The graciousness of a great man

C.S. Lewis once said that an atheist couldn’t be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere, according to George Herbert — ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises; fine nets and stratagems’.

At the age of eight I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist, but God had certainly mapped out a strategy to call me to himself through my reading. The oldest in a rowdy family of five children, I sought solitude in books as soon as I could read. We lived in an outer borough of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a bit too rural at that time to warrant a public library, though we did rate a weekly visit from the bookmobile.

A bookmobile is just what it sounds like: mobile books. A bus had been converted into a small, rolling library (painted forest green, if I remember correctly) and it made the circuit of communities like ours, arriving once a week to give access to books from the great Carnegie Library in the centre of town. The books were frequently rotated, and you could request a book one week and receive it the next, if you had a title or an author you were looking for.

Fantasy and adventure

I gravitated to the fairytale, fantasy, and adventure section of the shelves as soon as I discovered them. Howard Pyle’s stories of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Robin Hood; The Iliad and The Odyssey; E. Nesbit, Edward Eage and, in time, Lewis.

I don’t have any memory of my first reading of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, but it must have struck me as being particularly good, as I do remember asking the librarian/bookmobile driver if she could find me a book I’d read once ‘with a lion and a witch in it’. To her everlasting honour, the next week there it was, waiting for me. My mother’s counsel to ‘remember the author of a book you like and look for others by the same person’ might be the only time I took her advice with such alacrity: I began a quest to find more books written by C.S. Lewis, whoever he was.

Although all the Chronicles of Narnia had been written before I read the first one (in 1958), they were very slow to cross the Atlantic, as were his other books, and, indeed, his reputation. For a very long while I thought I might be the only person in America who had heard of C.S. Lewis. Checking the card catalogues of the Carnegie and other libraries usually only brought up a disappointing reference to Sinclair Lewis. Bookstores rarely had anything by him, although I still remember the serendipity of walking past a remaindered table in Kaufman’s department store and finding a copy of Mere Christianity just lying there. Of course, I snatched it up, and have it to this day, dog-eared and ragged.

Writing to Lewis

As a result of my searching, I encountered Lewis’s more well known adult works at an inappropriately young age, though that didn’t stop me reading Screwtape and Mere Christianity well before I had turned 14. Around about that age it occurred to me that Mr. Lewis might like to hear from me since apparently so few other people had ever heard of him. I thought he might need the encouragement — the egocentrism of a child!

I duly wrote him a tedious and childish letter, which thankfully has not survived, telling him all my daily doings and how much I liked his books. He wrote me back a ‘Dear Reader’ sort of letter, telling me that he was thankful for my kind words, had turned 64 yesterday, and that he was glad I liked his books, signed, ‘Yours sincerely, C.S. Lewis’. The letter travelled surface mail with two three-penny stamps of the young Elizabeth Regina on the envelope, and I delightedly taped both letter and envelope on the inside cover of my Lion.

Letters to children

We corresponded three or four more times (I think I’ve lost one of his letters, due to their insecure storage place inside my books). The four I have are now framed, tape marks, torn envelopes and all, just to the left of me as I write. If you get a copy of the book C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Children and turn to the back, I’m the last four written to ‘Kathy’. I had given copies (no, you can’t have the originals!) to the Wade collection when I was in seminary, and apparently someone had collated the letters he had written to children and published them. The first I knew of it was when I saw the book in a store.

That book was a revelation in another sense. How thoughtful were the letters other children had apparently written to Mr. Lewis, to elicit such long and similarly thoughtful replies. I blushed to remember that I only talked about myself, keeping house when my mother was in hospital, apologising for my poor grammar (and getting an odd reply that he was not the sort of ‘English teacher’ who is trying to put across the idea of what the English language should be, but interested in it as it was, rather like a gardener versus a botanist), moaning about the editor of my grammar school newspaper butchering a story (and getting the gracious reply that ‘us authors’ have to put up with such things, which had happened to him many a time).

