CS Lewis: Waking up to the Father’s Love

Previously published in the Feb 2020 Light Magazine article

By Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

Have you or your parents ever treated education as more important than family? CS (Jack) Lewis and his father Albert were like ships passing in the night, not knowing how to connect.  Being very close to his calm, cheerful mother, her sudden death from cancer left ten-year old Lewis feeling like the mythical Atlantis was sinking.  Jack’s mother Flora Hamilton, who tutored him in Latin and French, was brilliant, earning an honors degree in mathematics at Queens University in Belfast.  Her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been Anglican (Church of Ireland) clergy, the latter being a bishop. As a child, Jack shared his mother’s strong faith.  It was like God had died with his mother’s tragic death.

Jack’s secure Irish childhood dissolved into a nightmare of six years of painful residential school living in England.  He later commented that English accents at the boarding school sounded to his childhood ears like some strange demonic chatter. Both Jack and his older brother Warren were traumatized by a brutal schoolmaster at their first boarding school Wynard in Watford. Jack called Wynard “Belsen” after the Nazi concentration camp.  A few months before Jack’s death in 1963, he stated that after fifty years of struggling, he had finally forgiven the headmaster Capron who had so damaged his earliest boyhood. In a letter to a young person, Lewis wrote “I was in three schools (all boarding schools) of which two were very horrid.  I never hated anything so much, not even the front-line trenches in World War I.  Indeed, the story is far too horrid to tell anyone of your age.”  Jack’s second residential school Malvern was rife with bullying and sexual abuse. After Jack threatened to shoot himself, his dad relocated him to Great Bookham, Surrey, to be taught by a private tutor William Kirkpatrick who had trained for the ordained ministry in Ireland. Kirkpatrick, as an ardent atheist, was portrayed in Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength as MacPhee, a humourless, freethinking Ulsterman.

His father Albert was so swallowed in grief and self-pity that he pushed his two sons away physically and emotionally. Being afraid of his father as a child, CS Lewis described his dad as a man with “a bad temper, very sensible, nice when not in a bad temper.” His father’s emotional ups and downs taught Jack a distrust of emotions that would stay with him throughout his life.  He called his father’s family “true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, rhetorical” people who moved quickly from laughter to wrath to tenderness, but with no gift for steady contentment.  His father, who dreamed of becoming an MP, instead served as a prosecuting solicitor in the Belfast police court.  Swallowed by his work, Jack’s father was sometimes cold, remote, distracted, and morose.  He had a tendency to cross-examine his sons as if they were on trial.  Jack learned to pretend, avoid and lie to his dad to keep him happy.  His father, said Jack, “could never empty, or silence, his own mind to make room for an alien thought.” His dad’s life was so orderly one could set a clock by his schedule.  When away from his job, he became fidgety and bored, eager to return to his legal responsibilities. Jack was so alienated from his father that he missed how much he was like his dad.  With swift imaginative minds and resounding voices, they both could persuasively make intricate arguments.  Jack and his dad shared a delightful sense of humour.  Albert’s sons claimed that their dad was the best storyteller in the world as he loved to act out the character parts. 

His father was very strong on regular church attendance as the right thing to do, but never explained to his sons why.  Religion was very private. On Sunday Dec 6th 1914, Jack a confirmed atheist was confirmed in the Church of Ireland in order to avoid a fight with his dad, “one of the worse acts of his life”.  Jack later commented, “Cowardice drove me into hypocrisy and hypocrisy into blasphemy.” At age seventeen, C.S. Lewis explained bluntly to a Christian friend he’d known since childhood, “I believe in no religion.  There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint, Christianity is not even the best.” One of his prep school friends described Jack as a “riotously amusing atheist.” As a teenager, he resented God for not existing, and for creating such a flawed world.  Just after World War I, Lewis, a wounded veteran, boasted that during his time in the trenches, he “never sank so low as to pray.” To a friend about the same time, he said “You take too many things for granted.  You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!” 

After ending up in hospital on April 15th 1918 from WWI shrapnel injuries, Lewis wrote his father Albert, saying “I know that you will come and see me…(I was) “never before so eager to cling to every bit of our old home life and see you…Please God, I shall do better in the future.  Come and see me.” His dad however stayed in Ireland, refusing to change his busy work schedule.  In October 1918, after successive requests for his father to visit him in hospital, CS Lewis wrote his dad saying “It is four months now since I returned from France, and my friends laughingly say that ‘my father in Ireland’ is a mythical creation.” The father wound and resulting emotional cutoff became ever deeper.

