Douglas Gresham (C.S. Lewis's Stepson & Exec. Producer of Netflix's Narnia Series)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses on how the gospel influences the work of our guests. With that disclaimer out of the way, please enjoy the episode. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor.

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You can go pick up a copy at Barnes and Noble, at Amazon, at Books A million. Wherever in the world you shop for books, you can go buy it right now. And you still have a few more days to enter. To win this incredible trip to Europe that I'm giving away, I'm going to personally be paying for somebody, hopefully a listener of this podcast and the friend of your choice, to go on a seven night European cruise. You're going to go tour La Sagrada Familia, the world's largest church, which I write about in the book, and then you're going to meet me in Barcelona for dinner. You got until January 27, 2020, 2020 to enter the sweepstakes. You got to do it right now@jordanraynor.com hey, so this is a special week. This is the book's birthday. And so I have been saving a very special episode of the Call to Mastery for this week. I've been wanting to share this for a long, long time because I know so many of you are huge CS Lewis fans like myself. And so today I am incredibly privileged to share a conversation I recently had with my good friend and CS Lewis's stepson, Douglas Gresham. So if you've ever seen the movie Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins, you know that C.S. lewis was married later in life to Joy Davidman, who's Douglas's mother. And through marriage, Lewis really became the father figure in Douglas's life for more than half of his childhood. He's the last person alive who personally knew C.S. lewis, which is incredible to me. And listen, he's a masterful culture creator in his own right. Dark Doug has really been the chief champion for his stepfather's legacy. He's the head of the C.S. lewis Company and he's been the producer of all those Narnia films that Disney produced back in the mid-2000s. And he's the producer of a new set of films that Narnia is going to be in production with Netflix. So Doug and I sat down. We talked about CS Lewis daily routines and how he pursued mastery of his one thing. We talked about Doug's surprising first encounter with CS Lewis when he was at the age of eight. I'm just going to warn you right now, the audio quality for this episode is pretty rough. Much rougher than usual given that Doug and I were calling in from his home in Malta. But I don't think you guys are going to mind bear through the audio challenges as the content and the substance of this conversation is one of my all time favorites on the call to mastery. So please enjoy this conversation with Douglas Gresham.

Hey, Douglas Gresham, thank you so much for joining me. What is it afternoon there?

Malta? It's what, ten minutes to three? Okay, perfect, perfect.

Well, thanks so much for joining me for the conversation. A few weeks ago I had our mutual friend Kelly Stewart on the podcast. And yeah, by the way, have you.

Read her new book? Yeah, I have. I have indeed.

Yeah, it's fantastic. And we were talking about the dinner that we had at the Goring Hotel in London with me, you and Kelly's husband.

Yeah, Kelly wasn't there. Unfortunately, Kelly wasn't there.

It would have been a lot more fun with her. Right?

Yeah. Well, I met up with her later and I actually wrote a blurb for one of her books, or both of them, I think, because they are fantastic pieces of writing. Excellent pieces of writing.

She's an incredible writer. But I gotta say, after that time at the Goring Hotel, you've got some pretty incredible taste in hotels. Is the Goring your favorite hotel in the world?

Probably, yes. I've been going there for over 30 years now. Kind of like one of the family.

Yeah, I could tell when we were there. Am I misremembering this or did you once have a run in with the Queen at the Corian? I seem to remember some story.

So I have a run in with the Queen. I met the Queen on a couple of our gala premieres for movies as well. But yes, I met her. She was just in the foyer one time and I just asked her if she needs any help. I said, you know, can I help with anything? She said, no, no, I'm fine. I'm just taking a breather sort of thing. And that was it.

Because the Goring's right around the corner from Buckingham Palace.

I Think the Queen probably used it to some extent as a getaway from Buckingham palace once she wants to be out from under. There is a royal suite at the Goring Hotel which is available to the royal time.

Interesting. Well, I know she liked to have dinner with her staff there around Christmas time. And, yeah, it seems like.

Yeah, seems like a pretty nice getaway. Yeah.

I think everybody listening to this podcast knows and loves C.S. lewis, and many are familiar with his story, but they might not be familiar with yours, which I find truly fascinating. So I want.

My book and read. Buy lots and lots of copies, spread them around and read it. I have to warn you of something. We've just had a huge thunderstorm approach toward the house. You may hear some weird noises in the background. No worries.

