Surprised Into Joyful Reason

In the twentieth century there lived a man who taught a doubting age that you could think your way to the edge of faith, and still be surprised by joy when you arrived. His name was Clive Staples Lewis, born in Belfast in 1898, and for much of his life he was sure that God did not exist. He had buried his mother as a boy. He had marched through the mud of the First World War and seen friends die beside him. He had read everything, argued everything, and decided that the universe was cold and silent. And yet, all his life, something kept ambushing him. A stab of longing he could not name. A sweetness that came and went. He called it Joy, and it pointed somewhere he refused to go.

Here is the strange thing about his conversion. It did not arrive in a single blinding flash. It came slowly, like a man being followed home down a long road. The books he loved kept being written by Christians. The friends he admired most kept believing the very thing he denied. And one of those friends was a quiet Oxford don named J. R. R. Tolkien.

Picture a September night in 1931. Three men walking the wooded paths of Oxford, late, the air mild, the talk turning to myth and meaning. Lewis loved the old stories of dying and rising gods. He found them beautiful. He also called them lies breathed through silver. Tolkien turned to him with a different thought. What if one of those stories was true? What if the dying god who rose again had actually happened, in a real place, under a real sky, in history? The myth made fact. The longing made flesh.

Lewis went away and could not shake it. Days later he climbed into the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, bound for the zoo at Whipsnade. As he set out, by his own account, he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. By the time he arrived, he did. No argument had been spoken on the journey. No debate had been won. Something had simply settled, the way light settles over a field at dawn. The reluctant convert, as he called himself, had finally stopped running.

What that quiet surrender produced reached far beyond one man. When the Second World War fell across Britain, the BBC asked Lewis to speak. And so, while bombs fell and families huddled by their wirelesses, a steady Oxford voice came over the airwaves explaining the Christian faith in plain words. He did not speak down to frightened people. He made hard things clear. Those broadcasts became the book the world now knows as Mere Christianity. Later came the lion Aslan, and a wardrobe, and a land called Narnia, where children felt courage and sacrifice and joy before they could ever define them.

Lewis never claimed to be a saint or an apostle. He was a layman who had once been an atheist, a scholar of old books who knew the cold of unbelief from the inside. That was precisely his gift. He had walked the long road himself, and so he could walk it with others, patiently, honestly, without pretending the questions were foolish. He showed a sceptical century that reason need not be the enemy of wonder, that the mind and the heart could kneel together.

He had spent his youth chasing a joy that ordinary things could never satisfy, certain it led nowhere. In the end he understood that the longing itself had been a signpost all along, pointing past every pleasure to the One who made it. He had been looking for joy. What he found was its source.