While teaching at Oxford, Jack kept running into Christians, like JRR Tolkien, who persuaded him that Christianity is a true myth, a real story grounded in history.  Jack’s atheist background helped him reach out to spiritual seekers through books and BBC radio. His voice became the most widely recognized in Britain after that of Winston Churchill. His books, which still sell six million copies a year, led him to become one of the most influential voices in contemporary Christianity.  The late Chuck Colson, converted by Lewis’ book Mere Christianity, contended that Lewis is ‘a true prophet for our post-modern age.’ As one of the few Christians read extensively by non-christians, he became known as the Apostle to the skeptics. 

Was it a mere coincidence that CS Lewis turned to God in the very summer of his father’s death?  In August 1929, Lewis went to Belfast to visit his seriously ill father, bringing significant family reconciliation.  Lewis said that his dad was taking his cancer surgery ‘like a hero.’ After his dad’s death, Lewis commented, “As times goes on, the thing that emerges is that, whatever else he was, he was a terrific personality…how he filled a room.  How hard it was to realize that physically he was not a big man.” Lewis deeply regretted how insensitively he had treated his dad.  How might CS Lewis’ restoration to his father’s love inspire us to deeper family reconciliation in 2020?
Click to view the first article in a three-part series on CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

-co-authors of the new novel Blue Sky

CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien: the Power of a Difficult Friendship - HIRD

By the Rev.  Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

-an article previously published in the January 2020 Light Magazine

Have you ever had a difficult colleague who profoundly impacted your life?  C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien, two of the most famous and versatile English writers, had that kind of bond.  The companionship between Lewis and the man he called “Tollers” inspired the chapter on friendship (philea) in Lewis’ book The Four Loves.

For much of his life, Lewis, the son of a solicitor and of an Anglican clergyman’s daughter, was a convinced atheist. Lewis encountered Tolkien at a 1926 faculty meeting. In his diary, Lewis wrote about Tolkien as "a smooth, pale fluent little chap—no harm in him: only needs a smack or so." They had much in common, as both had been traumatized by the premature death of their mothers and by the horrors of trench warfare in World War I.

At age 10, Lewis saw his mother dying of cancer.  “With my mother’s death”, said Lewis, “all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.” Tolkien experienced the double loss of both his father at age 3 and his mother at age 12. His strong desire for friendship/fellowship, as with Frodo, Sam, Merry & Pippin, came from Tolkien’s loss of his three best friends in the trenches.  Referring to trench warfare, CS Lewis commented: “Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still.” Lewis vividly remembered “the frights, the cold,…  the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day  and night until they seemed to grow to your feet…”

About four years into their friendship, Lewis and Tolkien formed an ‘Inklings’ group, meeting in the Rabbit Room of the Eagle and Child pub.  Lewis’ brother Warren said that at the Inklings, “the fun would be riotous with Jack at the top of his form and enjoying every minute…an outpouring of wit, nonsense, whimsy, dialectical swordplay, and pungent judgement such as I have rarely heard equaled…”

Both CS Lewis and Tolkien loved the history of the English language, especially as expressed in the ancient tales like Beowulf. CS Lewis commented: “When I began teaching for the English Faculty, I made two  other friends, both Christians (those queer people seemed to pop up on  every side) who were later to give me much help in getting over the last  stile/steps. They were HVD Dyson and JRR Tolkien. Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices…” Lewis said to Tolkien that tales or myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver’. ‘No’, said Tolkien, ‘they are not lies’. Tolkien went on to explain to Lewis that in Jesus Christ, the ancient stories or myths of a dying and rising God entered history and became fact. Twelve days later, Lewis wrote to another friend Arthur Greeves: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it”.

CS Lewis recalls going by motorcycle with his brother Warren to Whipsnade Zoo, about thirty miles east of Oxford. “When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did”. In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, Lewis commented: “In the Trinity term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God…perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”.

When Lewis turned to Christ, he was surprised to find the skies bluer and the grass greener.  “Today”, Lewis wrote, “I got such a sudden intense feeling of delight that it sort of stopped me in my walk and spun me round. Indeed, the sweetness was so great, and seemed so to affect the whole body as well as the mind, that it gave me pause.”

