I don’t go to Manhattan very often, but this summer nothing could have kept me away from this home of great theater. I have long been a devoted fan of C.S. Lewis, the great British Christian writer of the early 20th century who died Nov. 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy died from an assassin’s bullet.
And this summer, two of Manhattan’s off-Broadway theater productions featured the Christian beliefs of Lewis. One was “Screwtape Letters,” and another, “Freud’s Last Session,” where the atheist Freud, now near death, calls in Lewis, the Christian, challenging him on his writings supporting belief in “what or who he calls God.”
I became a C.S. Lewis fan way back in 1943, thanks to my high school music teacher, Sister Jerome Joseph. One day I met her in the hallway and she was smiling. I asked her why and she told me she was reading this very funny new book called “Screwtape Letters.” Knowing I was always reading, she said she’d pass it on to me as soon as she finished it.
Well, she did, and then it was me walking down the hallways smiling. It was my introduction to Lewis, and I was an immediate fan as I read about Screwtape, a seasoned devil, trying to train a neophyte devil, Wormwood, in the ways of deviltry.
In the Westside Theatre, off-Broadway play, Screwtape, played by Max McLean, does a masterful job providing instruction for the devil-in-training, Wormwood, on how to get the soul of a specific Christian. But, ah, he fails — to the delight of the audience, many of whom, I’d wager, had no doubt read this long-acclaimed book.
Now, moving uptown, fortunate theatergoers filled the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater to hear quite a verbal battle as two brilliant men express their vastly different beliefs about life and God. No one seems to know for sure whether these two men ever met in person, but certainly Lewis was well aware of the atheist Freud in his lifetime.
In his acclaimed book, “Mere Christianity,” Lewis writes, “The philosophy of Freud — is in direct contradiction to Christianity; and also in contradiction to the other great psychologist Jung. And furthermore, when Freud is talking about how to cure neurotics, he is speaking as a specialist on his own subject, but when he goes on to talk general philosophy, he is speaking as an amateur. It is therefore quite sensible to attend to him with respect in one case and not in the other — and that is what I do.”
I expect that I so enjoyed these plays about C.S. Lewis because I have 16 of his books and have read so much of his life and beliefs since my teen years that my respect for him is enormous. I was so deeply touched by his autographical “Surprised by Joy.”
The book tells of his lonely early youth, his mother’s death when he was only 9, his distant father, with whom he and his only sibling, a brother, could never really have a positive or nurturing relationship.
His incredible pain and loss at seeing his mother dead put him in a no-man’s land when it came to faith, and this book tells of his ensuing spiritual journey that led him to atheism and then back to Christianity.
Inspired by this spiritual man, I studied for a summer religious program at Oxford, where he had been a professor, specifically planning to attend services at the chapel of Magdalen College, where he went every day for morning prayers.
And one thing more — I knew C.S. Lewis frequented a bar at Oxford, with his own seat always set aside for him. One pre-lunch time, I went to the bar, spoke to the one person there, a bartender, and asked if he would show me Mr. Lewis’ place. This gentleman escorted me to the table, and smiling, graciously invited me to sit in C.S. Lewis’ chair.
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