C.S. Lewis
1898 to 1963
Clive Staples Lewis was a Belfast-born writer and a scholar at Oxford and Cambridge, and one of the most widely read Christian authors of the twentieth century. An atheist in his youth, he came to faith in his thirties, helped along by the friendship of J.R.R. Tolkien. He went on to write Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters and the Chronicles of Narnia. His great gift was making deep things plain.
We keep coming back to Lewis because he never wrote as a man who had always believed. He spent his early life as a convinced atheist, and even after he came to faith he remembered exactly what unbelief had felt like from the inside. So he reasons the way a person argues with himself late at night, seeing your objection coming before you have finished raising it, and answering it without ever talking down to you.
He had a particular honesty about pain. The Problem of Pain set the question out carefully and at arm’s length. Years later, after he lost his wife to cancer, A Grief Observed showed the same man living through it instead of explaining it, doubts and all. That willingness to be found out, to let the theory be tested by grief and not flinch, is part of why his words have lasted. He makes the deep things plain not by shrinking them, but by standing close enough to describe what he sees.
Quotes with a reflection
“I pray because the need flows out of me all the time. It doesn't change God. It changes me.”
I Pray Because It Changes Me →“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”
Destiny Born From Hardship →“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
Happiness And Peace →“He loved us not because we are lovable, but because He is love.”
He Loved Us →“Reach for the sky and you will get the earth too. But if you reach for the earth, you won't get either of them.”
Reach For The Sky →“We are what we believe we are.”
We Are What We Believe →“Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?”
Uncreated Light →“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
Forgive The Inexcusable →“Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”
Happiness →Selected sayings
A few more lines from C.S. Lewis, gathered as encouragement, each with a note on where it comes from or what it means.
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“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
From his essay Is Theology Poetry?, on how faith becomes the light you see the rest of life by.
C.S. Lewis
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“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.”
From Mere Christianity, on what happens when first things are kept first.
C.S. Lewis
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“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”
From The Weight of Glory, on the eternal weight of every person you will ever meet.
C.S. Lewis