A Shiver of Wonder Read online

  C. S. Lewis:

  A Shiver of Wonder

  © 2004 Derick Bingham

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  The publisher has acknowledged copyright holders for various quotes within this book. These quotations comply with the copyright principle of fair comment or fair usage.

  British spelling used throughout.

  ISBN 978-1-93230-732-0

  eISBN: 978-1-62020-662-1

  Published by the Ambassador Group

  Ambassador Emerald International

  427 Wade Hampton Blvd.

  Greenville, SC 29609

  USA

  www.ambassador-international.com

  and

  Ambassador Publications Ltd.

  Providence House

  Ardenlee Street

  Belfast BT6 8QJ

  Northern Ireland

  www.ambassador-international.com

  The colophon is a trademark of Ambassador

  For Peter McConkey, chef extraordinaire, who pointed me back to writing this book; and for Adrian Adger, who gently and faithfully prayed it through.

  Whether we were his pupils in the classroom or no, we are all his pupils, and we shall not look upon his like again.1

  DAME HELEN GARDNER,

  writing about C. S. Lewis

  I stand on the windy uplands among the hills of Down

  With all the world spread out beneath,

  Meadow and sea and town,

  And ploughlands on the far-off hills

  That glow with friendly brown.

  And ever across the rolling land to the far horizon line,

  Where the blue hills border the misty west,

  I see the white roads twine,

  The rare roads and the fair roads

  That call this heart of mine.

  I see them dip in the valleys and

  Vanish and rise and bend

  From shadowy dell to windswept fell,

  And still to the West they wend,

  And over the cold blue ridge at last

  To the great world’s uttermost end.

  And the call of the roads is upon me,

  A desire in my spirit has grown

  To wander forth in the highways,

  ’Twixt earth and sky alone,

  And seek for the lands no foot has trod

  And the seas no sail has known. . . .

  “The Roads,” taken from Spirits of Bondage, A Cycle of Lyrics, written by C. S. Lewis under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. The book was published by Heinneman in 1919, when Lewis was just twenty-one years of age, and reveals his early giftedness as a poet.

  These verses show C. S. Lewis’s deep and, as it turned out, lifelong love for County Down. He once described his idea of Heaven to his friend David Bleakley as “Oxford lifted and placed in the middle of the County Down”!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter One: The Lost Address

  Chapter Two: The Unbending Thumb

  Chapter Three: The Wackford Squeers of Watford

  Chapter Four: The Most Beautiful Woman He Ever Saw

  Chapter Five: A Careless Tongue

  Chapter Six: The Gates of His Seclusion

  Chapter Seven: No Calling Without a Caller

  Chapter Eight: Oxford in Mantling Snow

  Chapter Nine: If There Were No God, There Would Be No Atheists

  Chapter Ten: Heartbreak at the Heart of Things

  Chapter Eleven: On Finding You are Awake

  Chapter Twelve: Taking a Header

  Chapter Thirteen: Being Present in the Present

  Chapter Fourteen: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe?

  Chapter Fifteen: Strange and Solemn Perfume

  Chapter Sixteen: No Longer Faceless

  Chapter Seventeen: The Bridegroom and the Widower

  Chapter Eighteen: A Shiver of Wonder

  End Notes

  PREFACE

  THE OLDER GENTLEMAN APPROACHED ME quietly. He wore tweeds and, speaking gently, he asked me to lunch. He said his name was Bishop Arthur Goodwin-Hudson. As I had never had lunch with an Anglican Bishop before, I wondered what was coming. He had heard me speak on the Scriptures, and now he wanted to talk to me.

  When eventually we settled down to lunch together, his opening phrase intrigued me: “We have something in common,” he said, in a kindly way. I immediately perked up. “You and I are interested in ‘the man on the outside.’”2 It touched me that he had noticed, for, in truth, when communicating on Christian matters, I have tried to be mindful that my listeners or readers may not be familiar with what I am talking about.

