Amy Orr-Ewing on Dorothy Sayers, Part 2

[00:00:04] Welcome to Women Worth Knowing, the radio program and podcast posted by Cheryl Brodersen and Robin Jones Gunn.

[00:00:12] Hello, this is Cheryl Brodersen. I'm in studio sans Robin because she's recovering.

[00:00:20] But I still want to say to you there are so many Christian women with fascinating stories.

[00:00:26] Some are missionaries, some are musicians, some are reformers, there are authors, there's wives, there's mothers, there's single women.

[00:00:32] Just God uses so many women of all different backgrounds and all different nationalities in order to inspire us and give us examples of what it is to follow Jesus Christ into all his purposes.

[00:00:53] And the amazing things that God does. I'm very excited to bring you part two of Dorothy Sayers.

[00:01:00] I was going to do one on Dorothy Sayers, then I found out a dear friend of mine and so when I totally admire Dr. Amy Orr Ewing did her doctoral thesis on Dorothy Sayers

[00:01:11] and I said to myself, why reinvent the wheel?

[00:01:14] And when Amy came to California all the way from Oxford, England I said please, please, please come on the radio.

[00:01:22] Or sorry podcast and speak with us about Amy Orr Ewing.

[00:01:28] Amy Orr Ewing, speak to us about Dorothy Sayers. That might be fixed. That might not be fixed. You might know I'm human. I don't know.

[00:01:34] But so we were at the scandalous part.

[00:01:37] Yes.

[00:01:38] Where, you know it's so interesting to me because we were talking about her birth and those of you out there who haven't listened to part one please go back and listen to it.

[00:01:47] But we talked about how she was born into an Anglican family.

[00:01:51] Her father and her grandfather had both been what we would call in America pastors.

[00:01:59] And she was brilliant as a child learning to read at the age of four, learning at least three different languages before she even turned 10.

[00:02:10] Just this amazing young woman who went, graduated early, went to Oxford first cohort of women to graduate from Oxford.

[00:02:19] How she was a woman of strong principles.

[00:02:22] Her Christianity was very important to her. She's very strong in the faith.

[00:02:25] And she went from there to work at an advertising agency rose very quickly in the ranks because of her brilliance.

[00:02:35] Held on to her principles, began to write was a successful writer, fell in love with a man who was also a writer but was not willing to come to Christ,

[00:02:46] not willing to marry her and wanted more of a sexual type of relationship which she said no to because of her principles.

[00:02:58] But devastating news coming over from the United States where he had moved told her that he in a letter told her he had married.

[00:03:07] And after that, sunk into a depression where she had an affair with a totally unsuitable man and gave up all those well quite a few of her moral strengths.

[00:03:20] Yeah, well she so in her discouragement kind of dated this very unsuitable man and did sleep with him and became pregnant and hid the pregnancy for the entire duration.

[00:03:31] Carried on working in the advertising agency. People just thought she'd got an almost free back, you know, no one knew her parents didn't know no one knew not a single person.

[00:03:42] What the one person she confided in towards the end of her pregnancy was her cousin, a young woman called Ivy who sort of fostered children and agreed this young woman agreed that she would take on and foster say as his child.

[00:04:00] So say as took the day off when she was going to have the baby and went away and gave birth and gave the child to her cousin and was back at work the next week.

[00:04:13] And no one ever knew parents never knew Ivy Ivy was the only person he knew for a really long time.

[00:04:23] Now did she name him herself?

[00:04:25] Yes, she did.

[00:04:27] So she named him but he and and she corresponded with him and he knew.

[00:04:37] Oh, I didn't know that.

[00:04:39] Yeah. So so as as a child by the time he's about sort of 12, 13, I think he knew that she was the mother but she corresponded with him the whole way through.

[00:04:51] There isn't a letter saying I am your mother.

[00:04:53] Right.

[00:04:55] Kind of in a loop Skywalker.

[00:04:57] Yeah, Darth Vader moment.

[00:04:59] Right.

[00:05:01] Yeah.

[00:05:03] And then as she sort of after so she left the advertising agency because she became financially independent through the detective fiction and then she began to write more theological plays.