In their Inklings group, they vigorously critiqued each other’s unpublished manuscripts like Narnia Tales and Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote in a letter "The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not 'influence' as it is ordinarily understood but sheer encouragement.  He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my 'stuff' could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more, I should never have brought The Lord of the Rings to a conclusion." In October 1933, Tolkien wrote in his diary that friendship with Lewis ‘besides giving constant pleasure and comfort, has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of our Lord’.   

When Tolkien first shared his ‘Lord of the Rings’ manuscript at the Inklings group, CS Lewis said: ‘This book is a lightning from a clear sky. Not content to create his own story, he creates with an almost insolent prodigality the whole world in which it is to move; with its own theology, myths, geography, history, paleography, languages and order of beings.’ Without the Inklings fellowship of Tolkien and Lewis, neither the Narnia Tales nor the Lord of the Rings might have ever seen the light of day. In a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin, Lewis wrote "I would willingly do all in my power to secure for Tolkien's great book the recognition it deserves."

While Lewis loved Lord of the Rings, Tolkien disliked the Narnia Tales.  He called Lewis’ writing creaking, stiff-jointed, and unoriginal. Tolkien, who took seventeen years rewriting Lord of The Rings, resented the ease at which Lewis kept producing new books.  Tolkien, being very private, resented fellow Inklngs Charles Williams’ intrusion into their friendship.  Lewis’ marriage to a divorced American Joy Davidman also strained their relationship.  On October 27th 1949, no one turned up for the final Inklings meeting.

Shortly before his death, C.S. Lewis wrote to his estranged friend J.R.R. Tolkien: “All my philosophy of history hangs upon a sentence of your own, ‘Deeds were done which were not wholly in vain,’ ” Four days after Lewis's death on Nov 22nd 1963,  Tolkien wrote to his daughter Priscilla "So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age—like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: This feels like an axe-blow near the roots.  Very sad that we should have been so separated in the last years; but our time of close communion endured in memory for both of us."

I thank God for the complicated friendship of two literary firestarters.

Rev Dr Ed & Janice Hird

Co-authors of the novel Blue Sky

Default Atheists?--Kathleen Gibson

Ever since creation, two corresponding questions have risen, set, and risen again. Like the sun and moon, they loom large on the horizon of human thought. “Who is God?” and “Who am I?”

The Bible records that God created man(kind) in his own image. History shows that man immediately began creating God in his, and that along the way, he killed the God-man, Jesus Christ.

After peering at the God of the Bible through his academic telescope, author Richard Dawkins answers the first question this way: God is a work of fiction.

“The God of the Old Testament,” he says, “is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Well, isn’t that a lovely bunch of coconuts? Dawkins, whom the media sometimes refers to as the “world’s most influential atheist,” authored the recent book “The God Delusion,” from which that quote is taken.

Mr. Dawkins, it seems to me, has his telescope upside down. “The Heavens are telling the glory of God,” I read this morning in Psalm 18 (an Old Testament reference, by the way). Those words confirmed what I saw in the crimson sunset last evening.

But here’s more, also gleaned from the Old Testament, in Isaiah, chapters 25 and 26: God is: “zealous for his people, the doer of marvelous things, perfect faithfulness, a refuge for the poor and needy, a shelter from the storm, a shade from the heat, the perfect peace-giver, maker of salvation, the Rock eternal, the way-smoother, the establisher of peace, the nation enlarger, the glory-gainer, border extender, the preparer of delicious food.”

God doesn’t need the likes of me to defend him, and he’s likely laughing at Mr. Dawkins’ list. According to the Old Testament, his justice also brings down pride and cleverness. His is the power to discipline nations and peoples; to remove the disgrace of those he loves, to swallow up death forever, and to wipe away all tears.

A high percentage of Westerners declare a belief in God, but given that the litmus test of any belief lies in a willingness to act on it, I suspect the true delusion regarding God lies in another area—atheism by default.

Like Dawkin’s outspoken atheism, default atheism has affected our world a long time. 20th century author Russian Fedor Dostoevsky once made a sober observation about the West. He believed we were in trouble—not because of the God we worship, but because of the God we ignore.

