Once Upon a September
On a Sunday in September, over ninety-years ago, C.S. Lewis took a walk that forever changed his life. He was enjoying the fellowship of his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Their conversation turned to myth and reality. The wind picked up. Lewis tuned in. His restless atheism was giving way to belief in God. Lewis later described Tolkien and Dyson as the “immediate human causes” of his conversion.
Here’s Lewis’s description of his move from atheism to theism:
“You must picture me alone in that room in 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. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
The following video only features Tolkien and Lewis, but is inspired by that historic conversation on Addison’s Walk within view of Lewis’s office at the University of Oxford:
For Lewis, belief in God came after a stroll and a conversation with trusted friends. That is, after all, the real sweet spot for Christian evangelism, isn’t it? Who can you walk with this September?