[00:05:14] So she was given the opportunity to write a play for a play cycle that was happening in one of the cathedrals in Britain.

[00:05:23] And this became so popular that the British train company had to lay on more trains because thousands and thousands and thousands of people wanted to see this play.

[00:05:35] It's called a zeal for thy house.

[00:05:37] And she she also then met her husband, the man who became to be went on to become her husband.

[00:05:49] And I think she hoped that he would agree to adopt the child that they could then kind of live as a family.

[00:05:59] But after they got married that that just did not work out.

[00:06:02] He was called Mac and he turned out to be quite a sort of gruff.

[00:06:06] Not terribly supportive husband.

[00:06:10] And so she was quite unhappy in her emotional life.

[00:06:15] So her the fulfillment she experienced in life really happened through her writing and her art and her work, which obviously was absolutely prolific.

[00:06:26] So after the the success of the Cathedral play cycle, the BBC approached her and at this point radio was a kind of new media.

[00:06:37] And they approached her and asked her would she write a play cycle about Christ.

[00:06:45] And so she wrote The Man Born to Be King which was then broadcast on the radio and millions and millions of people listened to it.

[00:06:54] And it was controversial because I remember reading that.

[00:06:58] Yeah.

[00:07:00] And wasn't it controversial? It's kind of like the chosen that is popular series right now on the States.

[00:07:06] I don't know if it's in England.

[00:07:08] Yes, it is because it gave modern vernacular.

[00:07:11] It put modern language in the mouth of the characters, including the Lord.

[00:07:15] And so which is like Eugene Peterson's message.

[00:07:18] Yeah, exactly. The Lord's Observance Society they were called with a kind of, you know, churchy campaigners who were absolutely incensed and created headlines that there was blasphemy on the radio at the BBC.

[00:07:34] Which probably only made it more listened to.

[00:07:36] Exactly.

[00:07:38] It had the opposite of their intended impact.

[00:07:41] As a result of these plays, millions of people heard the words of Jesus in a format that was relatable to them.

[00:07:52] And the statistics actually show that church attendance went up in Britain in that era.

[00:07:57] So she had a huge impact so much so that the head of the BBC who is a Christian called Dr Welch wrote to the Regis Professor of Theology at Oxford.

[00:08:10] And he was asking him to with him together, the two of them, right to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop William Temple.

[00:08:20] He was a very strong devout believer, godly man and asked him to confer on Dorothy Elsay as the Lambeth Doctorate.

[00:08:29] And the letter says that C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Elsay are the two people we have who can put forward a reasonably orthodox version of the Christian faith in a way that people will actually listen.

[00:08:42] So that gives you a sense of the vastness of the impact. I mean this was huge, huge impact.

[00:08:49] So William Temple then did write to her offering her the Lambeth Doctorate and that would be a very, very high honor.

[00:08:57] It might be like a sort of, I don't know, presidential medal or something here.

[00:09:02] Like a very, very prestigious award.

[00:09:07] And she wrote back turning it down and she gave the reason that she didn't want to be a sort of official representative of Christianity and she would hate for the first woman D.D.

[00:09:22] To basically let the church down or cause a scandal.

[00:09:26] So she didn't confess to anything specific.

[00:09:30] But it seems almost certain that she feared that the news of her pregnancy and the birth of her child outside of marriage would come out and bring the Lord's name into disrepute.

[00:09:46] Which in that time it would have.

[00:09:50] It would have devastated her parents and you know, yeah.

[00:09:54] You see how many sacrifices she had to make.

[00:09:58] You know, so many women who do these great things from the Lord, they're paying a high price for it.

[00:10:07] Yeah and you know, I think all say that that sense that the Lord uses us with all our imperfections.

[00:10:15] And to think that the foremost female communicator of the Christian faith in Britain, probably in the, you know, certainly in the mid part of the 20th century.

[00:10:30] Seeing alongside C.S. Lewis as the key voice that that was her story.

[00:10:35] I think is amazing.

[00:10:37] It actually sort of speaks of the gospel and the redemption the gospel can bring.

[00:10:42] But it wasn't able to be publicly known at that point.

[00:10:46] Which is so tragic.