  Picking up on Christ’s analogy that evangelism is like fishing, the Bishop told me that his “fishing boat” had been the Anglican Church. During the Second World War, when he was a much younger Anglican minister, he had approached the outstanding Christian industrialist and film producer J. Arthur Rank, who sat on the board of Odeon Cinemas. The Bishop asked him if he could have permission to bring a Christian message to the soldiers who attended the Sunday evening film at the Odeon Cinema in London. Rank said yes, but the manager of the cinema was much harder to persuade. He warned that the soldiers could give a minister a very rough time indeed. Eventually, however, Arthur managed to persuade the manager to let him speak. The first person to be converted to Christ was the cinema manager himself!

  My new acquaintance began to expand on the theme of the importance of reaching “the man on the outside,” the person who has little or no knowledge of the Christian faith. He told me that when he was in the United States he had heard what he called a “raw young preacher,” who wore loud ties, but who had something special. With the Bishop of Barking and others, he invited this dairy farmer’s son from North Carolina to Harringay Arena in London to preach the gospel. “The Christians tore him apart,” the Bishop said, looking me straight in the eye; “but the sinners loved him.” In fact, by the Saturday night of the first week, 11,400 people had filled the Harringay Arena to capacity, and 30,000 more were standing outside. Landline relays were set up, and 400,000 listeners received the audio signal from the services via the 400 lines that went out from Harringay.3

  In this year of writing, it is the fiftieth anniversary of that twelve-week Billy Graham London Crusade. A significant book could be written of the stories of people whose lives were changed by Christ at that pivotal time in the spiritual life of a nation.

  The Bishop then shared with me some of his experiences serving Christ in Chatham during the Second World War. His ministry was challenged in a unique way when he received an interesting request from an Ulsterman. Maybe it was his affinity with that Ulsterman that led him so generously to invite me to lunch that day in England twenty-three years ago; I would like to think so. Maybe the Bishop was kind to me because of his affection for that Ulsterman; the name of the Ulsterman was Clive Staples Lewis.

  In the winter of 1941, C. S. Lewis received an invitation from the RAF’s Commander-in-Chief, the Reverend Maurice Edwards’ to address the Royal Air Force. This invitation followed the incredible success of Lewis’s BBC wartime broadcasts. Lewis offered to conduct lectures during weekends.

  It was a year of many great crises across the nation and the world. In Britain, the popular vocabulary for the year 1941 was full of such words as dictator, infamy, arsenal, casualties, avenge, treacherous, potent, uncanny, indomitable. It was the year that 180 German bombers dropped 203 metric tons of bombs and 800 firebomb canisters on the City of Belfast in one night. On two nights in March, 200 planes pounded Clydebank in Glasgow for fifteen hours. In North Shi
elds, at midnight on 3 May, a single bomb from a lone German raider scored a direct hit on a public air raid shelter beneath Wilkinson’s lemonade factory. One hundred and three lives were lost, many of them women and children. Though hardened by the horrors of nine months of the Blitz, Londoners were shaken on 11 May by a horrendous raid. In brilliant moonlight, 550 German planes indiscriminately dropped hundreds of high-explosive bombs and 100,000 incendiaries. In June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union; and in December Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour provoked the war in the Pacific. The Fuehrer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jewish people. The year 1941 saw that order being unrelentingly and savagely carried out across Europe.

  Under such conditions, and in such an atmosphere, C. S. Lewis set patiently about his work of sowing Christian seed. For years he traveled all over the country in crowded trains. In the summer, particularly, he journeyed from the Highlands of Perthshire to the mountains of Wales, seeking to win airmen for Christ. The Bishop told me that Lewis was deeply concerned for the spiritual wellbeing of aircrews going out to die, so he invited the Bishop to join him as a speaker on his lecture tours. “I’ll go for their heads,” said Lewis; “you go for their hearts.”