“The West has lost Christ and that is why it is dying; that is the only reason.” Dostoevsky, and many other genuine followers of God before and since, knew the truth: If you wish to kill God—you will also kill mankind. Because without God, there is no life, and no freedom.

Whichever position you take—consider it carefully.

Among other places, author, newspaper columnist and broadcaster Kathleen Gibson ponders faith and life in Sunny Side Up.


 

Christopher Hitchens: Attempting the good death without God - Denyse O'Leary

In "Christopher Hitchens: A humanist at heart" (Washington Post , October 15, 2010), Michael Gerson offers some thoughts on celebrated atheist author Christopher Hitchens's disdain for "deathbed conversions," despite his serious illness and recent bad news. Gerson comments,

... Christopher Hitchens is weaker on the personal and ethical challenge presented by atheism: Of course we can be good without God, but why the hell bother? If there are no moral lines except the ones we draw ourselves, why not draw and redraw them in places most favorable to our interests? Hitchens parries these concerns instead of answering them: Since all moral rules have exceptions and complications, he said, all moral choices are relative. Peter Hitchens responded, effectively, that any journey becomes difficult when a compass points differently at different times.

The best answer that Christopher Hitchens can offer to this ethical objection is himself. He is a sort of living refutation -- an atheist who is also a moralist. His politics are defined by a hatred of bullies, whether Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein or the mullahs in Iran. His affections are reserved for underdogs, from the Kurds to Salman Rushdie. The dreams of totalitarians are his nightmares -- what W.H. Auden described as: "A million eyes, a million boots in line/Without expression, waiting for a sign." Even Hitchens's opposition to God seems less a theological argument than a revolt against celestial tyranny.

All this fire and bleeding passion would seem to require a moral law, even a holy law. But Hitchens produces outrage, empathy and solidarity without it.

We constantly hear from atheists that one can be good without God. The problem is, the atheist has set the goal posts for being "good" himself. Anyone can score in that situation. Hitchen's passion is easily bested by the passion (for slaughtering millions) of fellow atheists like Josef Stalin. Maybe (well, definitely) I like Hitchens better than Stalin, but that establishes nothing. I also like sushi better than ice cream. So?

If God did nothing else for the moral law, the fact that he is something other and higher than ourselves privileges his view. One could say the same thing of the Eastern ideas of karma or the cosmic mind. In other words, the things you cannot escape just by rebelling or not happening to like them.

It is good to want justice, as Hitchens does, but it is God (or karma) that fill in the idea. One sometimes wonders if "new atheists" like Hitchens don't believe in life after death because they realize that no one can be his own judge.

Here, the celebrated atheist author talks to Sally Quinn (from On Faith) about how he copes with his diagnosis of esophageal cancer (a week long series). It begins, "It's a strange thing having a malady like this, because you feel that you must, at the same time, make preparations to die and to live."

Gerson cautiously comments,

At the Pew Forum, Hitchens was asked a mischievous question: What positive lesson have you learned from Christianity? He replied, with great earnestness: the transience and ephemeral nature of power and all things human. But some things may last longer than he imagines, including examples of courage, loyalty and moral conviction.

See also:

The New Atheists are really God's prophets?

All roads end, but usually at another road

Why we must make sure the Darwinists lose (a rather deplorable take on deathbed conversions)

Is There a God? - Meyer

Recently, a popular Christian radio host (http://www.thedrewmarshallshow.com/) posed the question: “How do you know there is a God?”
It was suggested that if God is real, then he would personally contact us in such a way that we would know unmistakably that it was God speaking to us. It was further suggested that He would converse with us in a voice that our ears could hear or in written words that our eyes could see – but again, with a personal message just for us.

Well, actually, it has happened before in human history but not very often.
And what has been our reaction as human beings?
1. Disbelief – in the Bible in the book of John, chapter 12 and verses 28 and 29, there is an account of some people who heard a voice from heaven speaking. Their reaction – they said it was thunder.
2. Worshipping the messenger instead of the God who sent the message – when Paul the Apostle healed a man at Lystra who had been crippled all his life, the people began to worship Paul saying: “The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.”
3. Making the place the message was received into a place of worship – When Peter was up on the mountain and Elijah and Moses appeared and began talking with Jesus, Peter right away wanted to build three tabernacles (places of worship) on that site.
When we look down through history and around the world at special things (miracles) God has done, going against the laws of nature that he has put in place, our human reaction has invariably been one of these three.