[00:10:48] You know, I mean I grew up at Cary Chapel with every other week it was a testimony of somebody.

[00:10:54] We embraced people's weaknesses knowing that the Lord could be their strength.

[00:10:59] So it is tragic.

[00:11:01] I wanted to ask about just, you know, the unhappiness kind of touch on that in her marriage because they were going to, as you said, she had hoped to bring her son.

[00:11:15] Yeah.

[00:11:17] Was your son's name?

[00:11:19] John Antony.

[00:11:21] John Antony.

[00:11:23] She had hoped to bring him into the home.

[00:11:25] And she did take him out of the place he was living.

[00:11:27] And she had extended visits with him and she paid for his education and he did come and stay but he didn't live with them.

[00:11:39] So he was at school and yeah, it never worked out with her husband that he could actually live with them as a family as their adopted child.

[00:11:53] And obviously without sort of formally adopting him it would have seemed a bit strange to have her cousin's foster child visit too often.

[00:12:04] That's true.

[00:12:06] So there was kind of tension over that although obviously she completely financially supported him and his education and all of that.

[00:12:14] So she's, she doesn't, I read one review of this woman who said, I'm sorry it was a man who had gone to hear her speak and that he said she was so plain looking.

[00:12:31] But when she began to speak it was riveting.

[00:12:34] So she did begin to speak.

[00:12:37] What was, what was the kind of the main topics that when she did speak?

[00:12:43] What would she talk about?

[00:12:45] So after the Man Born to Be King play cycle she was then invited to sort of offer short articles which were kind of like essays for various publications.

[00:13:00] And they were around really interesting themes about what it would look like to rebuild a Christian nation after the war.

[00:13:11] She, she wrote about vocation.

[00:13:15] She wrote three brilliant essays about about work and what work is.

[00:13:21] Tim Keller loved this.

[00:13:24] Yes. And they are really amazing because one of them is called Why Work?

[00:13:27] The most famous one and then was one called Christian vocation.

[00:13:31] And yeah, she, she then began to be asked to do kind of like broadcast talks almost on the radio.

[00:13:41] And she would make the case for the kind of moral argument for God being the foundation of Western civilization and why we resist fascism and totalitarianism, which is very current in her age.

[00:13:55] She had this fascinating image of our civilization, Western civilization being like a necklace with the beads being strung together and holding together with coherence, you know, with democracy and freedom.

[00:14:10] But the string running through the necklaces actually Christ and his incarnation.

[00:14:16] And you can snip the string and you can hope the necklace will hold together.

[00:14:21] But you actually don't have any reason to believe it will if you, if you cut that string.

[00:14:27] And that's a really, really powerful image.

[00:14:30] So she's kind of making a case for the Christian faith being, you know, the underpinning of culture.

[00:14:36] She wrote a lot about the Trinity as well.

[00:14:38] Yes.

[00:14:40] And she wrote about Christian aesthetics.

[00:14:41] So she wrote about the idea that beauty in any form actually points us towards God and not away from him.

[00:14:50] So, and gave talks about these things all over the place.

[00:14:54] And as, as you mentioned, she was a very frumpy woman.

[00:14:58] She was quite a large woman.

[00:15:00] She didn't dress well.

[00:15:02] She didn't have sort of attractive appearance, but her speaking was utterly compelling.

[00:15:07] Yeah.

[00:15:09] You know, I love that about her too.

[00:15:11] Yes.

[00:15:13] And she wrote the eulogy for her funeral and it was called that ogreish lady.

[00:15:18] Thank you, C.S. Lewis.

[00:15:20] Yeah, imagine that's the epitaph on your, on your tomb.

[00:15:24] And what happened to the Irish slogan, never speak ill of the dead.

[00:15:28] Yeah, exactly.

[00:15:30] But he kind of meant it as a compliment.

[00:15:31] He had this sort of feisty nurse and this, this firing her that enabled her to, to make her way where no other women had really gone before.

[00:15:44] And yeah.

[00:15:46] We mentioned that she wasn't part of the Inklings, but she was kind of an honorable Inklings.

[00:15:52] She was, yeah.