I don't think our listeners will mind. So let's talk about your story, which you told so well in the book Lenten Lands. Lenten Lands inspired the movie Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins.

Is that right? I think so, yes.

So for those who haven't read the book, let's get the quick version of Doug's story. So let's start here. How did you go from being born in America to living in London and ending up with CS Lewis as your stepfather? How did all this happen?

Well, to start with, it wasn't my fault. I was 8 years old when my mother and father sort of parted company. And my mother had already gotten to know Jack when she was a. Jack. Sorry. Jack is family nickname, and he's had it most of his life. We left America after my father decided he wanted to be with someone else. Someone who I'm very fond of, actually was very fond of. She's dead now. So when it happened, when my father decided he was going to be somewhere else with someone else, they got divorced. And my mother decided she would take myself and my brother to England because everything was cheaper over there at the time. It's probably the reverse at the moment. And she liked the people a great deal there, and she liked everything about England. And she'd been there earlier trying to find a publisher for her book, Smoke on the Mountain in England. I think she succeeded, too, but she got to meet Jack a couple of times on that particular first visit. So when we went over there, one of the first things he wanted to do was. Was to introduce me particularly, but my brother as well, to this great man who had written the Chronicles of Narnia by that stage, only about two or three of them. And who knew, in my imagination, knew King Peter personally. Raised by an aslan of course, when you're eight years old and you've never been anywhere but America and you can't cross the whole Atlantic Ocean on an ocean liner, which we did in the middle of a North Atlantic storm at one stage. I had my 8th birthday on the ship. We arrived in England and if you grew up in America at that age and you some of the Chronicles of Daniel had been read to you perhaps a little bit of the Knights of King Arthur and so on, you expect everybody to be riding on horses and carrying swords and stuff. But when I got to the kiln was the first time that we quite soon went to visit. And when you get there, you suddenly meet this stupid, balding, professorial looking gentleman with long nicotine stained fingers and teeth and he just did not look like I thought someone who was in speaking terms with fat King Peter and so forth should look. And I was initially quite disappointed. But it was only a matter of a few seconds really, perhaps a minute or two at the very most, until Zach's enormous personality and his great charitable way of dealing with things eradicated any deficiencies that might have been to my mind in his appearance. And I lost an illusion and gained a very good friend. And he was a friend until he died. Well, it had the most influence on my life as anyone I've ever met. Or known. And all of that influence in his case was for the good. I was a bit of a rapscallion in my youth, but I have sort of stuck to what Jack taught me ever since. And I've been working on that premise basically, which resulted eventually in returning my life entirely, my life and everything I am and everything I have over to Christ, which is the only sensible way to live when you actually experience it.

I've heard you talk about your spiritual journey before. Can you recapture that? Right, so when did this happen? What was Jack's role in that process of you coming to Faith in Christ?

What does that look like in your own life? It's so simple, it's almost impossible to describe. It was just Jack living a Christian life very closely entwined with Jesus and everything he preached, everything he taught. And I didn't really understand that this wasn't just an elderly professorial gentleman doing the right thing as he saw it. Because I was a young teenager through those days and years and grew up that way and still in my early 20s and probably right through to my 30s, I was a bit of a rat bag. I drove fast cars. Well, I just still drive fast cars actually, to be honest. Rode motorcycles not Always legally, generally got up to all sorts of mischief. But then I suppose really, when I had to look around at myself and what was happening to me, and I went through a terrible case of PTSD from all the deaths and so forth I'd been through, I presume that for a while in my younger days, and I suddenly realized I tried to help someone and got it all wrong. All my life I've loved to help people, but I got it all wrong in this case. It messed up and hurt a lot of people. And I suddenly sort of had to look around at myself and how I was behaving and how I was thinking and realized this was not the way to go. And so I was a farmer at the time. I'm still a farmer, actually. I'll never stop being a farmer in one way or another. But I worked it out in my mind that if you practice suddenly stops in the middle of a field and you're plowing something or baling hay or something, you get your tools out and you fix it. And if you can't figure out how to fix it, you go and look up the maker's manual for the tractor in which it'll tell you how to fix things. And when I realized I was making a complete mess of my own life trying to run it myself, the problem was, if you live as a child up to your 8 years old, but about 8 years old, and your mother and father split up, and there have been lots of rows in the house and so forth, and you go across to a foreign country, and then in a short while after you get there, your mother starts to die from terminal cancer, and she does die in the end of that. And then about 18 months later, you get a message from America telling you that your father has committed suicide. And then about 18 months after that, the stepfather, whom he'd grown to love and honor and really enjoy being with, died. When you go through that, you've got a pretty heavy burden of PTSD to deal with. And I realized that whatever I was doing wasn't working. So I better look for the Maker's Manual. And the Maker's Manual of the Human Race turned out to be the Gospels of Jesus Christ. So I turned my life over to Jesus and he took over. And it's been very different ever since.

