Today’s the birthday of the great writer, teacher and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland in 1898. Coincidentally, it is also the day nineteen years later that he arrived at a trench in the front lines of World War I.
I noticed both of these details at the bottom of the page this morning as I did my daily read from A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings From His Classic Works. I gave the book to myself about this time last year and started the schedule on January 1. It’s almost a sad feeling to realize that I’m nearly finished.
The book consists of daily, one page (often only a paragraph or two) excerpts from Lewis’s impressive body of work, mainly from Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed, The Weight of Glory and The Screwtape Letters and others. Often several days in a row would center around a common theme. It’s been a fascinating and thought-provoking experience as I’ve come to see new things in works that I already thought I “knew.” Some of the excerpts from A Grief Observed and The Problem of Pain have been especially timely and comforting over the past several months as my father’s health worsened (funny how I “just happened” to get this book when I did). Little biographical details related to each day are also featured, and it’s been kind of a Tarantino-like experience to track the events in Lewis’s life in this manner when the days are in sequence but the years are not.
This book would be a great gift for the reader and thinker in your family who is often pressed for time. I will echo one of Lewis’s warnings, however:
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
