For the better part of my Christian walk C. S. Lewis has had both a direct and indirect impact on my life. I will never forget the demonology course I took in high school under the stern tutelage of Father Aquinas. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters was one of the required texts. I was fascinated by Lewis’ famous concept of “the law of Undulation” and the famous quote,

Has no one ever told you about the Law of Undulation?  Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal…. This means that while their spirits can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters [New York, NY: Macmillan, 1943], 37).

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I celebrate C.S. Lewis! Yes, I have read several of his books, but I celebrate something else about my connection with him. In 1998 my husband and I traveled to Oxford and Cambridge for the centennial of his birth at the “Loose in the Fire” C.S. Lewis Summer Institute sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We spent the first week at Oxford University and the second week at Cambridge University.

Our days were filled with lectures on various aspects of Lewis’ life, times, and work. The speakers list included many well-known scholars and practitioners who took on the challenge of the theme “to live as faithfully in our time as Lewis did in his, risking everything, if need be in pursuit of the God, the True, and the Beautiful” (J. Stanley Mattson).

As I think of C.S. Lewis, quotes from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Weight of Glory immediately spring to my mind. These I share with you.

The following three quotes speak of the tension we are invited to live in as Christians but often fail to do so, namely, the tension between the twin realities of God’s transcendence (God beyond us – wholly other) and God’s immanence (God with us). Lewis communicates a God who inspires knee wobbling fear (reverence, awe-fullness), whose ways are not our ways (wild) but who is good (loving, wise, gracious, merciful) and even playful (God as friend).

C.S. Lewis was a great scholar of medieval literature but also a man of the twentieth century. The twentieth century was filled with great good in the midst of great evil, and the culture Lewis inhabited needed wise interpreters and reminders of the grand scale of reality envisioned by Christian faith. In that century of war and self-sacrifice, C.S. Lewis gave his era a picture of the great themes – good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, ransom and forfeiture, selfishness and selflessness.

My favorite C.S. Lewis’ books are his space trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

In them, the protagonist, a man by the name of Ransom, has a wound that he received in another world. It incapacitates him in this world and cannot be healed on this planet. This idea has always intrigued me. It seems to be very much in line with sound teaching on confessing our sins to another person or even with the 12-Steps of the AA movement. When a wound has occurred, either to me or by me, I must return to the source to find healing. Sometimes that feels like going to another planet!

“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” 
— C.S. Lewis (The Silver Chair (Chronicles of Narnia, #6))

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the nature of reality. Not in a deep, theoretical, theological way, as one would chew on an interesting idea or penetrating insight. With the birth of my first grandchild and my first niece, the question of what the world that we live in is really like has pressed into me as I held each warm, small body in my arms, impossible to avoid, full of heft and cry and urgency.

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There’s a compelling story that Adele Ahlberg Calhoun tells in her Spiritual Disciplines Handbook about an entire French village that risked their lives during World War II extending hospitality by welcoming and sheltering Jews. When a local pastor was asked why the village responded in this way, he replied, “I could not bear to be separated from Jesus.” Indeed, that is the essence of hospitality, a virtue that reflects the belief that when we welcome others we welcome Jesus.  

She came to me a stranger, veiled by a shroud of shame. Shoulders hunched, voice a whisper, eyes but fleetingly raised.

Desperation bid her tell a story barely whispered through the years. I held her pain, and asked for grace to tread upon this holy ground with skill beyond my own.

I don’t particularly promote myself as having the gift of hospitality. Although I am aware, that as believers in Jesus Christ I am expected to live hospitably. I am growing to see that hospitality and the experience of the stranger can arise in any place. My daughter and I had a rare opportunity to visit a lakeside retreat facility as the guest of a friend. It is one of those that offer in-suite kitchens so that you can prepare your meals should you choose. We decided to head to the nearest food store one of those big box kinds.