So you were eight when you met Jack for the first time. How old were you when your mom and Jack were married?

I would have been about nine and a half, or closing on 10, I guess, at that stage, probably 10.

Okay. So, yeah. So you Your brother, your mom came over to England eight years old. A couple years later they were married. And you lived at the kilns from 8 years old until basically when you left after school. 17, 18, right?

Well, I left it, not school, to go to college. Yes, I was 18.

But all of those years, I mean, I'm sure those were happy years with.

Jack and with your mom, but they.

Were also very tragic. Your mother passed away when you were 14. During this time your biological father had committed suicide and then Jack died three years later. So you left the kilns shortly after Jack's death, is that right?

Yes, I was given a home by my mother's best friend in that area, a lady friend called Jean Wakeman, who was a motoring journalist. This is probably where I got my fascination for cars from. And I lived there for several years, I think, until I finally decided I didn't like being where I was at the agriculture. I wanted to go to an agricultural college to learn how to be a farmer. And eventually I wound up with a colleague that was teaching me mostly how to get subsidies from the government, things like that, which I wasn't the least bit interested in. And at that same sort of era, I had met someone incredibly beautiful. And there's a funny thing about that, actually, when I was a little boy in America, and from there on I had a problem with my brother, who was turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic and a violent and dangerous one. Most of the aims and things he wanted to do when I was a little boy was to get rid of me. And he tried that in many, many ways over the years. Only have the death of all my parents to deal with the fact that my brother was trying to bring mine about. He eventually died Christmas Day in 2016, in a sealed environment in psychiatric hospital in Zurich in Switzerland. I missed him. I cried over his death, despite the fact that he'd spent his life trying to get rid of things. But in any case, all of that going together does tend to mess him up a bit. But I did hugely enjoy the time we spent when my mother was in remission from her cancer, which lasted about four years, actually. Hugely enjoyed being with mother and Jack and good horny Jack's elder brother. It was a wonderful scenario to live in. I often wish that I'd been able to record the conversation somehow that went on at that dinner table, because just the laughter that rocked the house almost. We always had a lot of fun.

What are some of those conversations around the dinner table that you remember Some of the memories there at the kilns at C.S. lewis's house that you're particularly fond of.

Well, my favorite memory of dinner at the kilns was one time when my mother asked Jack if he'd remembered to do something she'd asked him to do. And he said, well, of course I did, my darling, what do you take me for, a fool? And my mother said, no, Jack, I took it for better or worse things like that. I mean, they were terrific people to be with. My mother friend Jack enjoyed playing the game Scrabble. I'm sure you're familiar with that. But they had their own rules. They would take the board from one Scrabble set and then they would take all of the meta tiles from two Scrabble sets and proceed to play Scrabble using all known languages, factual or fictional. And they would just always be on the lookout for the other one cheating, because that was part of the game for them to get away with it. On one occasion when I was watching them play this extraordinary form of Scrabble, Jack put down a word that mother didn't recognize and she immediately accused him of cheating. So Jack came up with some cock and bull story about where the origin of this in sort of ancient Egypt or somewhere was. And she still didn't believe him. So they looked at me and said, what do you think, Doug? And I said, don't ask me, ask Warnie. And Warnie was Jack's elder brother, as I said. So I toddled down to Warney's study and got him to come back up to the common room in the house, or sitting room as people would normally call it. And they asked him to look at this and see what his viewpoint was. And he studied the word very carefully because he also was a writer and a darn good one and a historian. And he said that he would penalize Jack a large number of points for cheating and equally penalize my mother with the same number of points for crowing over catching Jack are cheating. The whole thing was such a laugh filled atmosphere. Even when my mother was on the brink of death. The house was full of laughter. But there were sober and somber times as well when she was in pain. That was the hardest thing to take, of course, watching her in agony. But some interesting and miraculous things happened during those times. I remember one time, Jack, my mother, was losing the calcium of her bones to osteoporosis, which is a partial side episode of the cancer. Most people get it without having a cancer, but hers was accentuated by the cancer And Jack prayed that if there's any way he could be allowed to help with this, in order to do so, he promptly started to lose the calcium in his burns to osteoporosis, which he suffers from the rest of his life. And my mother started gaining the calcium in hers. Now, there's no explanation for this except that a transfer was officiated by Jesus Christ, By God. That was one. There was another time I can remember when Jack was sitting with my mother and pain in her legs was absolutely excruciating. And she was trying so hard not to cry, not to scream. And Jack told me afterwards that he prayed, prayed to God that he might be able, at least for a short time, to accept the prayer so that my mother wouldn't have to go suffer the pain. I mean, he was praying that God would let him accept the pain rather than my mother. And almost instantaneously he felt the most agonizing pains in his legs. My mother was free of pain. Those kinds of things are not things you laugh about, but they're things that bring you incredible joy and sudden understanding of Jesus presence. I never gave up on Christ when I was being a rat bag kid, riding motorcycles and getting up to all kinds of mischief. Never gave up on him at all. But one time when I finally realized that I couldn't fix this machine, I handed my life over to Christ completely. And it's been a totally different life ever since. I've been tempted all the time to do all kinds of dark things or I turn to Christ when I feel temptation coming my way to those years at the kilns.

