According to the church calendar, today as you know, is the feast day of C.S. Lewis. When I first discovered the Anglican Church and learned of feast days I thought, "What a great church! We get to eat and have all of these grand feasts throughout the year!" However, I quickly learned that feast days simply refer to the days of the year that we remember those saints who have come before us and today we do so for Lewis. Clives Staples Lewis or "Jack" to his friends was ruddy apologist with baggy tweeds, a booming voice, bald head, and horne-rimmed spectacles. Many view him as the most well read Christian author of the 20th century. However his journey to Christianity took the first thirty-one years of his life. It is this story that I would like to share with you today as he recorded in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy.As a child Lewis was rather withdrawn from what he viewed as a repressive life-a worldview that would quickly lead to atheism. He was not a popular boy. "I was big for my age," he wrote, "a great lout of a boy, and that sets one’s seniors against one. I was also useless at games. Worst of all, there was my face. I am the kind of person who gets told, ‘And take that look off your face too’"1 even though I was not trying to reveal any certain emotion. He did not really have any friends apart from his brother and he could often be found thumbing through the various stacks of books which his father and mother left scattered throughout the house and creating a written world he called animal land. After the death of his mother his father never really recovered. He was gone most of the time, thus leaving Lewis and his brother home alone and when his father was at home, he was quite absent minded, very emotional and had a horrible temper. Lewis and his brother were always looking forward to the next day when he would again leave for work. Lewis hated school and vividly remembered his first day when his mother dressed him in an outfit of stiff irritable clothes and sent him off. The teachers were cruel and beat him. Through these experiences he learned to hate the world in which he lived and God for creating such a place. He wrote, "I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world"2. He would go on to study under a man who he called the Great Knock, who would open up his intellectual world and allow him to fully and mindfully enter into atheism.
However as he grew and learning he began to discover difficulties in the beliefs which grounded his atheism. As a college students he began to lose his chronological snobbery, his belief in realism and he realized of the depth Christian authors. First, to go was his chronological snobbery-the belief that the latest and greatest scholarly work was correct and ancient works such as the Bible were outdated. It seems that here in the west many of us have this same view. The lastest and the greatest is the best of all. Just this week people were standing in lines for up to thirty six hours to obtain the latest Playstation 3 video game system. In the quest of the latest and greatest some were trampled, others shot and one person was even stabbled over in Manchester, Connecticut! We worship youth and revile old age by making jokes about older folks in our birthday cards. In the scholarly world, many scholars from the two most recent century have proposed that the Gospels and Epistles were not written by those who claimed to write them, such as Mathew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul, and therefore are not credible. Yet over 1,800 years of careful study has shown the very opposite. All of a sudden it is as if we are smarter than all of those who have come before us. When Lewis was forced to think about past wisdom he had to ask himself, had that information been refuted and by whom and how conclusively or did it simply die away in the scholarly world as often fashions do? Second, Lewis lost his trust in realism-the belief that only that which can be touched and which can show forth evidence is to be believed. In our culture is seems that imperical science carries this great prestige above and beyond theology and philosophy and all of the other sciences. It seems that people automatically assume that that which we can touch and physically prove must be the truth and all else is false--completely forgetting that even imperical evidence has to be interpreted. Lewis realized that there were all kinds of things which he held to that had no physical evidence: he trusted his own thoughts, he trusted his moral judgements as valid, and his aesthetic experience as valuable. Third, Lewis discovered that some of the smartest people he knewindividual believed in God. At Oxford clearly one of the most intelligent and best informed men in his class was a Christian-a thoroughgoing supernaturalist. He would go on to discover that all the books were turning against him--his favorite authors which had had a great effect upon him: George MacDonald, Johnson, Spenser and Milton, Plato, Aeschylus. And those others which held to his theories of atheism, Shaw and Wells, Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire all seemed thin and lacking in depth. As his intellectual base for atheism began to crumble so also did his journey begin to the belief which would change his life forever.
He would go on to write these words: "In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation"3. This was the begining of his move to truth. And so after 31 years during a motorcycle ride to the zoo with his brother he would come to believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and from there become the most well known Christian author of the 20th century. Amen.
1. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 95.
2. Ibid, 113.
3. Ibid, 215.
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