I'm a C.S. Lewis Evangelist
04/30/06
By Paul R. Miller (Parm)
All right, I'll admit it: I'm a C.S. Lewis evangelist.
First there was that remarkable experience of discovering Narnia...in my imagination one snowy night. Next, my imaginative fires were stoked further by my sixth-grade teacher's readings of Screwtape Letters, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but back in the days when we could read such things in class without causing, er... problems.
From there, it was not long before I took off from Out of the Silent Planet, walked on Perelandra and understood That Hideous Strength. To make matters worse, I fell into a crowd of Lewis-philes in graduate school, and I was fully saturated with the "gode spelle" (good words, Gospel) that was Lewis.
Certainly, some of my images of the man took a tumble when I read more about him and his jaw-dropping foibles. Even so, I loved to tell The Great Story by eagerly and unabashedly promoting Lewis whenever I could. As a result, I have taken excursions through the worlds of Latin and Greek, come to appreciate the difficult gold that is mined out of medieval literature, and submitted my Sunday School faith to the rigors of Mere Christianity University.
I, too, have tasted the heart-wrenching pain of loss: my mother's death in 1999, that was preceded by dementia. She did not know, from time to time, who I was, after returning from a five-year stint in Japan to meet her and share my family with her. I gained a great measure of comfort from Lewis' A Grief Observed while I stood back and looked at my own grief. I have invested in a copies of the book to pass on to those who need to meet another fellow struggler, and not feel so alone, nor misunderstood.
So what does this mean for anyone else? It means that if you are the kind of soul who is not merely content with the curriculum, of fill-in-the-oval, or connect-the-dots, or choosing a, b, c or d, then the mentally bracing challenges of Lewis are for you, and the rewards? Exhilarating!
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