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GOD'S QUARRY JRR Tolkien, not yet the creator of hobbits, started teaching at Oxford at the same time as CS Lewis. Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, and was one of a circle of Christian friends who surrounded Lewis. |
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Left: CS Lewis in 1919, when he was 21 years old. Used by permission of The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. |
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Jack felt they shared so much in common with him – a love of old literature, the romantic, heroic, fantastic, mythical, and a distaste for modernism – except that they inexplicably believed in God. He felt the same with literature. So much of what he loved was spoilt by the fact that its author was a Christian. He hated the idea that the universe was not a wild wasteland, but the artificial contraption of a creator. He hated the idea that there was a Great Controller who wanted to interfere with his life. But he could not escape the fact that he seemed more and more to be encountering that Controller. "You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet... In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." But which God? Lewis had not accepted Christianity yet, just the existence of "Him". Finally, in 1931, Tolkien and friends persuaded him that the pagan myths they all loved about dying gods and the like were God's way of preparing the world for "the true myth", when in Jesus, God really did die and rise from the dead. "I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." Next: God's smuggler – click here! |
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