LIFE brings us many surprises, and not every surprise brings us joy. In all the beauty of life, we encounter breakdowns, small or big crises that challenge our views and the image we have of ourselves. We can rebuild our lives, but we are forever changed. That happened in the life of one of my favourite authors, C. S. Lewis. Lewis was born in Belfast on 29th November 1898 and baptised exactly two months later by his maternal grandfather, Rev. Thomas Hamilton, in St. Mark’s Dundela, a beautiful Church of Ireland church in East Belfast. The rectory of the church had a lion on the doorknob, perhaps an early inspiration for the figure of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia. Now we know C. S. Lewis as one of the greatest Christian writers and apologists of the 20th century, but faith did not come to him easily. When he was nine, his mother fell ill and died of cancer and the young boy’s life was shattered. The tragedy impacted him so drastically that in his childhood grieving he deserted Christianity and embraced atheism. It would take more than twenty years before he returned to the faith of his childhood. Surprised by Joy and by GodIn Surprised by Joy, he describes his early atheistic life and his journey towards God. The journey started with a search for the joy he once experienced – a moment in 1922 as he walked through Oxford, where he had lived since 1917. “I walked through Iffley, crossed the lock, and went along the meadows. Became wonderfully happy for a short time. A boisterous windy day”.1It was not easy for a convinced atheist to accept the call of God, which presented itself first as a supernatural reality, before he accepted Christianity as such. Gradually, the truths he used to deny began to seem trustworthy. His conversion to theism took place in 1929 when he was 31, but it did not come all at once. As Brian Sibley later wrote:Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Jack was becoming a different person – or, rather, was becoming a real person: “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 – drip and presently trickle – trickle. I rather disliked the feeling . . .” Eventually Jack came to the conclusion that God existed, and that “total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even ‘All or nothing’ . . . the demand was simply ‘All’.”2 His friends knew him as ‘Jack’, the name he took in childhood after his dog Jacksie died. The melting of snow would later be echoed in The Chronicles of Narnia; and there is another earlier entry from his diary about the melting snow that perhaps relates also to the ‘melting’ of his heart some years later, On 3rd April 1922 he noted that “it snowed hard all day”; and the next day: “I walked into Oxford . . . Remembering yesterday, I sat out in a coat and suffered from heat – the day turning out sunny and beautiful – all the more so for the drifts of snow lying under the hedges”.3 In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the children in Narnia also sat out in coats in the snow, but when spring arrived unexpectedly, they were too warm “when they saw winter vanishing and the whole wood passing in a few hours or so from January to May”.4 Perhaps Lewis’s conversion was like a coming of spring. This transition from atheism to faith in 1929 was a monumental step for him. By surrendering to the ‘All’ of God, he accepted new beliefs, and a new understanding of life came into his world. His conversion to Christianity in 1931 was largely influenced by his close friends, in particular the Catholic Oxford academic, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson, an Anglican. C. S. Lewis would often have long intellectual conversations with them in and around Magdalen, where he was a Fellow. In one of those conversations, as they took a stroll round the Addison Walk, a breathtakingly beautiful pathway round the Magdalen College meadow, Tolkien challenged Lewis to rethink his view of Jesus and Christianity – a challenge that led to his acceptance that Christ was who He said He was, although his conversion was gradual and to some extent reluctant. We can look at his gradual conversion as a part of his mid-life transition. It had a huge impact on his later years. In this transition, as Gerald O’Collins pointed out, people mostly “suffer a loss of orientation.”5 Until then, they knew where they were going and did not question their roles in society. “Their social identity appeared happily established, but now they leave their ‘normal’ roles to face and accept unexpected challenges.” Letting go of established roles is never easy; we tend to perceive the future through the framework of what we do. Yet there comes a time when the security our roles provide starts to seem too narrow, and to some extent fake. However, it seems to me that C. S. Lewis first encountered a more positive aspect of mid-life. As a respectable scholar and a deeply thinking person, he was surprised by joy. More so, he was surprised by feelings in general. In fact, two kinds of joy brought unexpected gifts into his life.Without his initial conversion – first to a theistic worldview and then to Christianity as described in his “Surprised by Joy”6, Lewis’ encounter with the woman who would later become his wife, serendipitously named Joy, would not have been so remarkable. The surprise of Joy DavidmanIn January 1950 C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman Gresham, an American journalist and a fan of Lewis’ writing, began a regular correspondence.7 Joy was also a convert from atheism to Christianity who had...
