Dec. 5, 2021, column:

Author C.S. Lewis was 'The Most Reluctant Convert'

By Mike Haynes

                If you’d like a relatively detailed account of how a person traveled over several years from atheism to belief in a vague supreme being to commitment to Jesus Christ as God, I recommend C.S. Lewis’s book, “Surprised by Joy.”

                Those who’ve seen the “Shadowlands” movie starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy, the woman he married, may be thinking, “Oh, ‘Surprised by Joy’ must be about the famous Christian author finding love late in life.”

                It isn’t. The “Joy” in the title refers to a deep desire or longing that can be fulfilled only by God and not completely until we are in heaven with him. Lewis takes readers on a journey from his childhood through his battlefield service in World War I to his experience as an Oxford University student and then professor, with each period of his life bringing him closer to that divine joy that he doesn’t think he wants.

                For a condensed but still well-explained version of Lewis’s spiritual journey, I would look for a chance to see the new film, “The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis.”

                The movie had a short local run in November. It stars Eddie Ray Martin playing Lewis as a child, when his mother’s death was a traumatic experience; Nicholas Ralph as a teen and young adult Lewis, whose friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien and others at Oxford helped draw him nearer to God; and Max McLean as Lewis in his later years.

                PBS viewers may recognize Ralph from his portrayal of James Herriot in the current series, “All Creatures Great and Small.”

McLean also narrates the film, using much of the same dialogue that he does in his one-man stage version of “The Most Reluctant Convert,” from which the movie grew. McLean founded Fellowship for Performing Arts in New York City and performs other Lewis and Christian live shows. From his association with the C.S. Lewis Foundation, he has friends in Amarillo; he’ll see some of them again July 28-Aug. 5, when he participates in the C.S. Lewis Summer Institute at Oxford.

                Not all of us go through such a painstaking, thorough analysis of the meaning of life, the possibility of supernatural events and the study of what is true and what isn’t. Lewis, the rigorous intellectual, did. He had grown up in Ireland in a Christian home but had rejected Christianity, probably influenced by the inexplicable loss of his mother and the horrors he witnessed in the trenches of World War I.

His book, “Surprised by Joy,” takes us from a childhood filled with details of everyday life to a young adulthood that becomes more philosophical to his 30s, where he finally considers spirituality and realizes that nothing in life is as significant as the Creator God.

                The movie, “The Most Reluctant Convert,” is a condensed version of that trajectory.

                Again surprisingly, the conversion in the title isn’t to belief in Christ. As Lewis says in the book, it’s an acceptance of deism. Any change in his beliefs had to be logical, and for him, it was a step-by-step process.

                Alone in his room at Oxford’s Magdalen College in his early 30s, Lewis “gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. …

                “It must be understood that the conversion … was only to Theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity.” Lewis believed in a God, but not a personal one and not in the form of Jesus Christ.

                He still was not sure that “I was now approaching the source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me ever since childhood. He did start attending his local parish church, “not because I believed in Christianity, … but because I thought one ought to ‘fly one’s flag’ by some unmistakable overt sign.”

                It was through more reflection and conversations with Tolkien and others that Lewis came closer to faith in Christ. “I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken,” he wrote. He was in the sidecar of his brother Warnie’s motorcycle on a sunny day as the brothers approached the zoo at the village of Whipsnade.

                “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did,” Lewis wrote.

                He also decided that joy was important only as a signpost to Christ: “It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.”

                As a world-famous author and scholarly professor, Lewis may not seem to be a model for us ordinary folks. But if you take time to read this book or see this movie, you might be surprised that we all face some of the same obstacles to understanding God.