Grace In The Conversion Of C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on November 29, 1898. He had an idyllic early childhood. He and his older brother Warren played together, invented games, and read many books that lined the hallways and the attic. When he was four years old, he pointed to himself and said, “He is Jacksie,” and refused to answer to any other name. David Downing says that, “These carefree years held an almost mythic status in the mind of the adult Lewis.” “Childhood” throughout his life is viewed as good and filled with joy. “Nurse” and “nursery” are associated with Lizzie Endicott (his nurse), as that which is simple, true, and good. His sense of joy described in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy took on great significance in his life.

The death of Lewis’s mother while he was still young (age 9) ended the settled happiness of his childhood. He describes his loss of security in the imagery that “the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.” There were now only “islands” of joy in the midst of an unsettled “sea.” Tragically, when Lewis’s mother died, he in effect lost his father as well. Perhaps out of an inability to cope with the loss of his wife, Albert Lewis sent his two boys to a boarding school, whose headmaster, “Oldie,” was later certified as insane. Lewis had gone to church some in his early life and continued in boarding school, but his sincere efforts soon ended. Lewis had gotten the idea that when you prayed you needed to mean what you said. When he said his evening prayers, he was always analyzing whether they were said rightly. Inevitably, they were not sincere enough, so he would start again and again and again. He would, he says, have gone crazy, had he not stopped. . . .

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