So, what would happen if God, wanting to convince a person named Sarah that He loved her, wrote a big message in the clouds: “Dear Sarah, I love you very much. From God.”
What would be the human reaction?
1. Disbelief – most people (including Sarah perhaps) would believe it was some kind of hoax.
2. Worshipping the messenger or person to whom the message was given. Can you imagine the books that would be written about Sarah and her wonderful experience? And the talk shows? Can you imagine Sarah’s inbox or her Facebook account?
3. Making the place the message was received into a place of worship. The area over which the clouds had appeared would be considered a sacred and most blessed land – a destination for pilgrimages for many years to come.

Well, maybe something quieter then. How about a hand coming out of nowhere and carving a message on a tabletop in Sarah’s house, right before her very eyes?
What would be the result of this?
1. Disbelief – Sarah would quite likely question her sanity. Others would question her sanity if she told them what had happened.
2. Worshipping the message, messenger or person who received the message. If people did become convinced that God had actually written a message on the table, that table would be put under glass and put in a church somewhere. People would come from around the world to touch the table (or the glass surrounding it), hoping to have their prayers answered, hoping for miracles, etc.
3. Making the place the message was received into a place of worship. Sarah’s home and her family and perhaps even her city and her country would be deemed sacred. Again, the pilgrimages would begin.

So, maybe if God wrote to all of us everyday on rocks or tables or clouds, then it wouldn’t be so special and we would just get used to getting our daily messages from Him. Yeah, I think we can all see the problem with that. The skies would be so full of cloud messages, we’d never see the sun and all of our tabletops would be ruined. And if God wrote to us in more traditional ways (like email), what would happen if we accidently deleted a message from Him – would that be like the unforgiveable sin? What if our computers crashed? Would he call us on the phone instead?

So, before this blog post gets too crazy, let’s just back up a bit. God is God. If He wants to communicate with us, He can devise a way that is not dependant on cloud cover, Bell Telephone, your local Internet provider (which is very unreliable where I live) or… tabletops. God could, and has, devised a way to speak to us that works even if we are in the dark or in the middle of an ocean and even if we are deaf or blind or incapacitated in some other way. God can use this to speak to us in any language, dialect and accent (yep, it’s true!). God speaks in such a personal way that often we are at a loss to explain the “conversation” to others.

What is this “device”? Well, actually, there isn’t a device. It is a direct communication with God himself, one that bypasses our ears, eyes and other senses, and goes directly to our spirits. As it says in the Bible in the eighth chapter of Romans and the sixteenth verse: “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.”
There are many other verses about the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38, Romans 8:16, Luke 12:12, John 14:17, 26, 1 John 2:27, John 16:13, etc.) but don’t expect to understand everything all at once. For starters, it will be difficult to wrap your mind around the fact that God exists in three Persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus) and God the Holy Spirit. That’s why the Holy Spirit could descend on top of Jesus in the form of a dove while a voice from Heaven said, “This is my beloved Son.”
The reason we can’t wrap our minds around God and who He is and how He speaks to us is, quite simply, weren’t not God. We’re just itty bitty humans. I don’t know how God, the Holy Spirit, can be speaking into my heart while at the very same time, He is watching over the universe, keeping track of sparrows (Matthew 10:29) and the number of hairs on my head! (Matthew 10:30) AND speaking into the hearts of thousands or perhaps millions of others all over the world. But there’s a whole bunch of other things I can’t understand either. Did you ever try to think what is beyond infinity or what comes after eternity?
At least, I have the assurance that someday, I will understand everything. The Bible says (in 1 Corinthians 13:12) that “now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
Beautiful words and reassuring words. Someday we will understand everything… All the pieces will fall into place. All our questions will be answered.
But for now, today, in this very moment, we have the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who speaks to our hearts, reassuring us that there is a God and that He loves us so much that we are privileged to call Him, Abba (Daddy), Father. (Galatians 4:6)

Dorene Meyer
http://www.dorenemeyer.com/

Author of The Little Ones and Jasmine
Now in book stores across Canada
Distributed by Word Alive Press http://www.wordalivepress.ca/.
Available online and as ebook on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/ (key in title of book and publisher: Word Alive Press).