(upbeat music)
- Hi I'm Max McLean,
actor, artistic director for Fellowship
for Performing Arts speaking
to you from my apartment in New York city.
Sorry,
I couldn't be with you in DC,
where I plan to present scenes
from our play with C.S. Lewis on stage,
The Most Reluctant Convert.
It's the story of Lewis's journey
from atheism, hard-boiled atheist
to faith in Christ using his own words,
grateful for the folks
at the Colson Center,
particularly John Stonestreet
for this opportunity.
Let me give you a little background.
Lewis turned away from
faith at the age of 14.
Several things contributed
to his rejection of God.
The death of his mother by cancer,
when he was eight years old,
she was the love of his life.
He had a terrible
relationship with his father,
his atheism was further solidified
by experiencing the butchery of
a trench warfare in World War 1.
when he returned to Oxford after the war,
one of his classmates asked him ,
"Where you much frightened in France?"
And he said,
"All the time,
but I never sank so low as to pray."
Based on his experience
with evil and suffering,
he concluded either there was
no God behind the universe,
a God who is indifferent to good and evil,
or worse,
an evil God.
He embraced materialism,
but over a 10 year period after the war,
especially through the influence
of the writings of George
MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton,
as well as friendships
with Hugo Dyson and J. R. R.
Tolkien and Owen Barfield,
he moved away from strict materialism
to believe in the God of the philosophers.
Then he went into this kind
of monism stick spirit,
which he called the Absolute.
Coming to the personal
God behind the moral law,
but not yet Christian,
this God begins to bear down on him
and he takes a strict moral
inventory of his character
and what he finds he says appalls him,
a zoo of lusts,
a bedlam of ambitions,
a nursery of fears,
a harem of fondled hatreds,
my name is Legion.
And this is where we pick up the story.
(ambient music)
Oh, amiable agnostics talk cheerfully,
of man's search for God. (laughs)
Men will talk about the mouses,
search for the cat.
All I ever wanted was not
to be interfered with.
To call my soul my own,
keep out private.
This is my business.
Let no one talk glibly about
the comforts of religion.
Oh, is it a small thing to give yourself,
blindly,
to a God who on his own showing,
may very well be leading you to poverty,
ridicule, death.
Oh, I knew I would not allow myself
to do anything, intolerably painful.
I would be reasonable.
Would it be reasonable?
(soft atmospheric music)
No assurance was offered.
(soft music)
It was all
or nothing.
As the dry bones shook in a
Ezekiel's dreadful valley,
the absolute spirit began
to stir and heave throw
off its grave clothes.
He said,
"I am the Lord.
I am that I am,
I am."
You must picture me alone
in my room at Magdalen,
night after night, feeling,
whenever my mind lifted even
for a second from my work,
the steady, unrelenting approach
of Him whom I so earnestly
desired not to meet.
(crowd laughs)
That which I greatly feared
had at last come upon me.
In the Trinity Term 1929 ,
I gave in,
and admitted that God is God,
and knelt and prayed,
perhaps, that night, the most dejected,
reluctant convert,
in all England.
(crowd laughs)
(soft music)
I did not then see the divine love
that would accept a
prodigal on such terms.
Kicking,
struggling,
resentful,
darting his eyes in every direction ,
looking for a chance to escape.
The hardness of God is kinder
than the softness of man.
His compulsion is my liberation.
(ambient music)
You must understand
that the conversion I just described,
was all enthusiasm,
totally simple,
no Christianity.
I knew nothing of the incarnation.
The God to whom I
surrendered was not human.
I had no belief in an afterlife.
That to me, felt like a bribe.
(crowd laughs)
I did begin prayer,
but at the time it felt
like posting letters
to a nonexistent address.
(crowd laughs)
Oh, I suppose that was a dead way
to vote skeptical habits,
because all of my reasonable
mind was convinced
that the universe cannot explain itself.
That God is behind the universe,
that He has purposes
and He's to be obeyed
simply because he is God.
My religion was like that at the Jews.
As soon as I became atheist,
I started attending my parish church
on Sunday and college
chapel during the week.
Not because I believed in Christianity,
but because I thought,
one should fly one's flag.
(crowd laughs)
Oh, church was an unattractive affair.
I liked clergy as I like bears,
but I'd no more wish to be in church,
as to be in a zoo.
(crowd laughs)
Church to me meant ugly architecture,
ugly music,
bad poetry.
Hymns are extremely disagreeable to me.
(crowd laughs)
And the botheration of it all.
The crowds,
the notices,
the perpetual organizing.
(crowd laughs)
But now that I believed in God,
I wanted to know more
of him from any source.
Pagan or Christian,
the perplexing number of religions began
to sort itself out.
The question was no longer to find
the one true religion among many,
but where had the thing grown up.
Paganism was a childhood of religion.
Where had it reached to maturity ?
Well when I saw materialism
I was no longer concerned.
Their view was out of court.
If reason is only the accidental result
of atoms colliding in skulls.
I see no reason why I should believe
one accident should give
the correct card ball other accidents.
Oh, it's like asking
spilled milk on the floor
to give the correct account
of the jar that it came from
and why it was spilt.
No, my allegiance was now
with the massive humanity
who had danced,
sang,
prayed,
worshiped.
There isn't really an
infinite variety of religions.
You know, to me, the only
ones worth considering
were Christianity and Hinduism.
Islam is only the greatest
of the Christian Hades is.
Buddhism is one of the
greatest of the Hindu Hades is,
all that is best in Judaism
and in Plato survives in Christianity
and Hinduism baaz no historical claim.
Oh, that had been put into my head by
that hard-boiled eight years who said,
"All that mythology about (mumbles) gods ,
looks as if it really happened (mumbles)
(crowd laughs)
One day Tolkien and I took
a stroll on Addison's walk.
As we talked, I said,
"Tolles, I have with
considerable resistance,
come to believe in God,
but not Christianity.
I simply cannot believe
something I do not understand.
How can the life and
death of someone else,
whoever he was, 2000 years ago,
help us here and now?"
Tolles answered,
"Jack,
when you meet a God sacrificing himself
in a pagan story, such
as Dionysius or Boulder,
or even a fairy tale,
you'll like it very much.
And I'm mysteriously moved by it provided,
you meet it anywhere,
except in the gospels.
Jack, the story of Christ is a myth
Working on us in the
same way as other myths,
with one tremendous difference,
it really happened."
(wind blowing)
Suddenly, rushing wind
interrupted(mumbles)
so many leaves fell to the ground.
I thought it was raining.
I held my breath,
(soft music)
Tolles and I talked deep into the night.
Hugo Dyson joined us.
They convinced me that ,
nothing else in all literature,
is just like the gospel says.
And that no person is like
the person they depict.
When I would bring this up,
my colleagues would say,
"Jack, I'm ready to accept Jesus
as a ,
great moral teacher,
but I simply cannot accept
his claim to be God."
How could a mere man be called
a great moral teacher and
say the sorts of things,
Jesus said ?
That he always existed,
that he will come again
to judge the world.
Chesterton wrote,
that no great moral teacher
ever claim to be God,
not Moses, not Mohammad,
not Plato, not Buddha.
Not one.
If you had gone to Buddha and asked,
"Are you the son of Brahma? "
He would have said,
"My son, you are still
in the veil of illusion."
(crowd laughs)
If you had gone to Socrates and asked,
"Are you Zeus?"
He would have laughed at you.
And if you had gone to Mohammad and asked,
"Are you Allah?"
He would first tear his clothes,
then cut your head off.
(crowd laughs)
No great moral teacher
ever made that claim,
except Jesus.
And he went on claiming to forgive sins
and that he himself is the injured party
in every transgression, ha!
In anyone else,
this would be thought silly.
Eh, suppose you told me
that two of your colleagues
had lost you a professorship
by telling lies about your character.
