spring. Okay, so we can all think to the Chronicles of Narnia, and we can find ourselves in the moment where the white witch’s power is waning and spring begins to come, and all this conviviality and joy happens. You see the woodland creatures gathering for their festivity. Father Christmas comes and gives everyone presents. We could get to that. That’s a thing that Tolkien really, really hated was the introduction of Father Christmas into this mythical world. And you can see C.S. Lewis saying, “Okay, I’m writing a story about the planet Jupiter according to the medieval cosmos, which means that every good and beautiful and joyful thing that I could think of is going to be in this story.” And that’s how Father Christ ends up coming and delivering presents in the Chronicles of Narnia. And so you have here the Kingliness, the emphasis on the two kings and the two queens, that kind of royal nature, yeah, exactly. The reclaiming of the kingdom, the joy, the fading of winter into spring, and all of that points to how the medieval cosmos talked about the virtues and aspects and elements of the planet Jupiter.
Fr. Bonaventure: Which one’s Mars, is that?
You could line this, you could line this up with all of his books, so it’s really cool. So Mars is Prince Caspian. –
Fr. Bonaventure: Right.
Mars is Prince Caspian, okay, why is this one? Well, because Caspian is all about strength and discipline, courage, about order, against particularly against cruelty and lawfulness. So this symbolizes the planet Mars. I also really like, I really like the interpretation of the Magicians Nephew, which is lined up in the medieval cosmos with Venus.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, that’s a bad book with Venus.
Fr. Patrick: So you don’t like that one!
Fr. Bonaventure: I was told- I read that one first…
Fr. Patrick: So we, I’ve read that one for a good jump. We could jump to the Last Battle, which is Saturn.
Fr. Bonaventure: Okay. Yeah.
Fr. Patrick: So that’s got an explicit reference to Plato. You should love that. Saturn is all about disaster and death or Godly sorrow or farther time, farther time, contemplation, farther time, things to come, future times in the medieval cosmos. And the circumstances at the beginning of the Last Battle, which are best ones, disaster, treachery, all this kind of evil that comes, is resolved in a coming about of the further up and farther in.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. Yeah.
Fr. Patrick: So this kind of awakening that is part of how medieval is what of under the planet Saturn.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, I think that’s… It’s beautiful to think about the cosmos as telling us things about the world and we generally we still have an inkling of this no pun intended with horoscopes, right? There’s still people still think they still, no one reads the newspaper anymore, but you can still find these things that like the moon planets do something to us most of us think the pie is just kind of like rocks or gas, gas clouds but there’s still this semantic so the meaning sense that they give to the world. And the medievals just were more attentive to this, not because they necessarily thought, for instance, that all these planets were inhabited and did these particular things. But rather, they symbolized structures of our reality and the conceptions of it. And Lewis was just very good at seeing that. He saw things poetically such that I think it was less of a slip, slide from him to be doing his fiction, which is also why his nonfiction, this is interesting. If you read Tolkien’s kind of nonfiction, I think you get a, you know, when he’s talking, you get this is a strong sense between the, when he’s doing his literature and when he’s not doing the literature. Whereas Lewis, it’s a degree, it’s kind of sliding back and forth. He has this notion of supposalism is a kind of way of understanding what he’s doing when he’s thinking about what a plan would be like without this. Even in his writing about pain or very difficult issues, there’s always a bit of the fantastical or the imaginary that he just dwells in this. So he’s never quite going on and off. It doesn’t have a binary switch between fictional and non-fiction. They’re always kind of related to each other. I’ve always appreciated that, and maybe that’s another reason why he’s harder to read in his just pure fiction and his fantasies because he’s always kind of doing fantasy. It’s a question of what end of the spectrum is on in that.
Fr. Patrick: Right. So I wanted to mention Ward’s thesis and give a sense of some of this medieval cosmology, which Lewis would have known, because if you don’t have that context for arguments, making it a fence for the richness of the Chronicles of Narnia, when you read Tolkien’s criticism, it could be brutal. And it could just sound really nasty. You know, so for example, Tolkien says to their friend, Roger Green, “it really won’t do. It really won’t do. I mean, to say, names in their ways, the love life of a fawn, he’s making fun of one of the books on the bookcase there in Mr. Tomnis’s bookcase. Doesn’t he know”, Tolkien continues, “Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?”
Fr. Bonaventure: Yes. Yes.
Fr. Patrick: Which is just eviscerating.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, of course.
Fr. Patrick: Really difficult.
Fr. Bonaventure: I mean, Tolkien’s life project is developing, he’s got attentiveness to this detail. It’s gonna work pure. I mean, inventing his own language. Like for instance, the in CS Lewis’s out of the sound of planet, the Roth’s, whatever those kind of swamping creatures. They have their own language. Yeah, I’m morally certain that CS Lewis did not develop it in its full grammar. Like I just don’t, I don’t know, maybe he did, maybe, but I don’t think so. It’s not important anymore. Whereas there are people who speak Elvish, right? There are people who write, it’s an entire language. I mean, much better than Klingon, it has its full kind of compliment. You can do this. You just couldn’t do that with any of Lewis’. And you might, Tolkien would say, well, if you want to really get this full product, this kind of full vision, you need to get granular and you need to get in there. Whereas again, Lewis has this other, I think this conception of, you’ve got to get stuff done. Not in the pragmatic pure sense, but like it’s a, it’s about the message of the Gospel. Such that you can read that Lord of the Rings and have no idea, I think, that Christ is involved. I think it’s possible to totally do that. It’s harder to do that with the Chronicles of Narnia. You can do it. That’s why it’s an allegory. But I think it’s pretty hard to believe that people could get away with that for too long.