Incredibly formative. And then, you know, another time we'll have to share the story. Well, people can go read Len Lands to hear the full story after the kilns. You've had such a fascinating career from radio broadcasting to farming in Australia. You guys had the house in Ireland where you were ministering to women with post abortion trauma. Here's what I'm curious about though. What led to you? I mean, the work you're doing today, essentially being the chief champion of Jack's legacy through the C.F. lewis Company. What led to you focusing so much time and energy on that work, on producing films and plays and other resources that will extend Jack's legacy.

To start with, you know and loved a man as a father, as I did Jack. And you actually love his works almost as much as the man. And I've read most of his works, if not all of them over the years. And then he dies and you inherit, I think, a Moral responsibility to take care of his works and ensure that he's not forgotten. Make sure he is still known, still doing good work, even though he may not be there to see it himself or he may be looking down from heaven, who knows? But the point being that there has to be somebody to keep the work going, to keep the work in front of the public, to keep the work expanding. And there was no one except me to do it. I guess I quite willingly plunged into it because I thought that Jack deserved as much as I could give him back.

Yeah. So you've been doing this work for a while. You guys have produced a number of films. I know a lot of people listening have seen the films with Disney in the mid two. Was that the mid 2000s that those Disney Narnia films came out?

Yeah. So it's no good after me. I know it did happen because I was in it. One of many things that was one of many things that were done. I worked with. I still work with HarperCollins quite a lot. When they come out with a new idea, it's bounced off me and we discuss it and so forth. And there are publishers, of course. How to describe. It's just something I feel that God wants me to do. And it makes me feel that Jack might be smiling at me.

For all the Lewis Works. The C.S. lewis Company owns the copyrights for all those works. Is that correct?

Yes, it is. The works are now translated, I think into almost 50 languages.

Wow.

And that's something I've tried to promote as well. So we probably have. In terms of Narnia, I think we probably have a reading audience of somewhere near 400 million people in different languages all over the world. That's unbelievable.

That's incredible.

If you think about it, A lot of years gone by since those books were originally released and they were only in English. And we've spread about myself and my assistant, my right hand man, for example, and others in the company have worked very hard to help them become published in other ways. Language is all over the place. I loved it one time when I was in an American university which remained nameless. And it was after I'd done a bit of a talk and all the students corrected in a great mass. One girl looked at me and said, can I ask you a question? I said, certainly. She said, those centaurs you had in Narnia, were they real? And I just couldn't resist. Yeah. Well, we were on this great big plane in New Zealand where we shot this piece and there was forest around it. You Must have remembered the battle scene. Wonderful place to shoot a battle scene. Anyway, I said that this suddenly while we were, you know, looking out to see if it was the right place to be, and we had a couple of helicopters we'd flown in on. There were no roads into there at the time. And I said, just from nowhere, under the trees, we saw these strange looking people coming out. And finally everybody just rocked with laughter. Except this particular girl. And she looked up, her eyes back down, figured out that I was having a go at her, you know, she laughed about it at the end. I gave her a big hug, she gave me a big hug and it was all friends, thank God. But she did make a complete throat of herself imagining that. And it was beautiful because I wish, I wish, I wish there were really centaurs that we could talk to. Doug.