And I reply,
"I freely forgive them both."
Oh, would you not think
that's sheer lunacy?
(crowd laughs)
And yet even those who opposed him,
admitted that he expressed moral truth
with depth and purity,
full of wisdom and trueness.
He calls Himself humble and meek,
and we believe Him,
not noticing that humility and meekness
are the last things you would describe
to a man who makes claims
worthy of a megalomaniac.
Kirk taught me to shame inconsistency.
If Jesus' statements are false,
Christianity is of no importance.
If true it is of infinite importance.
The one thing it cannot be
is moderately important.
(crowd laughs)
Oh, I felt our resistance to this.
Almost as strong as my resistance
to theism .
Every step from the absolute,
to spit it to God,
was a step toward the more concrete
and now to accept the incarnation ,
that God became man,
was a further step in the same direction.
This too was something I had not wanted.
I remember very well when,
but hardly how ,
the final step was taken.
I was being driven by my
brother Warnie to Whipsnade
the zoo in the sidecar of a motorcycle,
one sunny morning in the autumn of 1931.
When we set out,
I did not believe that Jesus
Christ is the son of God.
When we reached the zoo,
I did.
(crowd laughs)
I had not spent the journey
and thought all great emotion,
It was more like a man walked
along sleep, has become aware,
he is now awake.
(soft music)
My conversion shed new
lights on my search for joy.
The overwhelming longings
that emerged from fantasies.
And my brother's toy garden
were merely sign posts
to what I really desired.
They were not the thing itself.
I concluded that if I
found in myself the desire
which no experience in
this world could satisfy,
the most probable explanation is,
I was made for another world.
The faint, far-off
results of those energies
which God's creative
rapture implanted in matter
when He made the worlds,
are what we now call physical pleasures.
And even thus filtered,
they are too much for
our present management.
What will it be like,
to taste at the fountain-head
that stream of delight,
which even the smallest drop,
prove so intoxicating?
(soft music)
That,
I now believe,
is what lies before us.
We are to drink joy,
at the fountain of joy.
At present we're on the
outside of that world.
The wrong side of the door.
We cannot mingle with the splendors,
we've seen.
But all the leaves of the New Testament
are rustling with the rumor
that it will not always be so.
One day, God willing,
we shall get in.
(ambient music)
Meanwhile,
the cross comes before the crown
and tomorrow is a another morning.
A cleft has opened in the
pitiless walls of this world,
and we have been invited to
follow our great Captain inside.
Following Him is,
of course, the essential point.
That Christmas,
I took the short walk to my parish church,
that walk marked the end of one journey,
and the beginning of another.
As I sat in the Pew and looked around,
I thought,
well, not only potential glory hereafter,
but also that my neighbor's glory.
Oh, it is a serious thing
to live in a society
of possible gods and goddesses,
to remember that the dullest,
most uninteresting person you meet,
may one day be a creature
that if you saw it now,
you would be strongly tempted to worship.
Or else a horror or a
corruption such as you now meet
if at all,
only in a nightmare.
All day long,
we are helping each other to one
or the other of these destinations.
It is in the light of these
overwhelming possibilities
that I should now contact all my dealings.
Now I know all my people,
I never met a mere mortal,
nations, cultures , civilizations,
these are mortals,
and their life is to
ours as that of a gnat.
It is immortals whom we joke with,
work with, marry, snub,
exploit,
the weight or burden of
my neighbor's glory ,
should be laid daily on my back.
A load so heavy.
That only humility can carry it
And the backs of the proud will be broken.
At the close of the service,
they read from the book of common prayer .
Christ, our Passover ,
is sacrificed for us.
Therefor,
let us keep the feast.
I got up from my Pew,
walked to the front ,
knelt and received
the bread and the wine,
the body and the blood of Jesus Christ.
Unlike my first communion,
17 years earlier,
I now,
believe
(atmospheric music)
(crowd applauding)
