C.S. Lewis’ life is a lesson in the 3 things we most need

I have been re-reading  C.S. Lewis’ conversion story, where he describes the close friendships, openness to challenging ideas, and deep reading that led him to God.

In other words it shows how critical our community, our faith, and our scholarship are to a Christian life.

Before he tells the tale of his conversion, Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, describes how he lost his faith. 

Though he had strong relationships with his father and brother, C.S. Lewis’ childhood seems to have been spent mostly alone. In elementary school, “Jack,” as he was called, used his solitude well, inventing an imaginary kingdom of animals.

But in his boarding school days, Lewis describes a dark system of peer-to-peer power control that allowed older boys to abuse younger ones shamefully in a formalized way. With no supportive community, his faith naturally weakened.

When he was 9, young “Jack’s” mother died of cancer, even though he had prayed for her recovery, with all the faith he could, believing that God had promised he would answer such prayers. To make matters worse, he began to develop the belief that his prayer was only real when he felt a special consolation.

Nobody taught him what he says he learned only later: God is a Savior and judge, not a “magician” who prevents tragedy — and not a stimulant that delivers jolts of dopamine on cue.

As his misunderstandings about God hurt his faith, his schoolteachers did very little to address them. He went to several British schools for boys where “the accepted positions seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true,” he wrote. “But on what grounds could I believe in this exception?”

He had already stopped believing in God when he got a new tutor: W.T. Kirkpatrick, who taught him to be a rigorous thinker — and reinforced his atheism.

When Lewis was 16, he met his first friend, Arthur Greeves, after discovering they were both fascinated with Norse myths.

The two didn’t just find that both considered the same book their favorite, but “that we liked not only the same thing, but the same parts of it and in the same way,” he said. “I had been so far from thinking such a friend possible that I had never even longed for one.”

This first friend would be a lifelong friend, one who would receive Lewis’ letters about what happened 10 years later.

At Oxford University, James Frazer’s book The Golden Bough was all the rage. It said the Christian story was just another version of other cultures’ myths of gods dying and rising like plant life.

Lewis bought its conclusion as so many did. But then, he said, “The hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good.”

The atheist said: “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”

C.S. Lewis said that hearing this from this man was “shattering” to his worldview.

In a letter to Arthur, Lewis described a late-night conversation he had with his intellectual friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. 

He realized that the story of Christ wasn’t an imitation of pagan myths or agricultural cycles — but, rather, that the God who created all things through Christ had imprinted this story onto all peoples, and that his fundamental story showed up in their stories, and in the fabric of nature itself, because it was the story of what really happened once, in Christ.

Thus, it took all three of Lewis’ passions — for friends, for myth, and for study — to convert him.

To have a thriving Christian life, we each need: Friends who support us, openness to God’s voice, and a robust understanding of the intellectual basis of our beliefs.