| The New Man By David Westfall “Mother…” All was quiet. “Mother…” Still no response. “Mother!” he shouted. When the silence continued just as it had before, he began to cry. Surely that would bring her running. He emphasized his little sobs just enough so that they would transmit into the next room, loud enough for her to hear—she had always been a light sleeper. This went on for some thirty minutes, and yet his mother still did not come. “Please!” he cried. “I have a toothache!” Once again he waited in silence. Once again no one came. The boy gave up. Rising out of his little bed, he paced quietly to the door, then out into the hall. Everything was dark, but for a thin white line around the edges of the door at the end of the hall. Now outside his own door, the boy could hear a faint noise. Crying. This peaked his curiosity. After all, every child knows that grown-ups never cry. So he moved quickly but silently over to the door, and placed his ear against it. He heard muffled talking, but the thick door made it impossible to understand. He placed his hand on the knob and opened it ever so slightly. He peeked in through the crack. What C.S. Lewis first saw was a tall man in rumpled clothes that had obviously not been changed or cleaned in some time. He knew it was his father, but he wanted to see more. He opened the door widely enough to get more of his head through the gap. “Albert.” His father moved away from the door and knelt down by the bed. “What is it, my Flora?” “Don’t let this hurt Jack. Protect him, Albert.” “How?” “He will not understand. He will only know his mother is dead.” Beyond his control, Lewis cried out. In an instant his father was there, taking him up in his arms, holding his head to his shoulder. “My dear boy,” his father whispered, and began to cry. “What’s wrong with mum?” Albert placed Lewis on the floor. “Clive…” he said coldly, obviously summoning the words. The boy knew it was serious. Both his parents had refrained, at his request, from calling him by his real name. When they did, he became afraid. The boy began to shake. “…Jack,” said his father in a warmer tone. “Mummy is sick.” “Get the doctor.” “We have, Jack. I’m…” Albert glanced up to the ceiling for a minute and shook his head. “I’m sorry. He can’t do anything.” “Then she’ll just have to get better,” said Lewis with determined finality. “Listen son, I am grieved that you must see this at such a young age, but even more saddening would be for you to grow up without understanding this.” “I don’t understand! Why can’t the doctors make her better!” “Jack,” whispered the boy’s mother. “Come here.” His father behind him, the boy paced over to her bedside. “Mummy?” said Jack, his voice as brittle and cold as an icicle. “I have cancer, son. And I can’t…” she began to cough. Her hand grasped Lewis’s, squeezing the color from it. “Son…” she rasped. “I love—.” Her last words were interrupted by blood. Lot’s of blood—more than Lewis had ever seen; now being coughed up by his dying mother. Albert wrenched him back but Flora’s grip on his hand was too strong. “Mummy!” he cried. Mummy died. “Jack!” The young man looked up. Across the library, another man stood, with a thin mustache gracing his familiar face. “Warnie!” shouted Lewis, quite too loud for the library. Jogging across the room, he embraced his brother, Warren Lewis. The two held each other for a moment, and then released themselves. “Didn’t mention that you were going to be at Oxford this Christmas.” “I thought I would pay you a visit, Jack. Free you from these books for a while.” Lewis glanced back at his books and papers strewn all over the table, and led Warnie over. Warnie looked across the materials on the table. “Been doing some writing, have you Jack?” “Oh yes…but this isn’t…” Jack scrambled to remove papers from Warnie’s view. “…important,” he finished. Before Jack could react, his brother snatched one of the papers and started to read. “‘And so can you not see that the presence of suffering eliminates the possibility of a personal God that one would ever choose to associate with or trust?’ Clive…” Lewis winced at the name. “Give me my paper, Warnie.” After hesitating a moment, it was handed over. “I’m sorry.” “You should be.” “I meant for calling you Clive. Confound it, man, you’ve given up!” Lewis looked puzzled. “What do you mean?” “You’re mother loved you, Jack. Do not forget I was there too when she died. She loved you and among her last words was a request that our father not let you fall out of the faith.” At his, C.S. Lewis exploded. A tension between him and his brother, which had grown over the years beneath the surface, had finally found its way into words. “Warnie, this doesn’t matter! I cannot…I will not believe in a God who would take my mother from me, who would put me through that sort of pain!” “A God who put you through so much pain? You? Jack, listen to yourself. Your mother died of cancer. Whom did he put through such pain? If your mother could grow terminally ill with a painful disease that made living a chore rather than a joy and yet still remain faithful, so could you.” “I will not listen to this!” Jack bellowed. He stormed out of the library, taking his materials with him. Warnie was left standing in an utterly still room, the students and professors there staring at him in utter amazement. Choking back tears for his brother, he