So I know a lot of Narnia fans were really excited about the news. We heard recently that for the first time, one company has the rights to.

Produce films on all seven books.

And that company is Netflix, of course. So what can you tell us about what we can expect from that deal? What's the latest on this partnership between Netflix and the C.S.

Lewis Company? Well, to be honest, I can't tell you very much at all. We did a deal quite some months ago and I haven't heard a word since. I mean, I'm listed as a producer, but I've heard no word from what they plan to do or how they plan to do it, or when they plan to do it, for that matter. Looking at things, I don't know whether Netflix are sort of ready to rock and roll on this or not, but we'll find out in due course. I'm sorry, I can't help.

That deal was done a while ago, right? I mean, we're looking at more than a year ago since the deal was executed. Is that right?

Oh, no, not that long. It's quite a few months back, but I don't think it was a year. I'm very bad at times. As I said, I don't think so. It's a year, though.

We all hope there's news very soon. We're recording this in November, but we're actually releasing this episode the day after my new book, Master of One Hits Bookstores. I think some people are really drawn to the title, but a lot of people are intimidated by it. I think there's this question of how can there be just this one thing that I am going to master vocationally? And I found our conversation, Gosh, this is going Back a year and a half ago about Jack's vocational. One thing to be tremendously helpful. I remember I was asking you to confirm whether or not Jack's one thing was writing, but you disagreed with that. You said that his one thing was much broader than that. He was really a masterful teacher. And he applied that in different contexts throughout his career. Can you talk about that? Like, why do you say that rather than writing, teaching was kind of the thing that Jack was.

Well, I think the writing was a product of his teaching. When he found a dilemma right in front of his eyes of some sort, he would start to write down how he would interpret that dilemma in possibly science fiction or some other form of. Certainly the darling chronicles. Other forms. But every single thing he wrote was instructive to us if we wanted to learn. It forced things on people. I don't know if you've heard till we have Faces, but I think it's one of the finest books he ever wrote. In fact, it was a joint effort between my mother and him. They wrote it together. But there are so many layers of meaning in that book. He doesn't help you with it all at once. The more times you read that book, the more you'll understand what he's getting at. And there's huge depths of wisdom in it. And the same applies to almost all of his writings. The science fiction trilogy, for example. Our Silent Planet and Perelandra and the last one which has escaped me at the moment, but that Hideous Strength. That's right. But those books, they're teaching books. I think everything Dak wrote in fiction turns out to be something we can learn from. Of course, all of his Christian books, Near Christianity and Screwtape Letters, and all of those are just blatant teaching us how to avoid the pits of Satan and how to get closer and closer to Jesus. It's not something that's difficult to read. It's not something that one has. He's not preaching in any way at people. It just lets the facts sort of run out of the end of his dip pen and form the words on the page. And the result is that we can learn so much from his works. And I'm still learning from his works. And I've been reading them most of my life now. I'm getting pretty old. I'll be 74 in a week's time. So, I mean, there's so much we can learn. I don't think one ever gets to the bottom of his writings. The more and more information, the more often you read them yeah.

So as I talk about in the book, masters of any craft tend to be pretty disciplined people and tend to have pretty steady routines. Jack appears to be no exception to that. Can you talk us through your observation? You know, living at the kilns with Jack as your stepfather, what did his.

Day look like, what did his daily.

Routine look like from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to bed?

Well, they go up very early, often before dawn, as I do. To this day, I think he probably was out of bed by about four. He would go down to the kitchen and make himself a pot of tea and take it to his daddy. And there he would proceed to answer the previous day's letters. He had enormous correspondence from people all over the world. In fact, there are three large books which contain most of his letters. The ones that were salvaged anyway. So he wrote back to anyone who wrote to him. Except raving lunatics, of course. And everybody gets one or two letters down again. But he was hugely compassionate with people who had problems or were in trouble of one form, or just sad and dreary people who desperately talked to somebody. He was always there to answer their letters. So that was his first thing in the day. He would get up and he'd have his cup of tea, his little pot of tea and probably a couple of biscuits and get to work with a dip pen and a bottle of ink. He never used a fountain pen because his thumbs were malformed and they wouldn't work on the thing to load it with to fill the ink. Interesting in those days, to fill the ink satchel inside it. He would work on until he had got through all of his email. That might take him an hour. It might take him to lunchtime. Sometimes it would take him to mid afternoon, depending on what was happening.

