Putting Others First: C. S. Lewis’s Correspondence Ministry (1941-1963)

If living a Christian life means imitating Jesus, we should be willing to minister to the needs of others even when doing so involves great inconvenience to ourselves. In the case of C. S. Lewis, this usually involved the disciplined sacrifice of time in the midst of an incredibly busy life as a scholar, teacher, and writer.¹

Having embarked on a career as an Oxford academic in the 1920s,² Lewis would have gained little notoriety had he simply remained an Oxford don. But his subsequent conversion from atheism to Christianity,³ followed by the launch of his worldwide ministry as a popular Christian writer and apologist during the 1940s and ‘50s, changed all that. With fame came an enormous flood of correspondence from all kinds of people, including many children.

Most individuals placed in Lewis’ position would have excused themselves from personally responding to thousands of letters from complete strangers. There were, after all, plenty of good reasons for doing so. He was often worked to the point of distraction by his university duties – taking tutorials, giving lectures, and marking exam papers. He also needed time for his own research and writing, added to which he suffered from a rheumatic arm, couldn’t use a typewriter, and had little secretarial support.

Although he never allowed any of his frustration or irritability over the pressures he faced to surface in his correspondence with his fans, occasional remarks to his friends revealed the personal cost of this self-imposed discipline of responding to every letter written to him. “I wrote 35 letters yesterday: all out of working hours of course,” he told Eric Fenn, Assistant Head of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC, in a letter written some months after his first radio talks in August 1941.⁴ On another occasion he complained to Dorothy Sayers:⁵ “Oh the mails: every bore in two continents seems to think I like getting letters.”⁶ Despite these feelings, however, Lewis devoted many hundreds of hours (usually early in the morning) to what he considered his Christian duty of offering counsel and encouragement to all those who sought his help and advice, over matters both large and trivial.

The most remarkable example of this correspondence ministry are the 132 letters Lewis wrote to an American lady between 1950 and 1963,⁷ a woman he helped financially⁸ and described to a friend as “very silly…old, poor, sick, lonely, and miserable.”⁹ These letters overflow with comfort and advice over job losses, illness, bereavement, and fear of death. On one occasion, for instance, in response to his correspondent’s fear of having to move out of her home, Lewis wrote: “As for the bug-bear of Old Peoples’ Homes, remember that our ignorance works both ways. Just as some of the things we have longed and hoped for turn out to be dust and ashes when we get them, so the things we have most dreaded sometimes turn out to be quite nice. If you ever do have to go to a Home, Christ will be there just as much as in any other place.”¹⁰ But it was in response to her fear of dying that Lewis wrote his most moving letter not long before his own death on November 22, 1963: “Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you…There are better things ahead than any we leave behind…Don’t you think Our Lord says to you ‘Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms.’”¹¹

That these letters have been published, so enabling them to comfort and strengthen others facing similar problems and sorrows, is an inspiring tribute to the potential fruitfulness of time surrendered in seemingly small ways to God’s service through self-forgetfulness and self-discipline.

Footnotes: