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.
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
