Saying C.S. Lewis and a pre-haunted Ebenezer Scrooge shared an abiding revulsion for Christmas goes too far. But the “Chronicles of Narnia“ writer did despise what the holiday has become.
In Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” the fictional Scrooge replaces his bah-humbugs with giddy yuletime cheer. Lewis, a real-life atheist-turned-devout Christian apologist, never shed his disdain for what he lamented as an increasingly commercialized, soulless season.
“Lewis was not a fan of all the materialism surrounding Christmas. He didn’t give gifts, except to children, and he didn’t send cards,” says Lewis scholar and Wheaton College professor Jerry Root, who will keynote “A C.S. Lewis Christmas” on Dec. 19 and 20 in Utah.
“The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail,” Lewis commented. “Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?”
What Lewis observed more than half a century ago is no less the case today. A Pew Research Center study earlier this week noted that fewer than half (46 percent, down from 51 percent in 2013) see Christmas as a religious observance.
But Lewis, the British writer whose prose included allegorical children’s books, science fiction novels and myriad essays, as well as Christian apologetic volumes, was no pre-ghost Scrooge when it came to the “real meaning” of Christmas, Root stresses.
“He was in wonder of the incarnation [of Christ], the story that all of us longed would be true actually became true,” Root adds. “That was that God, loving us, sent his son to forgive our sins, allowing him to be born as a baby in Bethlehem in order to go to Calvary to die and rise again.”
Lewis also was quietly charitable and generous, not just during the holiday season but year-round.
“Every year he received more than a thousand letters,” Root says, “and he would answer them all.”
His friends and publishers lamented that such an amount of personal correspondence with his admirers could have been better spent writing more books. Ironically, those piles of letters eventually ended up comprising published collections still read long after his death in 1963.
“Eight volumes of his letters have been published,” Root points out. The writings were “so poignant and meaningful to the people that the people receiving them, saved them.”
Lewis also became known for his essays, many of them combined into “God in the Dock,” a 1970 collection containing theological and ethical arguments alternatively serious and academic, witty, self-effacing and allegorical.
The collection’s title came from Lewis’ musings about how, in return for faith, modern humans demand an explanation for what they see as flawed creatures.
“[Man] is quite a kindly judge; if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it,” Lewis wrote. “The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God is in the dock.”
That is one of hundreds of quotes cited by believers and thinkers of myriad faiths, among them members and authorities in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Lewis had been a favorite of speakers at the Utah-based faith’s General Conferences through the years, particularly the late Mormon apostle Neal A. Maxwell, known for liberally sprinkling quotes from the Anglican Lewis into his sermons.
“A C.S. Lewis Christmas” is being hosted by Utah’s Standing Together, a multidenominational evangelical organization, beginning at 7 p.m. Dec. 19 at Salt Lake Christian Center, 4300 S. 700 East, and again at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 20 at Elevation Church, 375 S. State St., Clearfield.
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