A Shiver of Wonder

by Derick Bingham

  How can weights make someone soar? One day I was talking to a Scottish friend of mine called William MacClachlan. He told me of a boy who was out flying his kite, but he wasn’t making a very good job of it. A man came by and gave him some advice. “Put a divot to your draigon, son,” he said. (“Draigon” is the Scottish word for a kite; and “divot” is the Scottish word for a piece of turf.) The boy did as he was told, and his kite soared. A bit of “grounding” in our lives will do none of us any harm intellectually. So it was in the life of Jack Lewis. Despite his heavy “grounding,” he was about to soar significantly.

  One Sunday morning in July 1940, sitting at the Communion Service in Holy Trinity Church, and not feeling very well due to a recent fall, Jack was suddenly struck with an idea. He had been listening to a speech by Hitler the night before on the radio, and to his great surprise he was impressed with how persuasive it had been. He had the idea of writing a series of letters from a senior to a junior devil, giving the psychology of temptation from the Devil’s angle. So, The Screwtape Letters was born: thirty-one letters about the art of temptation from the elderly Screwtape to the younger Wormwood. Considering the route Jack had passed through on his way to faith, The Screwtape Letters was the distilled essence of his journey. Written between July 1940 and February 1941, they were first published in a Church of England weekly called The Guardian. In book form, it was reprinted eight times before the end of its first year. As I write, a copy of the Fontana Edition (1968) lies on my desk, and I note that it went through 14 reprints between 1955 and 1968. At least two million copies have been sold. On 24 February 1942, the Manchester Guardian reviewer Antifex said prophetically, “The book is sparkling yet truly reverent; in fact a perfect joy, and should become a classic.”

  The book caused what really became the bane of Jack’s life: letters, letters, and more letters. They poured in, and Jack called on Warren to help him. For helping him to handle his routine correspondence he paid him a small salary, and Jack came to lean heavily on Warren’s businesslike approach in getting to grips with literally thousands of letters.

  In writing Screwtape Letters when he did, Jack Lewis shows all of us that some of our greatest work can be done amidst the most appalling circumstances. As Europe descended into the abyss of war, he set his pen to work to show from a most unusual perspective the importance of the choices people make and the reality of the Christian life. The “patient” that Screwtape and Wormwood were working on ultimately slipped through their fingers, because he saw the reality of Christ. In the book Jack shows that the Devil is the opposite of Michael, not of God. He is a fallen angel. And in the last letter Jack powerfully exposes the fact that the Devil is not omniscient: he does not know God’s plans or what He is really up to. Jack shows that the “Intelligence Department” of Hell has the greatest curse upon it.

  Jack is on record as saying that no writing gave him less enjoyment than did The Screwtape Letters. It is little wonder, for he was facing the Devil and his works head on. One wonders if Miss Cowie ever read the book; and, if she did, how did she feel afterwards? Intriguingly, Jack quotes two very famous names at the beginning of the book. They back up his method of defence against Satan in his day and generation. He quotes Luther, who said, “The best way to drive out the Devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” He also quotes Thomas More, who said, “The Devil . . . the prowde spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked.” Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,9 wrote James in the Bible. Jack Lewis did just that, and the Devil “ran for it.”

  Of course, he did not “run for it” everywhere; the evil that stalked Europe was now rattling at the gates of Britain. The Germans were advancing across France and pushing the British Expeditionary Force towards Dunkirk. Invasion seemed to be very close. On Wednesday 5 June 1940, a service of intercession and prayer was held at Westminster Abbey. Churchill, who was in attendance, recalled afterwards, “The English are loathe to expose their feelings; but in my stall in the choir I did feel the pent-up passionate emotion and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.”10

  Thirteen days later, in one of his greatest speeches, Churchill expressed what he felt to be the extent of the threat of the evil facing Britain and the world. On 18 June, the Prime Minister went on air on the BBC to vow that England would continue the battle alone. The day before, the French leader Petain had sued for peace, and Churchill wanted to discount any such speculation. His were awesome words in the face of unmitigated evil:

  Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. . . . Hitler knows that he will have to break us on this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: “This was their finest hour.”11

  The Director of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC in those momentous days was the Reverend James Welch. He faced the biggest challenge of his working life. To this day, anyone passing through the swing doors of Broadcasting House in London’s Portland Place has only to look up to see fascinating words, inscribed in Latin in gold letters, on the walls. Translated, they read: “This temple of the arts and muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors of Broadcasting in the year 1931, Sir John Wreath being Director-General. It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a harvest and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful, and honest, and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness.” These words, of course, are inspired by Paul’s words in Philippians 4:8. At the back of the entrance hall is a sculpture of The Sower; and below it is the Latin inscription meaning “God gives the increase.” The Reverend Welch was a sower; and his field was strewn with the horrors of war.

  In April 1940, James Welch had gone on a five-day tour of the British Expeditionary Force in France, asking the young soldiers what they thought of the BBC broadcasts. He discovered that the BBC was falling short of their expectations. Welch considered that the listeners in Britain fell into three broad categories: those who approved of religious broadcasting, those who were indifferent but not unfriendly towards it, and those who were overtly hostile. Welch reckoned that two-thirds lived without any reference to God, and that religious broadcasts were of little everyday relevance to them. There was a widespread ignorance of the Christian faith, yet there was a disaffection of materialism and a leaning towards a spiritual interpretation of life. Even among the two-thirds unresponsive or hostile to Christianity, Welch recognised “an almost unanimous consensus of opinion that in the Man Jesus lay the key to many of the riddles of life.”12

  The propaganda threat from Germany was significant. James Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, was drawing an audience of six million a night. After the main BBC News Bulletin at 9.00 each evening, the British retuned their radios to listen to Joyce’s mixture of propaganda and boastfulness, prefixed by his chilling introduction, “Germany calling, Germany calling.” In an attempt to draw them away from Joyce’s poison, the BBC responded with one of its most famous wartime programmes, called Post Script.

  How, then, was religious broadcasting to respond to the challenge of addressing a nation at its time of deepest need? In September 1940, London was facing the blitz. By the end of the month, 7,000 people had been killed and 9,000 injured. Welch needed a voice that would have a novel approach to religious broadcasting. In such dire times, who could deal with the doubts that people were having? Recently
, Welch had been reading a book called The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis. He recognised that he had discovered a refreshingly innovative mind and a rare gift. The book that Jack had penned between the summer of 1939 and the spring of 1940 had deeply touched the mind and heart of the man who wrote these words:

  In a time of uncertainty and questioning it is the responsibility of the church—and of religious broadcasting as one of its most powerful voices, to declare the truth about God and His relation to man. It has to expound the Christian faith in terms that can be easily understood by ordinary men and women and to examine the ways in which that faith can be applied to present-day society during these difficult times.13

  On 7 February 1941, Welch sat down and wrote to Jack at Magdalen College. Although Welch’s mind and heart were very much in the present, the repercussions of his letter were to reach into Eternity.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A CLUE TO THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE?

  AUGUST WAS RICH WITH WILD fruits in the England of 1941. The slender rowan trees were bending beneath the heavy clusters of their orange berries that were now beginning to deepen in colour to scarlet. Hips and haws were plentiful, and even the holly berries, though green, were in abundance. Early blackberries were ripening. The thistle thickets were full, and the goldfinch was to be seen pulling at the thistledown.

  The hedgerows, also, were blazing that summer with the hawkweed family, including tansy and ragwort. Here, there, and yonder, were patches of lady-glove and sunflowers growing tall. Nasturtiums were overflowing from cottage gardens onto the roadside banks. Acres of purple heather were blooming, and the cornfields painted the countryside in gold. Bees were busy on the heath, collecting nectar known as heather-honey.