It was many years later, and only during a study of his fuller correspondence while I was doing my college thesis (‘C.S. Lewis’s Mythopoeic View of Literature’) that I discovered what a sacrifice it was for Lewis to read, much less answer not only my, but every letter that he received. He believed it to be a near-sacred responsibility to answer his letters, though he loathed it passionately and even suffered physical pain from rheumatitus of the hand. He once said that his perfect world would include no postmen. Learning this I was humbled to think of my selfish and self-centred demands on his time, even while he was dying. Yet what an influence he had on me with his faithfulness in such a little thing!

Visit to England

In my last two letters to him I enthusiastically wrote of my coming visit to England over my 14th birthday, as a child-minder for my British neighbour Eileen Pearce. I planned (without consulting him in the slightest, as I recall) a visit to Oxford to meet him. I now know that he almost died in July 1963, but beyond mentioning having to use a wheelchair he did not refer to it in his letter of October 29, only encouraging me to save for my ‘holiday’ in England because it was the best sort of holiday one could have. His last letter, written only 11 days before his death, was cordial and encouraging as always.

Since Lewis died on the same day as John F. Kennedy was assassinated, no mention of it reached me until February. I was distraught to read an article attributed to the ‘late’ C.S. Lewis in the Saturday Evening Post. Late? How could I have not known? By now Lewis was to me something between my own personal secret possession and a household saint. Something had been going on between that first reading of Lion and the intervening years: I was coming to know Aslan in my own country, as indeed Lewis had said I must (at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

As unlikely as it seemed, the vibrant, loving, not-a-tame-Lion Aslan was apparently known as Jesus in my world, though at first this thought was one I rejected as ridiculous. How could the boring figure of my Sunday school lessons be the same as the romping Aslan, whom I loved with all my heart? The day I found Mere Christianity on that discount table I had been shopping with my aunt and was spending the night with her in the city. I stayed up until nearly dawn in the ground floor bedroom, reading it straight through. Though I’m sure I didn’t understand a great deal of what I read (it was a revelation to re-read Lewis year after year, finding new things each time, because I was older; just like Aslan being bigger each time Lucy saw him because she was older, not because he was), nevertheless some things began to fall in place.

God ups the intensity

Later, after I had returned from my trip to England (complete with a visit to the Kilns as a birthday present from my hosts, where I met Jack’s brother Warnie and was treated to a tour of the house and the grounds — I can only imagine that touring Americans hadn’t become pests as yet!) God turned up the intensity of his pursuit of me. Truly, he whispers to us in our pleasures and shouts to us in our pain, and my beloved beagle, Pepper, became fatally ill with a degenerative disease, provoking me to try to really pray for the first time.

The only prayer I knew was the Lord’s Prayer, which I raced through at speed, in order to get to my weeping requests for the restoration of my dog’s health. Suddenly I got stuck, at the ‘thy will be done’ part. We all believe intuitively that if we yield to God’s will, sorrow and disaster will follow, rather than joy, and I was no different. Trust God to do his will with my dog? I might as well sign her death warrant. After what seemed an eternity of struggle, and for all I know was a moment of eternity, I surrendered, sure that I had lost my dog. Instead, I had found my life.

Daily companion

Since that time Lewis has been my daily companion. He alone navigated me through the cynicism and illogic of my college religion classes. His prose was a model for my own. When others began to write about him and form societies and have dinners and speakers and tours, I must admit to a pang of jealousy. Lewis was mine! (Had I been older, I have often thought, I would have given Helen Joy Davidman Gresham a run for her money!) But the truth is, Lewis is not mine. He is a shining gift of God for many ages. A gracious man, and a man of grace.

The graciousness of a great man

How C.S. Lewis helped Kathy Keller to find Christ

Fantasy and adventure

Writing to Lewis

Letters to children

Visit to England

God ups the intensity

Daily companion

Kathy Keller

Main Articles

Other articles