A “Conversation” With CS Lewis

He sparked my imagination with, “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.”

He seemed a kindred spirit when he said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

He got my full attention with, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God… A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

How I would love to sit at a party or coffee shop while Mr. Lewis waxed eloquently about his childhood in Ireland, his mother’s death, his atheism and return to faith, his marriage to Joy Gresham, his works of fiction, his apologetics…heck, he could drone on and on about the finer points of goat cheese and I wouldn’t care. 

Although, that doesn’t really fit the “conversational” aspect of our theme.  It takes some back and forth to have a real conversation.  To that end, I suppose I could contribute an occasional, “Uh-huh,” or “Wow.”

And when I ask him for one final thought before we part, I imagine he might say, “The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.”