Sometimes life is
what happens to us when we are planning to do something else. For C.S. Lewis it was the World War of
1917-1918 that deflected him from his immediate plans for education at Oxford. Shortly before his nineteenth birthday he was
drafted and found himself billeted at Keble College.
By fluke of
alphabetical order he found himself sharing a room with Paddy Moore. The two young men agreed that if either of
them died in battle, the one that lived would take care of the other man’s
family. In November of that year Lewis
was sent to the Western Front with the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset
Light Infantry where he was wounded and returned to England for
recuperation. Paddy Moore was not so
lucky but was missing in action and believed dead.
At the end of the
war Lewis returned to Oxford to continue his education. Lewis’s brother Warren writes that C. S.
Lewis felt a “duty of keeping some war-time promise made to Paddy Moore” and as
a result took on what was going to be a life-long association with Paddy’s
querulous and demanding mother. Warren
wrote of Paddy Moore’s mother that she “interfered constantly with his work,
and imposed upon him (C.S. Lewis) a heavy burden of minor domestic tasks. In twenty years I never saw a book in her
hands; her conversation was chiefly about herself, and was otherwise a matter
of ill-informed dogmatism: her mind was of a type that he found barely
tolerable elsewhere.” Lewis faithfully
maintained his relationship with Paddy Moore’s mother until her death some
thirty years later.
What is amazing
about the story is everything else that C. S. Lewis accomplished while under
the stress of living in a household dominated by this old tyrant. He was a
voracious reader and creative thinker who left an indelible impression on his
peers and on generations to come. C.S.
Lewis is one of the most prolific Christian authors of the twentieth century,
and as university professor also wrote books in his own field.
He did all this
while living with Paddy Moore’s mother.
In one of his books during World War II, Lewis reflects the attitude
that adverse circumstances shouldn’t hamper you from meeting the more important
challenges of your life. There will
always be a crisis of some sort. Stress
never really goes away, it just changes its coat. Life is what you make of it where you are, in
the midst of everything that is going on.
In the midst of
everything C.S. Lewis grew a habit of steady prayer and scripture reading and
developed a special fondness for the Book of Psalms. As his books became popular he prospered and
extended his charities to a wide variety of societies and needy
individuals. He was a man whose gaze was
so firmly on the heavenly city that the hindrances on the immediate horizon
faded in importance. Rather than being
quelled by his domestic circumstances, C.S. Lewis thrived and blessed us all.
One thing I am
firmly convinced of is that a crisis is just a crisis. We’ve seen crises before. We will see them again. Stress goes away for a while, then changes
its coat and comes back again in another guise.
If we wait for circumstances to change before we do those things that we
want to accomplish we will wait forever.
There will always be something that threatens to deflect us from the
things we are called to do. Like C.S.
Lewis, instead of being constrained by the crises and stress of everyday life,
we face the challenge of stepping forward, right where we are, to meet God’s
deeper calling on our lives.