  The flowers of high summer were everywhere: common bird’s-foot trefoil, fleabane, purple loosestrife, great knapweed, red bartsia, the tall and handsome nettle-leaved bellflower, meadowsweet, and yarrow. Butterflies were busy, including the small tortoiseshell and the holly blue; and on leafy tree and hedge the beautiful seven-spot ladybird beetle could be easily identified. Here, then, were acres of abundant goodness.

  In the depths of the countryside, it would have been hard to believe that a nation was fighting for its very life. Back on 10 May, in brilliant moonlight, 550 German planes had indiscriminately dropped hundreds of high-explosive bombs, and one hundred thousand incendiaries within a few hours. The Chamber of the House of Commons had been reduced to a heap of rubble, and the square tower of Westminster Abbey had fallen in. Over recent months of bombing, the casualty toll in London had reached 20,000 killed and 25,000 badly injured; for the first time, people were seen weeping openly in the streets in despair.

  On Wednesday 6 August, a train pulled into Paddington Station. The station had itself suffered from German bombing. The train carried Jack Lewis on his way to make his first broadcast for the BBC’s Religious Broadcasting Department. James Welch had managed to persuade Jack to come and give his first live broadcast from the London studios. It was billed as follows in the Radio Times:

  7.30 p.m. News in Norwegian

  7.45 p.m. “Right and Wrong”

  A clue to the meaning of the universe?1

  His first broadcast was squeezed between the nightly news in Norwegian and songs from the National Eisteddfod of Wales. It was hardly prime time, but the nation suddenly discovered a prime mind on its airwaves, communicating with an extraordinarily captivating voice. Here was a speaker who had passion and enthusiasm, and who spoke with irresistible logic and clarity. People all over the country pricked up their ears, wondered who the speaker was, and found themselves using parts of their brains they hadn’t used for years. By the end of the fourth fifteen-minute talk that Jack gave every Wednesday evening during August 1941, letters had poured into the BBC. This broadcaster, by the hand of God, was causing spiritual waves. His second talk, on 13 August, was entitled “Scientific Law and Moral Law”, his third, on 20 August, “Materialism or Religion?” and his fourth, on 27 August, “What Can We Do About It?” He also broadcast on 6 September, under the title Answers to Listeners.

  In Bible times, in the face of the approaching genocide of the Jewish people in the Persian Empire, it was Mordecai who challenged Queen Esther: had she “come to the Kingdom for a time such as this”?2 So it was with C. S. Lewis: the spiritual life of Britain was facing the arid desert of Nazism and its godless tenets. James Welch and Lewis’s producer, the Reverend Eric Fenn, Assistant Director of Religion at the BBC, did a sterling job in preparing Jack to face the microphone. Once there, it was the lessons learned from the many years of his spiritual journey that spilled out like spiritual nectar.

  Back in Oxford in those momentous times, the spiritual nectar of Jack’s life was spilling out in another very influential corner. In 1928, standing on the banks of a South African river, a twenty-one-year-old girl called Elia Estelle Aldwinckle, otherwise known as Stella, had decided to give her life to helping people find God. Her spiritual journey had led her to Oxford. She had joined the Oxford Pastorate attached to St. Aldate’s Anglican Church. She became Chaplain to Women Students and was sent to Somerville College, a women’s college, to act as an advisor there.

  Stella was a Christian with vision and stamina and an intellect brimming with vitality. Led by God to a vital ministry, she rose up to fulfil it. Not waiting for undergraduates to come to church services to hear the gospel, she took the gospel to them. One day Stella was faced with a challenge. A student at Somerville College complained that she could find no one ready to discuss the questions which agnostics raised about God. Stella decided to do something about it. In the Michaelmas Term of 1941 she pinned up a notice, encouraging “all atheists, agnostics, and those who are disillusioned about religion, or think they are” to meet in the Junior Common Room. The result of the meeting was the founding of the Oxford University Socratic Club in December 1941.

