I grew up in the shadow of John F. Kennedy's murder, and in the long period of national mourning that followed. Something about the stark tragedy of his death captured my young imagination, and by the time I was eight, I was obsessed with him. I read books, starting with a beginning readers biography that was one of my prized possessions, and culminating in Robert Donavan's record of his wartime exploits, "PT-109." During my youth, I collected things like memorial records, a small white bust of the fallen president that melted the first time I tried to clean it, and a collector's plate showing John and Jackie. I also built the Revell model kit of PT-109 at least three times before I reached 18.
Early in my youth, one of my favorite things to do was to read through a Pittsburgh newspaper that had been published within one or two days of the tragedy, and which my parents had wisely kept as a memento. I don't remember which newspaper (I think it was the
Post-Gazette) and don't recall the publication date, but it became almost like a holy relic to me — handling the frail pages, and reading the stories written within hours of the tragedy, became as close as I could get to going back in time to that day. As befitting a priceless relic, it was kept safe in a metal safe deposit box, and I had to ask permission to read it. That not only made it more special, it makes the times I did read from its pages that much more memorable.
I read all of the paper, including advertisements, and stories that had nothing to do with the assassination. I remember that one of these stories was a brief item about an author named C.S. Lewis, who lived in England, and who had died the same day as JFK. I honestly don't remember anything else about the article, but that name jumped out at me then, and stayed with me for years. From that time on, I noticed Lewis' name as if it were written in red ink, even though I continued to have no clue about who he was, what he'd written, or why he was important. I simply saw and recognized the name each and every time I saw it.
After we moved to Tennessee, I was given a whole attic room to myself, amongst several long shelves full of paperback books (heaven!). One of the titles I remembered was a playbook titled "Dear Wormwood," which was, the cover promised, a play based upon
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Later, I found a copy of this same book, with my oldest sister's name written in the front cover. I filed this information in my head to go along with the name I'd been carrying around, but took no further action on it until I reached college.
Now, I had grown up as a somewhat conflicted young man when it came to spiritual things. I believed in God, but had no real concept of Jesus, and had a growing dislike of some of his followers. By the time I'd reached college, this had mushroomed into an active dislike of organized religion. What I loved was music, including the band Rush. A frequently-used piece of Rush iconography was the star of the Solar Federation from the
2112 album, which many erroneously thought was a satanic pentagram. A few, no doubt well-meaning, young believers had noticed this logo about my person (I had it on at least one T-shirt that I wore constantly, as well as a three-by-four-foot wall hanging in my room). One or two (although it seems more than that today) made it plain that my fascination with bands like Rush and their ilk would lead me straight to hell, and they proceeded to shun and disdain me.
Back then, attacking the bands I loved was a far more grievous offense than attacking me personally, although it amounted to the same thing. But if these believers were trying to convert me with this fire-and-brimstone ultimatum, they were mistaken; there was no question whom I would side with. And while it hurt to find myself on the outside looking in, the wounded pride of the small boy inside me led me to embrace to the role I had been placed in.
I began to find organized Christianity more and more ridiculous, and to think of Christians as a great, unenviable
Them — either delusional, or willfully hypocritical, or both. What I learned later — that there are millions of believers who are neither of these things — had not yet been made clear to me.
But even as I was growing more hostile to religion, there was a small, tiny part of me that wanted it be true. I have always, from boyhood, believed in God, even if I could not believe some of the things that were said about Him (or, if you like, Her — I simply follow the habits of my upbringing). I would have loved for Christianity to be true, but as I understood it, it simply didn't make any sense. There were simply too many doubts, and too much illogic.
Happily, about this time, I met my future wife, who saved me in a hundred splendid ways, not the least of which was my own warped and jaded take on the Divine. She was a Christian, and of a variety that I hadn't before encountered. And while she wasn't perfect, even to my completely smitten eyes, the faith she practiced began to win me over.
Instead of making her judgmental and hostile, her beliefs tended to make her generous and loving. She nearly always gave people the benefit of the doubt, and was quick to come to someone's defense. She was forgiving of others, at a time when I scarcely knew what that word meant. And, best of all, her beliefs were reasoned — she knew why she believed what she did, and could argue the point; a far cry from the "God said it, I believe it, end of story" theology I was expecting.
Finally, and most importantly, she had a real relationship with God. He wasn't some abstract concept, and He wasn't some malevolent all-seeing headmaster, waiting for a chance to punish her. She loved Him, and trusted Him. The God she worshiped seemed real, and not at all the Great Boogeyman in the Sky that others had warned me not to run afoul of.
In short, she, and a few friends, helped to unlock a door. The writings of C.S. Lewis would soon push it open the rest of the way.
