Mrs. Lewis

Most days I get an advertising email from the bible bashers at reference 6, possibly on the strength of having bought online the book about Saint Perpetua noticed at reference 7. A book brought on by my wondering what would impel a healthy young woman with children to get herself martyred for Jesus.

Thinking that the bible bashers deserved another look, I came across and bought the book at reference 1. Another fictionalised account, this time of a very clever and talented young lady from New York, of Jewish stock, who got married and had children, found Jesus and wound up married for a second time to C. S. Lewis - the very English Oxbridge don responsible for both Narnia and a string of popular devotional works - before dying of some unpleasant form of cancer at the age of 45 in 1960, when her then husband was in his early sixties.

First thought was that BH might like it, but when it arrived it turned out to be a rather fat & forbidding paperback of more than 400 pages. But I thought I might learn something about how such a lady, one-time communist, one-time atheist, came to find Jesus. With my having puzzled for a lifetime about how seemingly sensible, well educated young people from the UK and the US can still do this. More understandable that one should find Allah in places like the north west frontier. Still the norm out there.

The book turned out to be quite readable, although I do admit to a very modest amount of skipping. But all I have found out about finding Jesus, is that it seemed to come in a small number of Damascus-moments, if I might so call them. In particular, the moment when she, who had thought of herself as an atheist, suddenly found herself praying at the bedside of one of her children when her then husband was absent on a drunk.

I come away with the impression that she was a very talented lady with a busy and sometimes turbulent social life - but who had something missing at the middle, in her core self. She seemed to need to have Jesus supply that core. And, perhaps, an older man whom she could respect. And Lewis - when they met an old bachelor, living with his brother in a rambling cottage on the outskirts of Oxford, very old-style Oxford don - who no doubt had his own problems - seemed to fit the bill. And that all worked out very well, much to the surprise of some of his friends.

Over to BH to see what she makes of it all.

I shall check whether we still have 'The Screwtape Letters' - although I doubt if I will do much more than look at them - and whether we still have 'Shadowlands' - which I am sure I have once watched. Although I now wonder whether the intense and forceful Hopkins is well cast as the shambly, bachelor don.

Reference 1: Becoming Mrs. Lewis - Patti Callaghan - 2018. This best selling author is well connected, as can be seen from the snap above.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Davidman.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/01/emetics.html. Screwtape.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/10/dream-on.html. Narnia.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/snow-white.html. Narnia.

Reference 6: https://www.eden.co.uk/.

Reference 7: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/01/perpetually-perpetua.html.