No single author has had a more profound impact on my life than C.S. Lewis. Having spent so many hours in his books, I have a tendancy to think of him as a friend, despite the fact that he died three years before I was born. He has challenged and provoked me. He has arrested and delighted me. He has shown me horrifying things about myself, yet made me believe I have great value. Some of the sweetest hours my children and I have passed have been curled up on the porch reading his Chronicles of Narnia. He has stimulated my intellect, enriched my imagination, and fed my soul.
Several years ago I read a book by Professor Louis Markos called Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World. In it, Markos uses the writings of Lewis to address a number of the issues confronting us as postmoderns and to postulate what Lewis might have had to say today. It is an intriguing and compelling book.
I have spent parts of the past two days inhaling a series of twelve lectures Professor Markos produced for The Teaching Company called The Life and Writings of C.S. Lewis. Today, I will listen to them again.
The lectures provide a potent distillation of Lewis' thought and a marvelous romp through much of his library. I can not say how this would impact one who does not yet know Lewis, though it seems to me it would be an irresistable invitation to delve into his books. But, as one who has read all but one of the works mentioned, many of them multiple times, I found myself revisiting old friends. He had only to mention the characters of a novel and I was immediately transported to Narnia, or Perelandra, or the Wood between the Worlds. I could smell them, I could taste them, I could feel the air and hear the sounds. Sometimes I laughed and sometimes I groaned as we revisited familiar events. Many of the truths Markos found in the books were known to me. But, occasionally, he unveiled to me an insight that had been hidden. This was wonderful. But it was just as wonderful to be reminded of that which I had learned, but perhaps forgotten for a time. Or, to encounter the truths in a new place and find that today, they speak to situations I could have never anticipated when I read them last.
Markos offers a brief introduction to Lewis' biography in the first lecture to provide context, but by in large he allows the works themselves to speak for the man. Lectures one through six explore several of the nonfiction and theological works like Surpised by Joy, Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Miracles, The Problem of Pain, and The Great Divorce. In lectures seven through eleven Markos discusses Lewis' marvelous novels: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, and Til We Have Faces. He closes the series with a look at the agonizing and vulnerable, yet gloriously triumphant work A Grief Observed. Here I wept anew for Lewis and for all of us who have lost. And, I felt deep gratitude that God gave Lewis words for this and so many other experiences that we will walk in this life, so that we need never walk them alone.
And once again, your words are unwrapping a bitter, but oh-so-rich-and-decadent chocolate that I just have to bite into ; )
Posted by: nina coyle | 16 July 2009 at 12:44 PM