C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963) was a British writer and lay theologian. As a boy growing up in Ireland, Lewis was fascinated with animals and grew to have a great love of nature. In 1916 Lewis was awarded a scholarship at University College, Oxford, but within months was sent to France to fight in the First World War. He later held academic positions in English literature for many years at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. Lewis’s faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. Lewis was a prolific writer whose philosophical writings are widely cited by Christian apologists from many denominations. His most popular works include his fictions series The Chronicles of Narnia, and his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.
Quotes by C. S. Lewis…
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot “practice the presence of God,” it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness.