A Date We Remember

A Date We Remember

Who died on November 22, 1963?

MANY WILL correctly answer, “President John F. Kennedy.”

But also on that day another person died who was mightier in God’s kingdom than President Kennedy. His name was C. S. Lewis.

His initials, “C. S.,” stood for Clive Staples, but to his friends he was “Jack.” Born near Belfast, Ireland, in 1898, he was raised as an Anglican. But at the age of ten his world was shaken when his mother died of cancer. Jack wanted nothing to do with a God so cruel as to take his mother. By his early teenage years he had become an atheist.

Jack graduated from Oxford University, where he studied philosophy and English literature. Oxford became his home for the rest of his life. He served the first thirty years of his academic career as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. From there he went to the newly created chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. While at Cambridge, he commuted back to Oxford on the weekends.

Jack’s spiritual pilgrimage back to God began in 1926 with a conversation with another fellow of Magdalen College. Lewis was surprised to learn that his tough-minded, cynical friend believed in the Trinity. This revelation challenged Lewis’s atheistic presuppositions.

His next step was a memorable bus trip he took on a spring day in 1929. Riding along, Jack pondered the various philosophers he had read. Taking Hegel’s idea of the absolute and combining it with Berkeley’s concept of Spirit, he conceived of a being he could call “God.” He didn’t know anything about this God, but when he got off the bus, he knew he believed something he hadn’t before—that an absolute Spirit or God existed.

Some months later he began to formulate a mental vision of Absolute Spirit, conceiving of it as someone who said, “I am the Lord.” Jack finally had to admit that God was God, and for the first time in years he prayed.

The next step in his spiritual pilgrimage came on a September evening spent with two friends, J. R. R. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, and H. V. Dyson, an Anglican. As the three intellectuals discussed the authenticity and significance of Christian doctrines, Jack became more and more convinced that the events of the Bible had really happened.

But it was two years later, in 1931, that the real turning point came. On this particular afternoon Jack and his brother rode a motorcycle forty miles to visit the Whipsnade Zoo. Following them by car were three friends and a dog named Mr. Papworth. The Lewis brothers got there first, with time to relax with bottles of beer before their friends arrived. When the car pulled in, they all shared a picnic together before going into the zoo. Since dogs weren’t allowed in the zoo, Jack stayed behind to babysit Mr. Papworth.

As Jack was relaxing in the park, feeling a pleasant tiredness from the long motorcycle ride, he realized that sometime during the previous few hours he had come to an important conclusion. He knew that when he had left for Whipsnade he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but somehow when he arrived, he believed! Without consciously thinking about it, he had passed from merely believing in God to trusting in him as his Savior.

In 1941 Lewis burst on the literary scene with The Screwtape Letters. Books then began to flow from his pen at an amazing rate, one or more a year. Titles such as Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, A Grief Observed, and The Chronicles of Narnia have been used by God to change the lives of people of all ages around the world.

C. S. Lewis is considered the most influential Christian author of the twentieth century—quite a leap from the atheism of his youth.

Reflection

The conversion of C. S. Lewis was certainly unusual. What is your explanation of what happened to him on the way to the zoo? His story is a graphic example of how God uses different means to bring different people to himself. Where are you in your spiritual pilgrimage?

Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.

John 3:8