I’m bingeing movies about CS Lewis tonight…….
The Most Reluctant Convert
The Life and Faith of CS Lewis
Shadowlands
Surprised By Joy
I had read some of his works but
I had not known how profoundly his Mother’s death when he was nine, having had earnest child’s prayers for her healing unanswered, had led him to a staunch denial of God’s existence. Years later he began to doubt his own assumption of the absence of God as his intellectual peers made challenging rational arguments for God and his own brief fascination with occultism tapped into his imagination and led him to understand the power behind myth lies in the fact that, at some historical point that was known and documented, God becoming man had actually happened.
It reminded me of a part of my own spiritual journey, growing up in a Christ-believing and church- attending family, taking the reality of God for granted, at a point as a young adult when God didn’t respond to my rebellion and anger as I expected, I questioned whether He actually existed and, if He did, did I even know Him?
Young CS Lewis did not want to accept the truth of God’s existence and Christ as God’s Incarnation. He rallied all his intellectual capacity to argue with others against God until his arguments failed him and he found himself surrendered to the God he couldn’t deny.
I, on the other hand, blithely believed in the religious stories that some called myths, with no real understanding of the significance to me personally of the Personhood and atoning work of Christ and, when my doubts came, I began testing the myths I’d heard and read, eventually finding the Truth revealed that I feared might have been a lie.
Lewis and I began with opposing assumptions, his eventually shaken by the opposition of peers, mine shaken by my own questioning that stirred internal fears. And we both landed at the same Trinitarian view of God and a desire for others to know what God had revealed through His Spirit present to us, with us, for us,
in us…..
Every time I have the opportunity to hear or read the witness of others, I am amazed at God’s ability to meet us where we are, shake the ground on which we stand, and lead us by His love and grace to places we could never have imagined without Him.