Who is Clive Staples Lewis?  You probably know him as the author of “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Screw Tape Letters,” but did you know he called himself “the most reluctant convert to Christianity in all England?”  He was an avowed atheist for most of his younger years, culminating in a slow conversion to the One whom he had ridiculed and vowed never to follow: Jesus Christ.  He described Christ as an imaginary person, someone that weak people clung to, but was finally convinced that Christ was an actual person who died a horrible death on a cross.

Apparently, his mother’s death from cancer, an estranged father who couldn’t cope with her death, and being a victim of and witnessing first hand the horrors of WWI caused C.S., as he preferred to be called, to stop believing in Jesus Christ and to announce to the world that he was an avowed atheist.  The schism between his mother’s happiness and his father’s overbearingly deep depression, plus never praying even after being wounded twice in battle, caused him to put his faith in the reason and logic of the great philosophers, not in the One he could not see or touch.  There was no faith, hope, and charity in his home after his mother died, only silence.

I felt a kinship to C.S.’s estrangement from his father because of my hard relationship with my father after my mother died.  And like the Lewis family, the happiness left our family at her death, but at least, my father didn’t place me in a private school far away from him and then hire a private tutor for me at the age of sixteen before I enlisted in the army.  Unlike C.S.’s confirmation and first communion, I was surrounded by loving friends when I cried out for my mother’s love, making this event easier for me.  I have never considered myself to be a coward, a hypocrite, or a blasphemer as C.S. believed himself to be as he fell into the hole of unbelief.

Actually, his private tutor was more of a father to him than  his own father because he encouraged C.S. to read and think and to always have evidence to support his comments.  C.S. readthe classics and the great philosophers and was intrigued by the occult which influenced his continual denial of his Christian roots.  When he accidentally picked up a book called, “Phantastes” written by George MacDonald, he started his journey of appreciation for humor, holiness, imagination, joy, and nature.  He was startled by a memory that surfaced in a dream where his brother made a small garden of beautiful trees and flowers on a piece of cardboard.  That memory impacted his search for joy, the whisper of which began as a little child and continued to his death.  What he was unprepared for were the horrible nightmares he had of the battlefield, but they did not prevent him from returning to Oxford University after the war.

After Oxford, he received a fellowship from Magdalen College where he pursued writing, reading, and arguing about the improbability of Christ’s existence in history.  He realized that in order for someone to be a believer, he had to totally commit himself to that higher absolute.  At the request of his friends who were also beginning their religious journeys, he began to read books that supported the realities of life and not just support of ideas.  He felt the “pull” of the “Spirit,” not of God, as he read the New Testament.  Once it became apparent that Christ had actually lived, that “Spirit” became personal and he heard Christ speak to him with the words, “I am the Lord…I am that I am…I am.”  Just before WWII began in 1939, C.S. finally believed that “God was God,” that who he had feared all through his youth had finally captured his heart.  However, he still called himself a believer in Christ but was not a true Christian.

Although he didn’t like church architecture, singing and saying hymns and prayers, and the church’s rigid organization, he found his way back to his home church and the college’s chapel.  Perhaps we should credit his friends for influencing his quest to understand Christianity because C.S. started a study of the history of many diverse religions around the world.  To that end, he found that from early pagan Celtic mysticism sprung the rites of Christianity, that Christ had actually died on the cross, and that the moral teachings of Christ were based on wisdom and truth.  By accepting the incarnation of God becoming man through Christ, C.S. finally realized his belief in Christ was his search for joy, and that he could only find joy by desiring eternity given by Jesus Christ.  By following Christ, he became a Christian.

What I found fascinating about C.S. Lewis is that his journey of disbelief to belief is one that many of us have experienced, particularly with a world that is so caught up in secularism rather than religion, in trying to “one-up” each other or each nation rather than working together to achieve our goals, in arguing rather than hearing and compromising, in ignorance rather than wisdom, in hate rather than love.  Sharing with each other is what we are here on earth to do.  We can either help each other to eternity or we can help each other to darkness.  There are no ordinary people; we are all exceptional according to the talents given to us by God.  We are all mortal, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, ethnicity, culture or civilization.  One day, even our culture will become part of the sands of time.  We need to see caring for others as our responsibility, not a chore that could break our backs.  Only through the humble acts of each individual will we become like Christ.  One day, Christ will return, and I hope He will say to all of us, “Well done, Thy good and faithful servants.”

(Biographical notes are from “The Most Reluctant Co: the Untold Story of C.S. Lewis”)

Anna Hartt