[00:15:53] So the Inklings are a group of people who met in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford regularly to talk and J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis obviously were, were the key members of that but others as well.

[00:16:06] And she corresponded with Lewis.

[00:16:10] She didn't live in Oxford.

[00:16:11] So that would have affected it.

[00:16:14] And, you know, out of the 50,000 letters a good number of them talk about the bomb damage to the country and the absolute nightmare of the train system and the constant delays.

[00:16:27] Right. So she couldn't sort of zip onto Oxford for a meeting of the Inklings really very easily.

[00:16:33] So, yeah. She corresponded with Charles Williams who gave her all sorts of ideas and opportunities and first introduced her to the poet Dante through, yeah, this, the figure of Beatrice which he'd written.

[00:16:54] And so her, her intellectual kind of growth as a Christian writer really happened through letters and correspondence rather than through informal conversation.

[00:17:10] It's interesting as a woman that there's a very sort of tight set of men.

[00:17:15] She's kind of on the outside of it a little bit but she's also just forging this trail, this path.

[00:17:23] She also formed her own group. I can't remember the name of it but it was with other women that were intellectuals where they would read their transcripts so to speak to each other and take criticism and improvements.

[00:17:37] Yeah. So she did that with, did the detective fiction as well actually.

[00:17:41] So, and then there was a group, there were a group of authors as well who agreed that they were going to write a series of books that the mind of the maker was part of that series too.

[00:17:56] So she was part of different cohorts but she was also quite a loner.

[00:18:03] You know, she was not an emotive person at all. In fact she even talked about, she had this phrase, the passionate intellect and she talked about how she couldn't come to God on the basis of feelings but it was the intellectual pattern of the Christian faith that attracted her.

[00:18:21] I think she mentions that in the diminished church.

[00:18:24] Yeah, yeah that's a collection of her writings that yeah.

[00:18:29] Because she talks about that and yet in that particular book she writes with such passion again about the incarnation, about the doctrine.

[00:18:39] Yes.

[00:18:40] You know about how doctrine is the most exciting.

[00:18:42] Yeah.

[00:18:43] And her work, for lack of a better word, in fact I found letters to a diminished church and then are women human even more, what do I say, enthralling than the Peter Wimsey nozzle.

[00:18:55] Oh yeah, absolutely.

[00:18:57] And it's, the format is wonderful because it's short, concise.

[00:19:03] It's a thought that is developed over a few pages.

[00:19:07] Brilliant, Lebe. You don't have to read the whole book.

[00:19:11] Yes, so she does that really well.

[00:19:14] There's tremendous passion there but what I mean is she wasn't in the least bit sentimental.

[00:19:20] But in her writing it was like all that passion was almost reserved for her writing.

[00:19:26] Right, you know though it wasn't, it was inside but it was again very British.

[00:19:35] Maybe.

[00:19:37] That's only half of you.

[00:19:39] But it's very British to kind of be, you know, unemotive on the outside.

[00:19:44] But those passions needed an outlet and they were definitely in a writing.

[00:19:49] Absolutely, yeah.

[00:19:51] And the essays obviously became bestsellers as well.

[00:19:56] She had a collection called Creed or Chaos.

[00:19:58] And the sort of beating heart of that is this idea that the church has made Christ and Christianity boring.

[00:20:12] And she said, that's the most unbelievable feat because the story of the Incarnation is the greatest drama to have ever staggered the imagination of humanity.

[00:20:23] And that if it hadn't actually been true, it would have been an idea created by the greatest author or playwright.

[00:20:34] So she has this phrase, the dogma is the drama like the drama at the heart of Christian faith is the truth of God incarnate dying and rising and defeating evil and sin.

[00:20:48] And, you know, she's absolutely scathing about the way the kind of clergy of the era.

[00:20:56] She talks about how they've taken the lion of Judah and paired his claws and made him a petting cat fit for pale curates and pious old ladies, you know.

[00:21:10] And actually Jesus is this kind of roaring lion.

[00:21:13] She also had a phrase like he was anything but boring.

[00:21:17] And that's again, that you sense in that writing.

[00:21:23] It's almost tumultuous.

