Tuesday, November 22, 2016

The Curious Journey We All Walk



Clive Staples Lewis—or Jack as he was known to friends—wrote in Mere Christianity “You must make a choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up as a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.” These are the words that Holy Women, Holy Men, the trial lectionary resource depicting the lives of blessed ones, use to begin their commemoration of Lewis. And, these words possess within them not just the Truth of what Jesus’ life, death, and Resurrection compels us to do, but also a glimpse into the inner struggle of one of the most popular and widely read defenders and explainers of Christianity in the 20th Century!

My life would certainly not be the same without C.S. Lewis. Growing up my family had a few noteworthy routines that eventually turned into cherished traditions: decorating the house for various seasons, going out to eat whenever my sister or I made straight A’s on our report cards, and most importantly for the purposes of today’s sermon ironing the upcoming week’s outfits on Sunday afternoons. During the school year I did not have very many outfits that needed to be pressed except for church clothes but everyone else did. While my parents or sister ironed their things we took turns reading the Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis. The only time this changed was during Advent when we read his letters to children. To this day I have a strange love of ironing clothes that I believe stems from reading those books together, but that is not why Lewis’ life remains so impactful.

Lewis did not begin as a faithful son of Christianity. Yes, he grew up in the Church of England; however, his early formation did not stick, at least not immediately. After service in World War I, he began a struggle both with academia and with God. Eventually Lewis would become a lecturer at Oxford and later a Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge. While he pursued these outward posts inwardly Lewis marched from devout atheist to skeptical agnostic to curious theist and finally to “dejected and reluctant convert” to Christianity. His pathway of intellectual inquiry matched with wonderings of faith truly make his diverse works what they are. 

In college I can recall my own similar (but much more accelerated) journey from childhood believer to atheist to agnostic to theist and finally to Christian. The works of Lewis were annoying in many of those phases. Every person who cared enough to try to “convert” me back to the Christian side during college seemed to throw Lewis’ works in my face. Today, I am sad to say I could not take them serious, but I also realize that Lewis himself probably would not have been so pushy. His reluctance to fully take hold of the mantel of Christian was precisely what I felt. And at least for me I struggled with this both because I did not want to take something so serious on half-heartedly and because I knew that I could not really be sure of something like Faith.

The challenge for us is to have a mature faith that involves our entire selves. Doubts are helpful in this process. Without doubts and questioning we would not have Lewis as this figure who could articulate in so much diversity what it is like to be a Christian in the modern world. Curiosity allows us to grow deeper in our relationship with God. And, this is what C. S. Lewis’s questioning helped me to understand, primarily that the questioning and curiosity will lead us not into less faith, but into a deeper Faith!

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