C. S. Lewis

(Image from NPR-UK)

Many English-speaking Christians in the quest to understand their faith eventually find their way to the writings of C.S. Lewis, best known as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series. Lewis is also a widely read Christian apologist (an apologist is someone who defends a philosophical doctrine, not someone asking forgiveness), penning dozens of essays and allegorical works that attempt to elucidate Christianity.

His ruminations concerning the nature of man, sin, and morality might seem a little circumlocutious in the age of Twitter but are well worth a read for those who wish to advocate their faith with more than pithy slogans and bon mots.

C.S. Lewis is distinguished in another way; like millions of young men he experienced the horrors of World War I, yet he was among the few who turned toward faith instead of succumbing to disillusionment and anomie.

It was a terrible war, the most brutal and destructive conflict the world had ever seen...On average, roughly 6,000 men were killed every day of the war. Before it was over, 9.5 million soldiers lay dead, millions more wounded. About half of the British soldiers fighting in France became a casualty of some sort. Lewis lost most of his closest friends in the final year of the conflict.

Yet the war and its aftermath seem to have stirred Lewis’s spiritual longings. On a train ride to a London hospital to recover from his wounds, he was seized by a sense of the transcendent as he beheld the natural beauty of the English countryside.

After an esteemed career of teaching at Oxford and Cambridge he died a week shy of his 65th birthday on November 22, 1963, his death completely overshadowed by JFK's assassination. C.S. Lewis, who said that what we deem important in this life is really unimportant---and vice versa---would have appreciated the irony.