[00:21:25] I mean, you can't read it and not be moved.

[00:21:28] Yes.

[00:21:30] And also you've got to remember she's living through the Second World War, through the bombing, the blitz, you know, bombs falling near you the whole time, losing people close to you.

[00:21:41] The threat of a Nazi invasion hanging over your head, the threat of coming under totalitarianism.

[00:21:49] The reality of the culture of death of fascism just, you know, at the door.

[00:21:55] So the urgency of the struggle between good and evil is really there, I think.

[00:22:01] And that's partly because it's there in the culture.

[00:22:03] And for some people, you know, the response to that was just to keep calm and carry on, just live and don't think about it.

[00:22:13] But I think what Seyhz does so brilliantly is apply the truth of the gospel to that current, you know, cultural context that she found herself in.

[00:22:23] It's very relevant to us today as well.

[00:22:25] It is so relevant to us today.

[00:22:27] And again, especially the part of creating an anemic Jesus that is this pacifist who can, you know, because he called the sea, not realizing no, he's the conquering king who has risen from the dead.

[00:22:42] And she was also taking on the atheists of her generation as well and what was called the de-mythologizers.

[00:22:50] So the liberals who were trying to cut any kind of miraculous or divine claims of Jesus from the Bible.

[00:22:58] And they were in the church.

[00:23:00] First was in the church.

[00:23:02] Exactly.

[00:23:04] And so as a lay woman, as not a professional Christian, you know, as someone who's a writer.

[00:23:09] And a woman.

[00:23:10] And a woman that she's taking them on and basically saying, how dare you?

[00:23:14] How dare you do this to Jesus?

[00:23:16] And no wonder the chaps are empty and showing that, you know, even even a sort of simple portrait of the true Christ draws people.

[00:23:27] You know, when I'm the son of man is lifted up, he'll draw people to himself.

[00:23:30] And that is just evidenced in Seiya's work in the most beautiful way from the thousands flocking to the cathedrals to see the plays from the millions listening to the radio plays.

[00:23:42] The man born to be king, you know, from people buying her essays in their millions as well.

[00:23:50] Presented in a compelling Jesus, which he is.

[00:23:54] The true Jesus.

[00:23:55] Right.

[00:23:57] Which, you know, I've always had that conviction show the true Jesus.

[00:24:00] And people will be, as you said, drawn to the true exciting Jesus who you can't put in any political category or in any political party.

[00:24:14] He's, you know, he devised those right.

[00:24:17] So, I mean, we're coming to the close of part two, but we still have quite a bit because we want to talk about her work with Dante.

[00:24:23] Yeah.

[00:24:25] Which was amazing and talk a little bit about what Dante is for those because a lot of that is lost to us today.

[00:24:32] So we'll talk about Dante in part three.

[00:24:34] I'm sorry to do this to you, but you have to do part three.

[00:24:36] We'll talk about Dante.

[00:24:38] We'll talk about her death, you know, and then the legacy that she left.

[00:24:43] And maybe I have some questions also about, you know, the son and how all that ended up.

[00:24:49] So we'll talk about that in part three.

[00:24:51] Also, Amy herself, Dr. Amy Orr Ewing is an authorist and we want to talk in part three about some of the books that she has written that you'll want to read too.

[00:25:02] So all that coming up in part three.

[00:25:04] Don't forget to come back next week.

[00:25:06] Thank you for listening to Women Worth Knowing with Cheryl Brodersen and Robin Jones Gunn.

[00:25:14] For more information on Cheryl visit Cheryl Brodersen dot com or follow her on Instagram or Facebook.

[00:25:20] For more information on Robin visit robingunn.com or follow her on Instagram or Facebook.

[00:25:26] Join us each week for a lively conversation as we explore the lives of well-known and not so well-known historical and contemporary Christian women.

[00:25:35] If you think there is a woman worth knowing, we'd love to hear from you.

[00:25:38] Email us at www.cccm.com.

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[00:25:49] Thank you again for listening to Women Worth Knowing with Cheryl Brodersen and Robin Jones Gunn.

[00:25:54] Women Worth Knowing is a production of Calvary Chapel Coast Amesa.