  Lewis believed that Hitler was not the only enemy in Europe. He believed there were other anti-Christian forces at work. In fact, they had been at work for some considerable time, rooted particularly in David Hume’s eighteenth-century view that we live in an empty, godless universe, devoid of purpose. Kant’s belief that concepts such as God, the soul, and immortality belong to the realm of the unknowable, and Darwin’s belief that theology has no place in a scientific outlook, had added to the increase of unbelief. The theories of Marx and Engels had captivated millions and driven them away from Christianity. “God’s Funeral”, as Thomas Hardy metaphorically called the decline in Christian belief, seemed to have taken place. Interestingly, though, this famous poem does not mock believers. It sympathises with them, and, in my opinion, expresses envy toward them. Wistfully, Hardy remembers his earlier, now discarded belief:

  How sweet it was in years far hied

  To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,

  To lie down liegely at the eventide

  And feel a blest assurance he was there!

  And who or what shall fill his place?

  Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes

  For some fixed star to stimulate their pace

  Towards the goal of their enterprise? . . .

  Some in the background then I saw,

  Sweet women, youths, men, all incredulous,

  Who chimed as one: “This is a counterfeit of straw,

  This requiem mockery! Still he lives to us!”

  I could not buoy their faith: and yet

  Many I had known: with all I sympathised;

  And though struck speechless I did not forget,

  That what was mourned for, I too, once had prized.4

  One day Hardy was found with college dons, discussing the ceremony by which he would be sworn into an honorary fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. In the conversation, he pointed out that he used to attend church three times on a Sunday; he also revealed that he had a lot of knowledge of ecclesiastical music. “Of course, it’s only sentimental to me now,” he said.5

  Since Hardy’s time many more millions of people in Western Europe had been discarding Christianity. Now, at the height of the Second World War, God raised up a unique apologist to stir the thinking of those men, women, and young people on the outside of Christian belief. Interestingly, in 1955, Lewis took up residence in Magdalene College, Cambridge as the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English.

  Unashamedly Lewis believed in evangelism and in the fact that he was a Christian apologist. He wrote as follows:

  Where a speaker has that gift, the direct evangelical appeal of the “Come to Jesus type” can be as overwhelming today as it was 100 years ago. . . . I cannot do it: but those who can ought to do it with all their might. I am not sure that the ideal Missionary team ought not to consist of one who argues and one who (in the fullest sense of the word) preaches. Put up your arguer first to undermine their intellectual prejudices; then let the evangelist proper launch his appeal.6

  How successful was Lewis’s Christian work for the Royal Air Force? The truth is that often no one turned up. Sometimes fewer than a dozen men came. It was better at the bigger stations, where men of real intellectual ability were in his audiences. “It is fair to say,” wrote his friend George Sayer, “he made impression on only a few.”7 And this was the man who had just addressed millions so effectively across the nation by radio. Christian work has its challenges; but then a grain of wheat needs first to fall into the ground and die, or it abides alone. Winter snows cover the seeds; biting winds blow over them, and there is not a sign of stirring until spring. Then the harvest day is assured.

  Working as an academic at Oxford University, Lewis’s work as a Christian apologist knew many a chilling wind. Even when dining at his college he tended to feel increasingly isolated, because the open expression of his Christian views made him many enemies. It was thought that a man’s belief was a private affair and should not be written about or published. The academic who wrote from a Christian perspective for children was not given any encouragement. For some, the fact that he sought to see others converted to Christ was quite unforgivable. The academics who held a naturalistic point of view were ranged against him. C. S. Lewis’s faith and courage came at huge personal cost. He stood up for Christ, and he bore the scars.

  Now, the springtime for the seed that Lewis sowed has come. Currently, there are tens of millions of copies of his books in circulation in many different translations. For example, The Chronicles of Narnia has been translated into Afrikaans, Chinese, Danish, Greek, Icelandic, Russian, Slovene, and Welsh. “The man on the outside” is listening to him as never before. In the United States, C. S. Lewis’s books have become one of the most potent forces for Christianity in the nation.