  Socrates was the ancient Greek philosopher who never wrote a book. His life and ideas were recorded by his pupil, the great philosopher Plato, and the historian Xenophon. Socrates liked to spend his time in the streets and marketplaces of Athens talking to whoever would listen to him. He exhorted his listeners to “follow the argument, wherever it led them.” Stella founded her club “to apply Socrates” principle to one particular subject matter: the pros and cons of the Christian Religion.”

  The Club was to continue for thirty-one years. It met every week on Monday evenings during term time, and C. S. Lewis was its first President. At each meeting, a believer or a non-believer would read a paper. A speaker who held the opposing view would reply, and the meeting was then thrown open for a general discussion. During Jack’s time it became one of the best-attended and best-known societies in Oxford University. Many undergraduates looked back fondly to their Monday evenings at the Socratic Club. It became a highlight of their days at Oxford. Many a principle expounded there in defence of the Christian faith proved to be so useful to young people struggling intellectually with their faith; these principles strengthened and nourished them in an environment full of scepticism and indifference. Jack, the blossoming Christian apologist, was busy; and his feet were steadily carrying him to declare the Good News even in the form of rigid intellectual debate.

  God had even more for His servant to do. One rainy evening in the winter of 1941, two clergymen visited Magdalen College to seek Jack’s help. One was the Reverend Maurice Edwards, Chaplain-in-Chief of the Royal Air Force, and the other was the Reverend Charles Gilmore, his assistant. They asked Jack if he would give talks on theology to the men and women of the Royal Air Force. He would be in an honorary role as a visiting lecturer, and the lectures would take place in the many training establishments and camps across the United Kingdom. The idea had come from the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, no less. Jack agreed to the lectureship, and so began a ministry to the RAF which was to last for several years. Who can measure the worth of what he accomplished?

  Jack was usually away for two or three days at a
time, travelling through England, Scotland, and Wales, seeking to win RAF personnel for Christ. The year 1941 was the date of the introduction of the Lancaster, possibly the most famous RAF bomber of all time. In January, the RAF began attacks on specific targets in France. In February, the RAF made attacks on oil depots in Rotterdam and German naval targets in Brest harbour. During February and March, Bomber Command began regular nighttime bombing of industrial targets in Germany. These attacks normally included around one hundred aircraft. In May, the German battleship Bismarck was spotted by the RAF, as the ship attempted to reach Brest for repairs. This led to her final defeat by a Royal Navy battle group. In June, the RAF Coastal Command was formed in Northern Ireland, with American-built Liberator patrol aircraft.

  Through the opening months of 1941, Jack Lewis was visiting RAF establishments where people were experiencing grief at losing pilots killed in the theatre of war or missing in action. He was talking to men who could be scrambled into an air attack at any minute and who could be dead within hours. By February 1943, a round-the-clock Allied strategic bombing campaign had begun in Europe; in two days, 26 and 27 February, more than two thousand sorties were flown against enemy targets. On 16 and 17 May, the RAF Dambusters breached the Mohne and Eder Dams in the industrial heart of Germany, with a loss of fifty-three aircrew. A raid in July on Hamburg led to forty thousand deaths.

  In his Christian witness to the RAF, Jack found the main hurdle to be overcome was this: his audience felt that God was in the dock, and that man had become His judge on the bench. Jack reckoned that the average RAF person, and most unbelievers in his time, would be ready to listen to God’s defence for permitting war, poverty, and disease. Some Jewish people, understandably, felt the same. Several Jewish authors have told the story of how one afternoon in a sub-camp of Buchenwald, “a group of learned Jews decided to put God on trial for neglecting His chosen people. Witnesses were produced for both the prosecution and defence; but the case for the prosecution was overwhelming. The judges were Rabbis. They found the accused guilty and solemnly condemned Him.”3