My Summer Reading C.S. Lewis

The portrait of Lewis smoking a cigarette, musing on a draw of tobacco or perhaps the Norse mythology he so loved, hangs above my desk. My friends Sarah & Haley painted a Lewis quote that, I believe, fits the portrait swimmingly. "You can't get a book long enough or a cup of tea big enough to suit me." I'd like to think Clive Staples Lewis & I would have been friends, or at the very least bond over a shared love for smoking pipes.

After my sophomore year of college, I returned to Houston, Texas, to play music & lead homeless ministry at a summer camp. Ninety percent of my baggage weight came from books. The summer of 2014 will remain forever in my mind as the summer I read C.S. Lewis. By that point I was very familiar with his life & work, but I wanted a complete immersion in the mind of a man I deeply admired.

If you have ever worked at a summer camp, you are aware of what a foolish task I set to during the summer of 2014. The work of camp consumes your time & energy such that, when it arrives, rest cannot be wasted. It surprised my roommates therefore when every Saturday morning they found me sitting on the couch, already through two cups of coffee, reading C.S. Lewis. My first summer of camp showed me how profoundly introverted I am. The summer I read C.S. Lewis made me a good introvert. His books were my rest.

Till We Have Faces, The Problem of Pain, Perelandra, & The Weight of Glory were all first-time reads that summer. Till We Have Faces gripped my attention so fiercely I lost an entire Sunday to it's pages (Worth it!). Yet one sensuous moment stands out among the hours of word immersion that summer. It is good for man to read in the sun, but if you've ever been to Houston in the summer, you are well aware the chore doing anything in the sun can be. However, the desire to read & get tan for when I visited my girlfriend overcame my disdain for the Houston heat & humidity. I remember sitting in a wicker chair in the grass at the heart of the dorm courtyard, my water lying flat in the shade below my chair attempting not to boil. My eyes stung as I wiped falling sweat beads conglomerating near my brow. I intended to sit in that chair for forty minutes. A Grief Observed transfixed me in the Houston sun until the very last page. Having read over fifteen Lewis books before A Grief Observed, I developed a fondness & familiarity with him. To read his grief & find kinship to my own, I could not move until the work was finished. I've only read A Grief Observed once since the summer of 2014, and yet again, I sat with Lewis through from beginning till the end.

My summer reading C.S. Lewis taught me one very important lesson. Story-telling is a sacred calling. I read his works mostly in chronological order, Mere Christianity setting the early pace with Till We Have Faces & The Four Loves bringing the race to a close. It seems that Lewis's work, on the whole, began with more apologetic & lay-theology projects. Yet, his later books told stories, mostly children's stories. Calling Narnia books of children's stories inevitably connotes them to a lesser authority than a more 'adult' book like Mere Christianity or Studies in Words. Lewis instead showed me, book-by-book, that he remained one author from beginning to end, learning to tell the most wonderful truths he learned through stories. My immersion into the world of C.S. Lewis in the summer of 2014 broke down the walls between works of philosophy/theology & story-telling so abruptly that, looking back, I have no doubt that it was I who built those walls in the first place. I did not know that my immersion in Lewis was ultimately a baptism into a better story.

-HGM