Unlikely Converts

Surprised by Joy provides a beautiful recounting of C.S. Lewis's faith development from childhood to his adult conversion. Although every testimony is unique, the similarities between Lewis's story and my own cause one to see how the Lord mysteriously works in each of our lives, opening our eyes to the beauty of His sacrifice for us all. Lewis and I have unique and distinct life stories. We are immediately different in the sense that he is a man, and I am a woman. Lewis was a prominent, towering Englishman who grew up financially comfortable and an Oxford-educated rhetorician. In contrast, I am a petite American woman constrained to a wheelchair who grew up penniless, but to which adversity has developed an open-handed humility and deep empathy for others. My only regret is that Lewis and I did not get the opportunity to meet for weekly chats over tea so that, in some sense, I could say that I knew by first account all that plagued him and the resolution to that pain. Due to the restraints that my birth came twenty years after his death, I must do the best I can by what he has shared with us in his autobiography. Despite our differences, Lewis and I have one glorifying similarity: our lives have been transformed by Christ, to which scripture tells us if we have this in common, we have everything in common.[1] This essay will explore how Lewis and I share striking similarities in our faith development, from childhood losses to becoming the least likely converts to Christianity.

            In Lewis' autobiography, we gain insight into profound grief and pessimism that appear to be plaguing Lewis since childhood.

"With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis."[2]

The weight of such a statement gives insight into a person who appears to be marked deeply by loss; happiness, peace, and security have vanished. The world changes from a place to belong into now a lonely vast sea to which islands of joy and pleasure feel like a pilgrimage in search of a home that no longer exists. When I came across this passage, a great sinking came into my chest, a familiarity that one wishes they did not share with another but at the same time thankful that such a loss could be so beautifully captured with such a poetic description. When my grandfather passed, I was nine, the same age as Lewis at his mother's death. Similarly, the great continent of the King family fell to the bottom of the sea, and the survivors, my family, wriggled in the foaming sea above it, treading to keep water. However, most ended up drowning in the sea of their despair. Like Lewis, the loss did not happen unexpectedly but through a season of devastating moments of terror and preparatory mourning.

"There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. That was because she was ill too;…my father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before...For us boys, the real bereavement happened before our mother died. We lost her gradually as she was gradually withdrawn from our life into the hands of nurses and delirium and morphia." [3]

Similarly, a searing memory in my mind is the night before my grandfather passed. Almost thirty years later, I can still feel myself crossing the door threshold into my grandparent's room, the lamp nearest to the door and next to the bed providing the only light into the room. Huddled on the side of the bed, furthest from the door, next to a small window facing the front of the house, my grandfather beckoned that I come to him. I knew that he was very ill and fragile. I had watched over the past few months his dark thick brown hair transform into a disheveled grey whisp that looked as though he had been struck by lightning or perhaps seen the face of God. It had seemed like overnight that he had turned into but a shadow of the man he once was. He moved slowly, and an oxygen tank came with him, terrifying me as I watched him crumble before my eyes, and I became hesitant to engage with him. But that night, although small and tucked into his bed, he did not seem afraid but very at peace and eager to speak with me. He summoned me to his bedside, and as I slowly crept forward, I began to feel at peace; even in his weakened state, he was smiling, which quickly put me at ease. He said only one sentence. "You are so beautiful." As a nine-year-old girl, I had no idea of the importance of this moment. However, afterward, I remember walking into my grandparent's wood-paneled living room, feeling peaceful, with his words seared into my mind to this very day. It was the last time I would ever speak with him, and the pain of his death was seared onto my soul.

Lewis's loss affected not only him but also his father, to which he states, "never fully recovered from this loss." Neither did my parents. My grandfather's death was the catalyst for an unhealthy spiral into utter destruction for both of my parents. Their only accountability was to my grandfather, and as he left this earth, all moral standards became a moot point. As they faced their own mortality, they both ran inwards, depriving us of our parents and creating such a parental void that only the hand of God could deliver us. As Lewis so beautifully paints, for us both, "our whole existence changed into something alien and menacing. Strange smells. Midnight noises and sinister whispered conversations".[4]

In reflecting on the loss of Lewis' mother, his unanswered prayers for her healing or resurrection, and the lack of emotional support from his father, it should be no surprise that these events only compounded his naturally pessimistic worldview.[5] Similarly, I can remember my pessimism and cynicism sewn in childhood. Lewis and I both were confronted and plagued with the issues of a deep awareness of pain and evil coming in at a very early age. After such, we could only see God as either impotent or cruel with how He worked things. [6] With a deep sense of loss, we began the significant decline into a pessimism that clouded our way forward into atheism.[7]

Lewis tells us that he was "living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world."[8] As I read this passage, it resonated. I had believed that good things are taken from you. All the adults around me were miserable, so there did not seem much to look forward to in life. I was sure God was a mystical talisman made up in the mind of the weak, and I was puzzled why people would pray so often to a God who never answered them. Perhaps I thought it was easier to pray than do anything themselves. I would come home to a house with no adults, no electricity, and bare pantries. What cruel God would inflict such a punishment on children? Inside, I was angry at God for putting me in these circumstances.

Lewis's resolution to his atheism was that instead of being angry at God for his pain, he began to understand the futility of leading his own life, unsatisfied by the temporary joys he would encounter.[9] He was faced with three undeniable realities: that God existed, that he needed saving, and that the kindness of God's gift on the cross was a joy he could have never imagined.

"Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

Looking back at my years before conversion, I was a young person solely focused on building mudpies. I was constantly running after the temporary joys, but they were fleeting; my foolish heart would deny that God could only satisfy the inner aching and inconsolable longing.[10] Like Lewis, my heart was full of deep-seated hatred of authority, monstrous individualism, and lawlessness.[11] The barbed wire fence and guard built around the soul was to keep out those around us and keep a meddling God from interfering with us.[11] As Lewis so perfectly states,

"I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out.., I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back—drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling...[and] there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a hareem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion. For all I knew, the total rejection of what I called Joy might be one of the demands, might be the very first demand. Now, the demand was simply 'All.'"[12]

 I was afraid that if I answered the All, I would have to give up everything I longed after. But what I longed for wasn't working. The more I chased joy, the more miserable I felt, and eventually, I gave up. I began to see my sins, and I was disgusted, embarrassed by the ignorance and foolishness I had previously paraded around. I could see it now, and I could not unsee it. Like Lewis in the Trinity Term of 1929, "I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all" the world.[13] I have been comforted over the last twelve years as I have come to know my Savior more by the day. As Lewis says so well, the great delight in salvation is finding that "the hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.[14]

Sources

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955, Kindle.

Root, Jerry. C. S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2009.

The Most Reluctant Convert, directed by Norman Stone, screenplay by Norman Stone, original stage play by Max McClean (Fellowship for Performing Arts, 2021), CSLewisMovie.com (2022).

The Magic Never Ends: The Life and Work of C.S. Lewis, produced by Chip Duncan, written by Chip Duncan (Crouse Entertainment Group & The Duncan Group, 2006), Amazon Prime (2022).

[1] Acts 2:44

[2] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), 22, Kindle.

[3] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), 20, Kindle.

[4] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 20.

[5] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 22.

[6] Lyle Dorsett, PhD, Lewis Scholar, Professor, Wheaton College  (6:15)

[7] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 78.

[8] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 140.

[9] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 209.

[10] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 86.

[11] Ibid, 211.

[12] Ibid, 276.

[13] Ibid, 279.

[14] Ibid, 280.