C.S. Lewis: The Most Reluctant Convert
Blog by M. James Sawyer |
This afternoon Kay and I went to see the one-man show “C.S. Lewis, The Most Reluctant Convert.” I have of course been a Lewis fan since I was introduced to Lewis when I was in High School and delved deeply into his writings in college. Over the years I have read numerous biographies of Lewis—each from a different perspective, gleaning much from each one, and have even taught a seminary level course on his theology. And over the years I have grown to appreciate Lewis more and more. I appreciate his brilliance, his scholarship, his creativity as well as his honesty in sharing his own personal spiritual journey.
Now imagine sitting down and over the course of about seventy minutes having Lewis himself distill his spiritual journey from the intellectual atheism of his youth to his most reluctant conversion to the faith that he had dismissed as a teenager—that was the experience. And it was powerful. At several points I heard soft sobbing throughout the theater as Lewis’ words struck home to various audience members.
Max McLean the Founder & Artistic Directory for the Fellowship for the Performing Arts stepped into the character of Lewis. He is so convincing that anyone not familiar with Lewis from photographs would swear that it was Lewis himself that appeared on stage to tell his own story. The play is set in 1950, before he published his first Narnia book and before he met Joy Davidman Gresham–his future wife.
To set the background a bit more: in 1950 Lewis received a letter from a young American writer, Sheldon Vaunauken, who communicated his own struggle with Christianity because it sounded “too good to be true.” Rather than attack the question head on Lewis answered, “My own position at the threshold of Christianity was exactly the opposite of yours. You wish it were true; I strongly hoped it was not…Do you think people like Stalin, Hitler, Haldane, Stapledon (a corking good writer, by the way) would be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters…that there was nothing even in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they could say to Him, ‘Keep out! Private. This is my business’? Do you? Rats…Their first reaction would be (as mine was) rage and terror.”1
Lewis is so well loved today as a writer of Christian fiction as well as apologetics that we forget that today were he an articulate brilliant young man in his 20’s he would likely be one of the “New Atheists” keeping company with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and the rest of the crew. At this point in his life Lewis’ worldview was materialism which manifested itself as atheism, determinism, naturalism and reductionism. All causes to all events are to be rooted in an unbroken chain of cause and effect that can be traced to the “Big Bang.”
The play is the story of Lewis’ unlikely but dramatic conversion to Christianity. This came in no small part through interaction with several of his Oxford colleagues who were Christians themselves—this includes J.R.R. Tolkien and one atheistic acquaintance of whom Lewis said, “the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”2
The power of the play is that a vast majority of the monologue, I would estimate more than 90%, is drawn verbatim from his written work including Surprised by Joy, his collected letters, The Problem of Pain, The Weight of Glory, Mere Christianity, God in the Dock, Christian Reflections, and supplemented through insights from those who knew him as well as from his various biographers.
The Play: “C.S. Lewis The Most Reluctant Convert” is appearing shortly in Los Angeles, then in Chicago and finally in New York. If you have a chance to see it—by all means do not miss the opportunity!