Home at Last
“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.”
—The Last Battle, chapter 15
A Flame That Did Not Flicker
Jack’s funeral was held at Holy Trinity on November 26, and he was buried in the churchyard—just a few blocks from his home. Perhaps because President Kennedy had died the same day as Lewis, perhaps because in spite of his fame Jack had always remained a very private person, there were relatively few people at the service. Among them were Douglas and David Gresham, Tolkien and his son Christopher, Peter Bide, and George Sayer. Notably missing was Warnie, who had turned to the bottle to drown his sorrow. Also missing was a young American named Walter Hooper who had served as Jack’s secretary over the summer and had promised to return after his teaching duties were over in January. Hooper did return in January, but now to serve as the editor of over a dozen of Lewis’s books and, for five decades, to play a key role in keeping Lewis’s work alive in print and available to future generations of readers all over the world.
George Sayer offers this account of the burial:
We clustered around to see the coffin lowered into the grave. It was the sort of day Jack would have appreciated, cold but sunny. It was also very still. A lighted church candle was placed on the coffin, and its flame did not flicker. For more than one of us, that clear, bright candle flame seemed to symbolize Jack. He had been the light of our lives, ever steadfast in friendship. (410–11)
A week later, a memorial service was held in Oxford in the Magdalen College chapel, where Lewis had worshiped for many years. As he had at Joy’s service nearly three and a half years earlier, Austin Farrer again offered words of comfort and remembrance.
Farrer commented that, as a writer, Lewis had a unique way of integrating his thoughts, emotions, and imagination—not compartmentalizing them—and that it was this “feeling intellect” and “intellectual imagination” that gave power to the many works Lewis had left behind (46). “There lived in his writings,” Farrer told those who had come to honor their friend, teacher, and colleague, “a Christian universe which could be both thought and felt, in which he was at home, and in which he made his reader at home.”
About Lewis the man, Farrer commented:
His characteristic attitude to people in general was one of consideration and respect. He did his best for them and he appreciated them. He paid you the compliment of attending to your words. . . . He was endlessly generous. He gave without stint, to all who seemed to care for them, the riches of his mind and the effort of his wit: and where there was need, he gave his money. . . . His patience and his loyalty were inexhaustible. He really was a Christian—by which I mean, he never thought he had the right to stop. (46–47)
Farrer ended with words of hope: “The life which Lewis lived with zest he surrendered with composure. He was put almost beside himself by his wife’s death; he seemed easy at the approach of his own. He died at the last in a minute. May he everlastingly rejoice in the Mercy he sincerely trusted.”
In his novels, Lewis had imagined a number of times what passing from this life to the next would be like. One of the most memorable is found in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Reepicheep sails alone in his tiny boat up the great wave standing at the world’s end. Lewis describes what happened next.
The coracle went more and more quickly, and beautifully it rushed up the wave’s side. For one split second they saw its shape and Reepicheep’s on the very top. Then it vanished, and since that moment no one can truly claim to have seen Reepicheep the Mouse. But my belief is that he came safe to Aslan’s country and is alive there to this day. (244)
In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis imagined the passing to eternal life not from the point of view of those left behind but from the perspective of Wormwood’s patient. At the moment of death, the man briefly sees Wormwood, who had been his tempter, but then sees the angelic host who had been assisting him all throughout his life. He feels for the first time a joy that is not fleeting and comes face-to-face with the risen Lord.
The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered. Recognition made him free of their company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet. . . . He saw not only Them; he saw Him. (174)
Another equally moving passage can be found in chapter 15 of The Last Battle, where the ensemble cast find themselves in a strange new land, and Lewis has Jewel the Unicorn declare: “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” (196).
But perhaps the most powerful words Lewis ever wrote about death and the eternal life that follows are the final sentences of The Last Battle. Adapted below, they serve as a fitting close for our exploration of Jack’s spiritual journey.
And for us this is the end of Jack’s story, and we can most truly say that he lived happily ever after. But for Jack, it was only the beginning of the real story. All his life in this world and all his adventures on earth had only been the cover and the title page: now at last he was beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Looking for Lewis
My very first trip to Oxford came in my midthirties, after I received funding from my school to attend a summer seminar on British literature. Since then I have been back enough times that I have lost count—more than eight but less than twenty. That first seminar was based at Oriel College, which sits between Merton College, where Tolkien taught, and University College, where Jack had been a student. Like thousands of Lewis fans before me and thousands who have come since, I made the mandatory visits—people who don’t understand what Lewis can mean to a life mockingly call them pilgrimages—to Magdalen College, the Eagle and Child, the Eastgate Hotel, the Kilns, and Holy Trinity, with several damaging stops in between at Blackwell’s Bookshop.
On the plus side, Magdalen still looks very much as it must have looked to Lewis when he was a fellow there (and, we might be tempted to say, to Addison when he was a fellow in the early 1700s). You can look into the hall and see the high table where Lewis and his guests dined. You can stroll Addison’s Walk and imagine the famous night when Jack walked and talked there with Tolkien and Dyson. Off to the side you can see Magdalen’s famous deer park—still looking much as it did when Jack watched the small, mysterious animals from his back window. You can look inside the chapel, and, if your schedule permits, you can attend evensong and pray in the same stalls that Lewis prayed in and hear choral music which will sound exactly the same—and in some cases will be exactly the same—as when he was there.
