Thick and Thin Culture

The Desires of the Few and the Many

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.'“— C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce

The infamous “Fire Walks” of the Not-Your-Guru Tony Robbins—at which participants at self-help seminars attempt to walk over burning hot coals, and sometimes get severely burned—is but a thin, superficial, NLP-induced version of a concept that C.S. Lewis illustrated in his fantastical book, The Great Divorce.

I’ll say it up front: I find the Robbins Fire Walks to be a sad summation of the thinness of our culture—and the deep desire of people to become real.

In Lewis’s book, the narrator of the story lives in a dull, grey town. He finds a magical bus stop and boards a coach with other people who desire an excursion to some other place—any other place.

They don’t realize it, but the town they left was a kind of purgatory. And the bus they’re on is attempting to take them toward heaven.

As they ascend, their bodies are reve…