Further Up and Further In

I decided to take a CS Lewis class through Lakelight Institute followed by a tour in England. I wanted to move further up and further in to the deeper life based on the writings of CS Lewis. Here I sit in my hotel room  and I am reflecting on the week so far.

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!”

― C.S. Lewis in The Last Battle

While I know that the unicorn in The Last Battle was referring to heaven, I can see how we are to move further up and further into real kingdom living even this side of the veil. Moving deeper and deeper into life with Christ changes similarly to the difference between old and new Narnia. I know that the hope of heaven is beyond explanation but how to describe the movement to maturity is also hard to describe.

As I walked through the streets of Oxford, I wondered how I could move further up and further in my own relationship with the Lord by looking at the life and writings of CS Lewis, a brilliant mind and creative thinker. How can his life possibly inform my own faith? What would I learn that might help me move further up and further into relationship with Jesus?

I think one thing that I continue to learn from and be inspired by Lewis is the Joy that defines his life. I am not referring to his wife, but rather a choice to a quality of life that changed everything once he was surprised by it! God, who is our Joy, relentlessly pursues us so that we might know the delight of a relationship with Him as He makes known His delight of us. Real Joy is the original shout, so to speak, and all the stories and myths of human making are only echoes. All the stories we tell are evidence of the reality of the True Story, the Real Myth that Tolkien argued effectively with his friend, moving Jack from atheism to theism. The Great Story really is true. God really sent his Son. He really died for our sins. We really can have forgiveness and eternal life in the presence of the One to whom all the Joy was pointing It was a desire for God. It is evidence that we were made for God. Lewis later said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world”.

Joy is one side and logic and objective truth that is a hallmark of Lewis’ life and writing is other side of the coin for me in understanding God. Everything true and beautiful is worth defending because it is ultimately God himself. I resonate with the way Lewis esteemed truth and reason and valued joy. Lewis’s concept of what it means to be human is a joyful and awesome wonder and we cannot overestimate the worth of anyone! It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses and that there are no ordinary people. Lewis said in one of his letters, “Joy is the serious business of heaven”. So we must play and hope and pursue Joy! Because God is Real. There is objective Truth. There is the gospel. And there is Joy.