left. The motorcycle started, and the engine revved. Jack sat down carefully in the side-car, trying not to dirty his neat trousers. Once he was in, his friend sped off with him in tow. Because it was impossible to hear the driver, Lewis was left to himself, his own thoughts. This appealed to him, as his mind had been wrestling with the problem of pain for many days. In recent months he had been focusing on the idea of a theistic universe, and as he thought about it, found the thought actually quite appealing to him, not so far-fetched anymore. Appealing enough to entertain at any rate. Yet Christianity still seemed to him far-fetched. And still the question of pain remained unanswered. But at this point the man had gone through so many changes, worldviews, philosophies and feelings that he scarcely knew what to think any longer. All that remained were more questions. Why would a God create evil, from which springs our pain, he wondered. To punish us? Retribution for our sins? Ah, but to sin, we must be doing evil. And so for us to sin, evil would have had to exist before we chose to do it. What then? A test? Yes, that could be it—we have the choice between Him and evil, and those of us who choose Him are saved. Then why is evil so much more appealing? After all, if there is a God, common sense would dictate that we trust Him, since His grace is the only attractive goal and the only means to fulfill oneself. Why would he make evil so attractive instead, to the point where its’ desires were nearly impossible to master? Lewis sat for quite some time, puzzling over this, until he realized that the answer lay right under his nose. God does not make sin appealing, he thought. God does the opposite, in fact. It is some spiritual agent that must make evil more appealing than good, to the point where humanity is blinded into doing it. Essentially the devil, though Lewis matter-of-factly. So then…humanity is a sinking ship. Humanity is a collection of misled sheep, invited beyond their knowledge by a counterfeit Shepard into a den of wolves. Some kind of response by God is necessary. Something would have to be done to combat this temptation, to repair the damage done to creation so that the choices could seem nearly equal again. So that people would see the path to God clearly enough to follow it. In other words, a converse of the evil Shepard is necessary. Lewis buried his face in his hands, feeling so close to the answer that he could almost touch it. Yet at the same time, he felt distant from it as if he had reached an impasse and would never uncover the answer. His fingers tightened their grasp about his face, as if trying to tear the knowledge out of his mind. It was there, he knew it. But what? Lewis’s hands relaxed, dropped to his knees and he leaned gently against the front of the side-car. He had finally found it. “Those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect, as He is perfect—perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain. “For many this new thing is already happening. Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the earth. Some, as I have admitted are still hardly recognizable: but others can be recognized. Every now and then one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. “To become new men means losing what we now call ‘ourselves’. Out of our selves, into Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His thoughts. Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. Thank you and good night.” The chamber broke into thunderous applause, the entire audience rising to its feet. C.S. Lewis stepped down from the podium, and left as quickly as possible after shaking some hands. Warnie waited for him outside They embraced. “Shall we go home?” asked Warnie. Lewis yawned. “I think so.” As they left Oxford, Warnie glanced over at Lewis in the passenger seat. “Jack,” he said. “You’re a new man.” Lewis stared at him and smiled. They had for a long time lived together, but Warnie had never commented much on his conversion. He had observed that such discussions almost embarrassed Lewis with praise—the man was, after all, quite modest. But now, Lewis responded firmly. “When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” “First Corinthians.” “I mean it, Warnie.” “But when you were a child you were more or less Christian.” “A child in the faith, Warnie. I didn’t understand. From the moment mother began coughing up blood, unable to tell me she loved me, I didn’t understand. I was desperate to explain what was going on around me, and so in my childishness I held onto the simplest and fastest answer I could find: that there was no God, and that nothing else could explain the existence of suffering. Until I grew up and really thought the matter through.” His brother nodded. “And what did you find?” he said more than asked. “That we live in a bad world, a world which is bad because of what we have done. Don’t you see, it really is about us when it comes to pain and suffering? We have been deceived, and we made the wrong choice. We have caused our own problems, and because of some sort of nearly unthinkable love and grace which our creator still holds for us, we may still live.” A long silence followed. Warnie was amazed at how much his brother had changed over the years. Finally, he simply said, “Welcome back, Jack. Welcome back.” His brother smiled at this. |