But he would always go from start to finish. He would always finish whatever that correspondence was interesting.

He would finish when he finished. I mean, when he ran out of letters to answer. Occasionally he would put a very, very good letter aside for a later study or a very, very bad one as to how the heck am I going to answer this study? Mostly he would just work on until he got them done. There were a lot of letters which are of minor importance came in and those would go down to Warney's study and he'd put them on Warny's desk and leave it until Warny got up. Warney would type them with two fingers, one on each hand, and very badly. At least they'd be more legible than Jack's handwriting, which is very difficult to read unless you are familiar with it, as I am. I can feel read his handwriting, which is a great boon to me. But it was right until he finished. And usually that was sometime late in the morning or early or up toward lunchtime, something like that. And then after lunch he might spend about, I suppose, an hour or so reading something that he needed information from or style from or something from. And then he would sit down and write whatever he was writing at the time. And he would write right through the afternoon. He would go out for a walk about halfway through the afternoon, come back and have his afternoon tea, which consists again of a large pot of tea. And he'd have lunch, of course, in the meantime, large pot of tea and many biscuits, about four or five. And then he would retire back to his office if he had something pressing that he needed to write off. Sometimes a writer mustn't stop. You get to a certain stage in something you're writing and you just keep writing it until it's finished, that paragraph or that chapter, whatever it was. Because otherwise, you know, if you have an experience with this and you do that, if you go to bed without finishing it, it may well vanish from your mind. Yeah, yeah, definitely a great loss to you and to your audience. So Jack would make sure that he didn't stop at a point where he would lose anything. So he'd often write on. Sometimes he would write on till late in the evening. Mostly not. He always came down for supper. Supper was at dinner, rather, was at 7 o' clock at the kilns. And he was always there if he was in the house, and Borney too, and myself and sometimes other people. But that was more or less his day. And when he was at home at the college, of course, he was teaching half the day or most of the day and writing some of the day. And of course they had wonderful evenings with meetings of the Inklings in Oxford. And later on, of course, they would get together in Cambridge much less often because it was a long way from Oxford. And sometimes Jack would usually come home from Cambridge University, from Magdalene, Cambridge, every weekend. And he'd have a long weekend at home. And that was when he would go to an Inklings meeting or something and be with my mother, spend lots of time with my mother during those very difficult, very hard, but at the same time holy years that we went through.

What time would he go to bed? If he's up at 4, what time.

Is he typically going to sleep? He would be still up at about 10 and probably till about 10:30. And I know that because I would be in my bedroom upstairs, which had been his once, and I would have the light on. I'd be reading. He would come out of the back door of the kilns and come around little steps that lead up to the balcony outside of what was now my bedroom. And he'd shout, lights out, Doug. And I'd turn the lights out quickly. Yes, Jack, and goodnight, Jack. And as soon as he was gone, I would sort of sneak the light back on again, a few more pages of whatever chapter of whatever book I was reading. It was a wonderful place to live.

It's one of my favorite places I've ever visited.

It's such a.

Visited your bedroom?

Visited Jack's bedroom. Well, that was only my bedroom. I slept in almost every bedroom in the house, with the exception. I never slept in what had been my mother's bedroom. I didn't want to do that. But I slept in what we now call the music room. I slept in the room off the kitchen, which is my bedroom for quite a while. I slept upstairs in the room that had been Jack's study. I slept in Jack's bedroom later on. So I really kind of migrated around the house quite a lot. I'm not quite sure why at this stage, but I did in my bedroom, off the kitchen occasion, I was always a messy kid. There was clothes all over the floor, bits and pieces of junk, stuff I was building or destroying or whatever. And I suddenly was lying on the bed reading a book. I suddenly heard a voice inside my head which said, look at the ceiling. I looked up, I saw a square about 2 yards square of the ceiling falling, losing its grip on the rafters and starting to come down. And I was off the bed, across the room and out of the door into the kitchen before the blaster hit the bed. Jeff Roth has slept under that patch because you can see it's cracking around the edges again. I told him he better move the bed next time he stays at the kilns because it might come down again.

Wow. Yeah. Well, for our listeners who haven't been.

To the kilns, you really do have to go visit. It's an exceptional place.

You already know this because you've seen an advanced copy of Massive One. But in the book, I take on the quote unquote, Christian film industry pretty strongly, arguing that entertainment that is made by the church and for the church is seen by basically nobody outside of the church.

