with a piece partly inspired by conversations here:

I’ve just finished Charles Williams’s 1937 novel Descent into Hell, which was recommended to me by a couple of Catholic friends. Williams might be called “the extra Inkling.” Everybody knows J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but far fewer people remember the other, less aggressively punctuated members of the club, including the philosopher Owen Barfield and Tolkien’s son Christopher.

Williams is the best-known of these auxiliary Inklings, and his writing is indeed what the youth of today call “extra.” It’s dense, clotted with time-bending clauses, full of switchbacks. Motives are interrogated and re-interrogated. The plot of Descent into Hell concerns a mysterious play being performed in a London suburb, on a hill with a bloody history of war and martyrdom. …

And it’s a book about acceptance. At a certain point I remembered that both of the friends who’d recommended Williams were gay Catholics. And that made sense: So much of the book is about receiving what God has given you to do in life, instead of the tasks you would have chosen for yourself. There’s been a lot of writing in the gay, celibate Christian blogosphere lately about unchosen celibacy, and learning to accept lifelong unmarriage as a gift—however much you wish the returns policy were more generous. We’ve been writing a lot lately about the need to accept the life given us.

But what stood out to me, as soon as I began to read Descent through this lens, was the emphasis on self-acceptance.

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