Fr. Patrick: You can’t do, you can’t do a little bit more into, Father Bonaventure, you mentioned this distinction. You think that Narnia has more of a kind of evangelical perception as opposed to that which lurks behind Tolkien’s approach.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, I would say a little bit more about this thinking. Well, because I’m piecing together why, yeah, what the distinction is, why I like one or the other is maybe you like one or the other. And then what the deeper kind of issues might be, because they’re both in a sense apologetic in a way. They’re both about, I mean, Tolkien is about good and evil, it’s about Christ, at some extent, both about, I mean, Tolkien is about good navel, it’s about Christ, at some extent. See us lose well. And I’m wondering if, I was just teasing this idea about my mind, that it’s a difference between evangelical Protestantism and its relationship to the world and art and Catholicism, its relationship to world and art in this way, that evangelical Protestantism, which I grew up in and know well, has a sort of, the world is there to be used for this other Gospel message. Like, there’s a sort of simplicity, a sort of simple piety in the evangelical approach to things, because you’re not holding things too tightly because you don’t expect to find God in them necessarily.
Fr. Patrick: Right.
Fr. Bonaventure: There’s a because of the notions of original sin. Now, C.S. Lewis, of course, has doctrines of original sin, it’s not as dark as some Calvinist doctrines, but he still got a sense of like it’s a fallen world and we need to be called by megaphone of pain and all this stuff. So he’s got this, but the Protestant model of a sense of the world is not the word we’re supposed to be. It’s not the greatest place. And any way we can get people to believe in Christ, any way to signal this sort of salvation and signal the gospel, that’s the key. Revelation, over reason you could say in one way, faith over just pure knowledge. And the explicit over the implicit, right? So there’s a more of a surface kind of a tent, because the things around are so kind of shattered and broken that none of it’s not going to fit perfectly anyway. Like bringing, for instance, Father Christmas in, oh, it doesn’t fit the perfect schema of this thing, but nothing fits the perfect schema of a world made by men. It’s only Christ’s world that fits the perfect schema, so we don’t worry too much. On the other hand, I want to see if you think of this as how I want to think about this– Tolkien with the Catholic vision– some raised in the Catholic faith, as far as I know. He’s a Catholic. And a depth of the fact that God permeates and structures all things, such that a focus on the rationality of the world and its attentiveness to God, less a focus on the kind of cognitive effects of original sin, a greater trust in man’s capabilities to reason and create a trust in the artistic sensibilities, as opposed to a distrust in the Protestant world to aesthetic sensibility sometimes and images and all of this. So that, for Tolkien, the faith is in the Catholic sense something really grounded in the narrative. It’s there. In this case, Tolkien is the Aristotelian, with the truth being in the story, whereas Lewis plays as normally in the Protestant world, the more plate-nest, the truth is out somewhere else. And the story, and the story just as opposed to point you, but you’re not supposed to focus on it. What do you think about this?
Fr. Patrick: I completely agree with you. I think this is right on the money, especially because Tolkien views himself as a con creator.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yes.
Fr. Patrick: You’re co- in when an artist is creating something for Tolkien. You’re coke creating. And that you can never get too far from what was. So Middle Earth is a kind of prehistory of England, actually. It doesn’t exist apart from something that really is, despite the fact that it’s fantasy literature. And all of it is imagined, one hesitates to use that word, because it makes it sound a little too simplistic. But is made, is dreamed by the artist. And but for Tolkien, that’s not done independently of reality. It’s done radically connected to it actually in his conception, his understanding because he’s the co-creator and he’s lending, he’s lending the reality greater meaning and shedding a new light upon any in the work.
Fr. Bonaventure: And you think that Tolkien can respond to Lewis on this as well and say, “I’m staying closer to God than you are in a way because I’m staying close to what he’s created and how I’m supposed to…” So I’m getting exactly what I need for these stories, whereas Lewis, you’re just imagining things and aren’t those just your own fantasies and can’t we need we be psychologists and Freudians and wonder if you’re just kind of putting stuff like you’re the one who’s straying from the Gospel more because you’re not basing in in sound reality. But again, Lewis, the Protestant, more Protestant side of things is no, it’s sound reality. We don’t get to read. We need the Words of Scripture and the closer we stick to that, so I’ll script to work on that stuff. That’s where we get. So I think it’s some ways I’ve never seen anyone talk about this, but I’m sure they have a very good idea anyone has this private thought before. But that fundamentally, the division is really an aesthetic related to their commitments to Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism. And that helps to alleviate, understand why, some of us, for instance, me trained up in the evangelical Protestant tradition, why I’m very sympathetic to Lewis’s project, whereas Catholics tend to be more sympathetic or you’re grew up in the Catholic tradition in this kind of rich, robust sense of concrete reality, and God making things to point to him in the things would be more sensitive and open to Tolkien, whereas I could worry that things get lost in there and this whereas a Catholic thing’s actually, that’s where things ought to be. –
Fr. Patrick: Listeners, I hope this helps you sort through this great question of the different approaches to allegory from Lewis and Tolkien, because of course, like many episodes on Godsplaining, much more could be said about what we’ve raised, but whether you come down on the side of CS Lewis or the side of Tolkien, you are welcome here to be a Godsplaining listener. So we thank you for tuning in. We ask that you would continue to pray for us. If you enjoyed this episode and want to support the podcast, please make a donation to us on Patreon. Share this episode with a friend with someone you think would enjoy it, would benefit from listening to it, be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow us on social media on the social media platform X, Facebook, Instagram and more. Above all, we ask that you would pray for us, and please know that we are praying for you. God bless.