Mostly because I've been selling that for years.

Yeah, mostly because these are just, you haven't seen Mystery. So why don't you talk about this when we talked about.

It's not just that. It's an awful lot of books are written with a Christian theme and advertised by publishers and by the writers as being the new Christian novel or whatever. The problem is nobody's going to read it except Christians. It's simple. You don't go to see a Christian movie unless you're a Christian. What we need is movies like the lion of Witch and the Wardrobe, which is not a Christian movie, but it has some hugely powerful Christian messages built into it, as do most of Jack's works. And I think it's most essential that the so called Christian movie industry simply close up shop and go away and let those of us who are really dedicated to Christ make movies that aren't advertisable as Christian movies. But you will learn about how Christians think, how Christians work or how they should work and so on simply by watching these movies. And there are a lot of movies that have done that in the past. I hope there will be a lot more in the future because it's the only way you can get people to really understand what Christianity is all about. I have seen some fabulous movies. One of the best ones I thought, which I've seen is I Can Only Imagine, taken from a beautiful song which makes me cry every time I hear it. And I think that's the sort of movie we make. It is a Christian movie in a sense, but it isn't in other senses.

It isn't in the sense that. And I haven't seen the movie, but I've heard it's well done.

Right.

And that's the point I'm making in Master One. When we prioritize preaching our message above mastery of our craft, we usually end up with pretty bad cultural goods that aren't appealing to anybody. Right?

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We do. If we start trying to preach through our movies deliberately, why not let the movie tell its own story in a way which will project not preaching so much, but the facts of what happens when you become a Christian?

I think a lot of people are.

Going to struggle with this, right?

Because you say the lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe is not a Christian movie, it's not a Christian book. And I agree it's pretty clear that Jack was not intentional about writing a, you know, quote unquote Christian allegory. But the film reveals truth, the film reveals goodness, the film reveals the gospel. How does that happen? How did that happen in the life of Jack? Like when he sat down, what was he trying to accomplish in writing that book if not to explicitly or implicitly preach the gospel?

Well, if we can start by saying that the Christianity that's in it was not deliberate. He didn't set out to write a Christian book, as you say. He was having a discussion with J.R.R. tolkien at one stage about children's books that were being written at the time that they were discussing. This would have been in the late 40s or mid-40s. And they both decided that the children's books being released to the public at that time were absolute rubbish. There's no way either of them would have wanted to have read those books when they were children. So eventually they decided that they sort of have a go themselves. And Jack eventually came out with the line of Rich and Wardrobe. And of course, Tollers wrote the Hobbit. Now, neither of those are Christian books. But, boy, do you learn about yourself. Do you learn about what you ought to be? Do you learn about how you ought to behave, what you ought to do under very, very difficult circumstances? Being chased by trolls or something? All of this stuff is there, but it's always in the shadows of it. You can feel the goodness of the men writing them. You can feel the fact that what they're teaching is not Christianity per se, it's how to behave as a real human being, a child of God, that is so incredibly valuable.

Yeah, it is. In Master One, you quoted Jack, who used to say, we don't need more people writing Christian books. What we need is more Christians writing good books.

I remember Jack saying that. Yeah, it's very true. That's what we do need. More Christians writing good books, more Christians making good movies is what we need.

That's exactly right. Hey, Doug, three real quick questions I like to end every conversation with. First, which books do you recommend most frequently to others, or maybe give as gifts to others the most frequently?

Well, it depends largely on the circumstances. But I give away copies of A Grief Observed in batches. I mean, really, it reminds me I've got to buy another six because I've run out. That book is so hugely beneficial for those going through the agonies of losing it in a deeply loved person, someone they absolutely adore, then seen him or her suddenly taken away by disease or accident or whatever. I mean, it really knocks you sideways. And then out comes this book by C S Lewis, which, by the way, wasn't written, wasn't first published under his own name, published under a pseudonym. But this description of how you can deal with these horrible, horrible circumstances that come into your life. And he shows you that you can get through them and come out the other side back to being a normal, cheerful, loving and loved human being. That book is so valuable, I think it probably should be published in sheets of gold. Mind you, people would just take it for the gold if it was. That's one of the books I do usually admire and give away whenever I have a need to do so, and I must remember to buy some more. I also give away lots of the the Narnian Chronicles, usually to the children of people I know or have met and have liked. In fact, there's a guy working one of my houses at the moment, a workman, and I'm going to send him a set rather for his two young boys. And it's just what I do. I also think that if I had time, I would buy and give away books all the time.

