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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