If you ask at the porter’s lodge, as I did, the porter will tell you how to find New Building (or “New Buildings,” he may say) and the door to the staircase that leads up to Lewis’s former rooms. I was reminded: “But you can’t go up there. There’s someone else there now.”
And his statement speaks volumes.
If you go looking for Lewis at Magdalen (remember to pronounce it maudlin), you will find little evidence that from 1925 to 1954 C. S. Lewis was one of the college’s most celebrated fellows and one of the university’s most popular lecturers, or that fifty years after his death he remains one of the best-selling authors not just of Oxford but in the world. In the far corner of Addison’s Walk, somewhat out of the way, you can find a stone plaque, erected in 1998 to commemorate the centenary of Lewis’s birth, that features his lovely poem “What the Bird Said Early in the Year.”
But that’s about it.
On that first visit long ago, I asked my tutor why this was so. “Do you mean, why don’t we have a C. S. Lewis snack bar, or little Lewis key chains for sale, or at least a glass display case with yellowed exam papers he had marked, one of his battered nib pens, and the tattered remnants of his gown?” he asked partially in jest—but only partially. My tutor answered his own question by telling me that Oxford had seen many great men come and go and would continue to do so. He reminded me that the university was already three hundred years old when Queen Elizabeth had visited—Elizabeth the First. “We would find that sort of veneration, which Americans are so prone to, well, rather vulgar,” he added.
If it seems difficult to find much of Lewis at Magdalen, it is just the opposite at Holy Trinity. The unassuming parish church he attended for the thirty-some years after his conversion seems somehow a better fit to the unassuming man whose clothes were more shabby than natty and who looked more like a prosperous butcher than a celebrity. Inside, you can sit in the pew he shared with Warnie—and, for a time, with Joy. And you can pause to reflect that it was in this exact spot during a particularly dull sermon that Jack came up with the idea for Screwtape.
Listening to the wind in the trees of the churchyard where he and Warnie are buried, one senses a deep peace that is lacking down in the city. Despite the buildup that the village of Headington has seen, a good bit of the country remains at the grave of the man who loved his country walks. It is a rare day that someone has not left a flower on the gravestone or a bit of paper with thanks or a favorite quote. More recently, tiny Narnia action figures have started to appear from time to time—a little Aslan or a miniature centaur left behind to stand watch.
Of course, if you are looking for Lewis, the best place to find him is at the Kilns. Restored to look as it would have during the days when Jack and Warnie lived there—except much cleaner—the house welcomes visitors for tours by appointment, made through the C. S. Lewis Foundation, which owns and manages the property. Everyone I have talked to who has visited has found that a genuine sense of Lewis fills the rooms and the lovely garden as well.
Several years back, I was invited to lead one of the summer seminars-in-residence which the foundation hosts. During our week at the Kilns, we ate in its dining room, met for class in the library, held late-night conversations out in the common room, and slept in its bedrooms. I got to sleep in Jack’s bedroom—as far as I can tell, the thing I have done in my life which has most impressed my mother.
As one can see in a picture of the Kilns, Jack’s bedroom is located upstairs on the end toward the street, and a set of external stairs along the side of the house leads up to it. During our week, a plump, middle-aged cat, affectionately named Jack, wandered in every afternoon—from where no one knew for sure—to offer his greetings and inspect the grounds. I was warned that if the night was particularly cool and I left my window open, Jack had been known to climb up the balcony stairs looking for a warm spot at the foot of the bed.
Our week turned out to be especially cold, and I huddled beneath a triple layer of blankets each night with the window wide open, hoping for a visitor. Alas, neither the real Jack nor his namesake made an appearance during the nights I slept there.
In his book Seeking the Secret Place: The Spiritual Formation of C. S. Lewis, Lyle Dorsett reports that as Lewis was nearing death, Owen Barfield, who was serving as Lewis’s legal advisor, asked him if he had decided how he wanted to allocate the future royalties from his books. In a statement which shows both his humility and the dubious value of predictions, Jack replied, “After I’ve been dead five years, no one will read anything I’ve written” (20).
Given that Lewis’s prediction was not merely incorrect but extravagantly so, I will hazard my own. If I am wrong, I will be in good company. And in any case, it is unlikely I will be around to be told I was wrong. Fifty years from now, at the one hundredth anniversary of Lewis’s death, I believe people will still be reading and enjoying the Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity in great numbers. It is harder to predict which of his other books, Lewis’s B-list, will still be popular. One contribution of digital and on-demand publishing is that all of Lewis’s books are sure to be still available in some form five decades from now. It is hard to imagine that his lesser-known works will not continue to have avid and interested readers, though their numbers may not be as great as they are today.
Even if fifty years from now no one is actually reading Lewis, his writings would continue to bear fruit. His efforts to rediscover the Christian imagination, to reclaim Christian reason, and to restore a Christian vision of humanity live on in the minds and hearts of countless readers everywhere. The lives he touched are already affecting others, and they in turn are touching still more.
And after all is said, it is those lives which serve as the best measure of Lewis’s accomplishment and are the best place for us to look for him—both now and in the years to come.