It's one of the best gifts to give, right?

Books change people's lives.

Like, we have this very romantic attachment to books. And I remember some of the big turning points in my life are books that people gifted. It's one of my favorite things to give away. So I asked every guest this next question. I'm really interested to hear your response to it. So what one person would you like to most hear talk about the intersection of their faith and their work? Maybe somebody in Hollywood, since you know.

That world pretty well.

Like, who's a Christ follower in Hollywood that producing really, really great work that you'd love to hear talk about how their faith impacts what they create?

I don't know too many people in Hollywood or in the movie business, I'm afraid. Just only the ones I've worked with. And very few of them are Christian at all. Some were, I think. What? We don't need more Christians making movies. We need more Christians making good movies. It's as simple as that. And I think if we ever get to the stage, I think Ralph Winter is a Christian, for example. Top dude too, by the way. Nice guy, enjoys company. Very rare occasions I see him. We need more people like that. We need more people prepared to get up and make a really good movie without saying go to Jesus, everybody, every five minutes.

Last question. Doug, what one piece of advice would you give to somebody? So the people listening to this podcast, they are pursuing mastery of their vocations. They're pursuing mastery as filmmakers, as entrepreneurs, as leaders. What one piece of advice might you give that person who is trying to pursue mastery of their craft for the glory of God?

And the good of others. Well, I think the most important thing of all, no matter what your craft you're trying to achieve the mastery of, is to use it as a reflection of the master of all of us. He died for us on a cross when he came back. We need to know, and we need people to know in our work that we revere this idea of the fact. For example, a couple of things really. For example, love. I think it's got this all wrong. In modern society, love is your benefit at my expense. End of story. That's the kind of thing we have to get across. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality. Sexuality has absolutely nothing to do with love. Love is your benefit at my expense. And that was what. I don't think Jack ever used the phrase. I came up with it, but it is what Jack taught. Love is your benefit by expense. We need people who are prepared to go into their great career, whatever it might be, keeping that in the forefront of their mind at all the time. What did Jesus do? He expended his whole life to our benefits, our benefit at his expense. That's real. That's beautiful.

I just want to commend you for the exceptional work that you do. Thank you for being such a great champion for the work of your mother, your stepfather. We didn't get to talk about your mom, but your mom was such a fantastic writer in her own right. Thank you for working hard to ensure that Jack's work remains accessible to the world. By the way, even to my kids. I have a five year old, a three year old. Same you for making sure that they're going to grow up in a world filled with Narnia. And just thank you for your commitment to the ministry of excellence of writing great books, of making great films, of producing great plays. Hey, if you want to learn more about Doug's story, I really, truly cannot recommend Lenten Land's Highland Up.

It's an exceptional book.

How long has the book been out, Doug? Has it been a decade? Two decades?

How long has it been out? About 30 years now, I think.

30 years.

It always amazes me that people keep buying it because it's been on the market for ages.

Such an exceptional book. It's so well written. It's basically it's Doug's story. But of course, you can't tell Doug's story without also telling the story of his mother and of Jack as well. Doug, thank you so much.

Yeah, I'll tell you one funny thing. I wrote a book called Jack's Life as well, which is a biography of Jack written for children. And one of the reviewers said, I don't quite understand Mr. Gresham's tone in this book. It's almost as though he were writing for Cubes, which my reply was, well, duh. Also a great book.

Very, very short, very condensed version of Jack's story. But again, go pick up Jack's life and Lenten lands. And Doug, thank you so much for.

Taking a few minutes to chat.

Always appreciate it.

You're very welcome, Jordan. It's been good to talk with you.

I hope you guys really enjoyed that conversation with Doug. Doug was so kind to endorse Master of One. He really wrote one of the more heartfelt endorsements of the book that I'm just so incredibly grateful for. He's one of the most generous people I know. Hey, if you go order the book right now at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, wherever you buy books, head over to jordanraynor.com after you make that purchase. And enter to win this trip I'm giving away to Europe. Thank you guys for listening to this very, very special episode of the Call to Mastery. Thank you for pushing through the technical challenges and the poor audio quality. I promise next week the audio quality will be much better as we recorded it in Dave Ramsey Studio. So you guys have that to look forward to with my guest Luke LeFever next week. I'll see you then.