Spiritual Reflection, November 2022

Uncompromising Love
of the Word

It has been a season of loss, death, and illness in my circles. One of the writers to whom I return in such times is C.S. Lewis. Lewis had suffered the death of his mother from cancer as a child, and the loss of close friends during the war. As a young atheist, he had raged against a tyrannical god: “Come let us curse our Master ere we die, / For all our hopes in endless ruin lie. / The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.”

When Lewis, aged thirty, gave in and admitted that God was God, it was not so much because God was a fool-proof answer to the problem of evil, as because He alone made it possible for us to experience evil as evil at all. Only by believing in the reality of God’s goodness and love are we able to see death and estrangement as being at odds with a truth whose promise sustains us even as we realistically confront the condition of our world. Without faith, they would be the only reality we know; how could we even think of them as wrong?

His probing mind gave Lewis a certain unorthodox boldness as a person, too. After fifty years as an Oxford bachelor, he married a Jewish woman, Joy Davidman – an ex-communist poet with two sons who had found her own way to Jesus. When she fell ill with cancer, he quietly accepted the consequences: “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket, it will change into something unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.” This uncompromising love of the world requires faith in a God who will remake it; and I am grateful for Lewis’s and Joy’s example.

Judith Wolfe