  Walden Media has engaged the highly acclaimed director Andrew Adamson, best known for his animated feature Shrek, to direct the first live-action feature film adaptation of Lewis’s children’s book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This is expected to be the first of five films based on Lewis’s Narnia books. The filming is taking place in the forests, high country, and coastal areas of New Zealand’s South Island. “Narnia was such a vivid and real world to me as a child,” Adamson states, “as it is to millions of fans.” I share Walden’s excitement in giving those fans an epic theatrical experience worthy of their imaginations, and driving a new generation toward the works of C. S. Lewis. “Making a film that crosses generations is a far easier task when the source material resonates with such themes as truth, loyalty, and belief in something greater than yourself.”8

  The variety of lives touched by Lewis’s life and ministry is staggering. At this point, though, let me concentrate on just one of those lives. For over three decades, on both sides of the Atlantic, Kenneth Tynan was the hot centre of the theatre and film worlds. Arguably he was the greatest theatre critic of the twentieth century, and at one period of his life he was the Literary Manager at the National Theatre in London. He was generally perceived to be a notorious eccentric, a sexual obsessive, a womaniser, an atheist, and a champagne socialist.

  When Kenneth Tynan’s diaries were published by Bloomsbury, though, a very different side of him emerged. They reveal a man who was overwhelmed by melancholy and self-loathing. There was a desperate emptiness at the heart of his life. An ailing hedonist, he died of emphysema. A look into his diaries reveals a haunting thread of commentary about C. S. Lewis, his tutor at Magdalen College in Oxford.

  He writes that, while at Oxford in 1948, his girlfriend jilted him on the eve of what was to have been their marriage. He went to Lewis in despair, asking if he could postpone his final examinations until Christmas. Lewis immediately agreed, and “got me with the Christian business of c
onsolation.” Lewis reminded Tynan of a story he had once told him of how he had been a hair’s breadth from death during a German bombing raid in his home city of Birmingham. Gently, Lewis pointed out to Tynan that if the wind had blown the bomb a few inches nearer his house he would already have been dead for eight years, and that “every moment of life since then had been a bonus, a tremendous free gift, a present that only the blackest ingratitude could refuse.”

  Tynan writes, “As I listened to him, my problems began to dwindle to their proper proportions: I had entered his room suicidal and I left exhilarated.” He notes that Lewis was a “deeply kind and charitable man,” and that, because Tynan stammered, Lewis “kindly undertook to read my weekly essays aloud for me. . . . [T]he prospect of hearing my words pronounced in that wonderfully juicy and judicious voice had a permanently disciplining effect on my prose style.” Tynan notes, “If ever I were to stray into the Christian camp, it would be because of Lewis’s arguments as expressed in books like Miracles. (He never intruded them into tutorials).”9 Tynan calls Lewis “the great Christian persuader,” a man who is “brilliant and provocative.”10

  On 4 April 1971 he writes, “I read That Hideous Strength and once more the old tug reasserts itself—a tug of genuine war with my recent self. How thrilling he makes goodness seem—how tangible and radiant!” Tynan explains that he is struggling with whether he should write a film he has been asked to write and direct. “To do this work may well be a wicked act,” he muses; “Am I being tempted with sin, or tested with the chance of committing myself to responsible work?”11 On 6 December 1974 he wonders if Lewis will finally guide him back to belief.

  While reading Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, Tynan notes, on 27 April 1976, that C. S. Lewis “would certainly hold the view that, by drawing my attention to this passage in his book, God was offering me yet another signpost pointing towards acceptance of the Christian faith.”12 Kenneth Tynan hoped that when he died he would be buried as close to Lewis as possible. It must have been truly a poignant moment when his ashes were buried in the churchyard of St. Cross in Oxford, and his daughter Roxana read a passage from Lewis’s sermon The Weight of Glory. It was a passage warning that, when we think beauty is located in music or books, they betray us. What comes through them is, in fact, longing. If we mistake them for the thing itself, they become idols in our lives that will break our hearts. The passage teaches that the beauty we perceive is only an echo, a scent, and news of a greater thing.