Somehow, as a newly-married man, that copy of
The Screwtape Letters that had belonged to my sister had found its way onto the headboard of my bed. Today, I'm not sure why I'd brought it from my parent's home. I think it was the nagging, lifelong sense that there was something important about the name C.S. Lewis. It may have also come from a sense of simple curiosity — I'd heard about
Screwtape all my life, and I may have just wanted to see what the fuss was about. In any case, I took it down to read it, with absolutely no clue that my life was about to change forever. As Lewis himself said of himself in
Surprised by Joy, "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."
Today, I have little memory of that first read. I remember liking the author's self-effacing tone at once. He mentions the brisk sales of the book in preface's second paragraph, the counters in the third with this:
"Of course, sales do not often mean what authors hope. If you gauge the amount of Bible reading in England by the number of Bibles sold, you would go far astray. Sales of The Screwtape Letters, in their own little way, suffer from a similar ambiguity. It is the sort of book that gets given to godchildren, the sort that gets read aloud at retreats. It is even, as I have noticed with a chastened smile, the sort that gravitates towards spare bedrooms, there to live a life of undisturbed tranquility in company with The Road Mender, John Inglesant and The Life of the Bee."
In the book itself, I found something I hadn't expected. Lewis tackled many of the usual Christian themes, but focused through the lens of "the other side," who were working at to turn the main character away from Joy, and towards suffering. According to Lewis, Hell was not a place where people were hurled after failing to make one crucial decision; instead, it was reached after a lifetime of wrong decisions. People weren't hurled into to Hell by an angry God; they walked there, step by step, and locked themselves away, while resisting all His entreaties that they could be set free.
Lewis' assertion, born out in his later books, that the journey towards God began not with large gestures, but with small, steady, and sometimes event shaky and hesitant steps, slowly won me over. I was still wary of other believers, and could still be wounded by them. But, to my amused chagrin, I was slowly becoming one of them. Every time I opened a new book by Lewis, or re-read a much-loved older one, I was nudged closer and closer to what his character Screwtape called "The Enemy's Camp."
As I read more and more of his books, I quickly grew to love the man holding the pen. Particularly in his apologetics, Lewis' personality beamed from the pages. He was fiercely intelligent, vastly educated, keenly insightful, and yet possessed a warm, wry and often self-effacing humor. He seemed to shy away from criticizing others for their shortcomings, but was quick to hold up his own failings so that others could learn from them. And he was quick to confess his ignorance of a topic, and begged you throw away his arguments if they did not help his readers to understand. And through it all, his writings were cloaked in warmth and love, not judgement and condemnation. Best of all, he found a way to make Christianity make sense to me that no one has ever has, or, I think, ever will.
Lewis became much more than a writer to me; he became a friend, and a teacher. This man who I had never met helped to guide me through the mine field of my past, and helped me to discover a faith that I cannot now imagine being without. Once I found out that he had abandoned his given name — Clive Staples Lewis — around the age of two, and insisted on being called "Jack" (the same name as the family dog), I, too, began to call him Jack. I know it is presumptuous of me, and could even be seen as disrespectful. But I have come to love him so much through his writings that to call him Lewis seems cold and distant (for some reason, I have made an exception for this writing).
As I write this, we have reached the very day that, fifty years ago, saw the deaths of both C.S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy (who was, ironically, also known as Jack by friends and family). As I think of Kennedy's death today, I am gripped by grief, sadness, and a sense of injustice, as I have always been.
But I am much more moved by my remembrance of Lewis, who has grown from a few terse paragraphs on a newspaper page into an imagined friend, and a very real teacher (albeit one separated from me by time and space). He is for me, just as he once described George MacDonald, my master — the teacher that helps to shine a light onto the universe, and into yourself.
So much of the story today is about Kennedy's death, and rightly so — his foul murder began a pollution of our national psyche that continues to this day. It was, in a lot of ways, our first national loss of innocence. There would be more: Vietnam, Watergate, John Lennon,
Challenger,
Columbia, and 9/11. But JFK's murder was the first, and perhaps, the deepest.
But when I think of Lewis, today, I think of life. I think of what he brought to the world, and the countless people that he helped — myself among them — by merely trying to explain and convincingly argue his faith. As an Oxford Don, he had no need to do this, and indeed, some saw it as an interference with his "real" work. But he seemed to be compelled to, as he explained in the preface to
Mere Christianity.
"I am not trying to convert anyone to my own position. Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times...That part of the line where I thought I could serve best was also the part that seemed to be thinnest. And to it I naturally went."
Today, on the 50th anniversary of his death, I, and millions like me, are eternally grateful that he did.
