Today, November 29th, is C. S. Lewis’ birthday, an event I celebrate every year by reading or rereading one of Lewis’ books. This year, I’m digging into Yours, Jack, a collection of his letters, which focus on “Spiritual Direction” (according to the book’s subtitle).
I have read so much by and about Lewis that I keep thinking I’ll get to the point where nothing surprises me or seems new. That hasn’t happened yet. Here are three items that I especially appreciate about “Jack,” prompted by things I’ve read this past week.
First, I’ve always found delight in the way Lewis uses analogies or illustrations to make his point. He was a poet at heart and couldn’t stay away from comparing one thing to another so his readers could grasp important truths in deeper ways. Even in private letters, he offered analogies that both clarified and stung. In a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, he wrote:
“…I said that your besetting sin was Indolence and mine Pride…You at your worst are an instrument unstrung: I am an instrument strung but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician.” (page 12).
Second, Lewis brought to his evangelism and apologetics a fresh memory of his own conversion experience in his thirties. Hence, he could identify and sympathize with thoughtful outsiders who started from a vantage point of skepticism. We need that approach desperately in our outreach today. It requires honesty and realism for how we think about the process of moving from darkness to light as well as compassion for people when they challenge our assumptions.
In another letter, Lewis recounted, “My own experience in reading the Gospels was at one stage even more depressing than yours. Everyone told me that I should find there a figure whom I couldn’t help loving. Well, I could! They told me I would find moral perfection—but one sees so very little of Him in ordinary situations that I couldn’t make much of that either. Indeed some of His behaviour seemed to me open to criticism, e.g. accepting an invitation to dine with a Pharisee and then loading him with torrents of abuse.
Now the truth is, I think that the sweetly-attractive-human-Jesus is a product of 19thcentury scepticism, produced by people who were ceasing to believe in His divinity but wanted to keep as much of Christianity as they could….The first real work of the Gospels on a fresh reader is, and ought to be, to raise very acutely the question, ‘Who—or What—is This?’ (page 67).
Third, I am helped tremendously by Lewis’ brutal honesty about his own sin. Reflecting further on his own struggles with pride, in another letter to Greeves, he confessed, “You have no idea how much of my time I spend just hating people whom I disagree with—though I know them only from their books—and inventing conversations in which I score off them.” (page 42).
I know someone who spends time in that fruitless way. He could benefit from continuing to read Lewis and follow his example of honest confession.
Thanks, Jack.
