Becoming Mrs. Lewis(3)

In a crack of my soul, during the untethered fear while calling for help, the sneaky Lion saw his chance, and God came in; he entered the fissures of my heart as if he’d been waiting a long time to find an opening. Warmth fell over me; a river of peace passed through me. For the first time in all my life, I felt fully known and loved. There was a solid sense that he was with me, had always been with me.

The revelation lasted not long, less than a minute, but also forever; time didn’t exist as a moment-to-moment metronome, but as eternity. I lost the borders between my body and the air, between my heart and my soul, between fear and peace. Everything in me thrummed with loving presence.

My heart slowed and the tears stopped. I bent forward and rested my wet cheek on the floor. “Why have you waited so long? Why have I?” I rested in the silence and then asked, “Now what?”

He didn’t answer. It wasn’t like that—there wasn’t a voice, but I did find the strength to stand, to gaze at my children with gratitude, to wait for what might come next.

God didn’t fix anything in that moment, but that wasn’t the point of it all. Still I didn’t know where Bill was, and still I was scared for his life, but Someone, my Creator it seemed, was there with me in all of it. This Someone was as real as my sons in their beds, as the storm battering the window frames, as my knees on the hardwood floors.

Finally, after wandering the streets and drinking himself into a stupor, Bill stumbled into a cab that brought him back to us just before dawn. When he walked through the front door, I held his face in my hands, smelled the rancid liquor, and told him that I loved him and that I now knew there was a God who loved us both, and I promised him that we would find our way together.




As the years passed, our coffee table became littered with history and philosophy books, with religious texts and pamphlets, but still we didn’t know how to make sense of an experience I knew had been as real as my heartbeat. If there was a God, and I was straight sure that there was, how did he appear in the world? How was I to approach him, if at all? Or was the experience nothing more than a flicker of understanding that didn’t change anything? This wasn’t a religious conversion at all; it was merely an understanding that something greater existed. I wanted to know more. And more.

One spring afternoon, after we’d moved to a rambling farmhouse in Staatsburg, New York, a three-year-old 1946 Atlantic Monthly magazine was facedown on the kitchen table and being used as a coaster for Bill’s coffee mug. I slid the mug to the side and flipped through the magazine as our sons napped. The pages flopped open to an article by a Beloit College professor named Chad Walsh. The piece was titled “Apostle to the Skeptics” and was an in-depth study of an Oxford fellow in England, a man named C. S. Lewis who was a converted atheist. Of course I’d heard of the author, had even read his Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce—both of them holding a whispered truth I was merely beginning to hear. I began to peruse the article, and it was only Douglas calling my name that startled me from the story of this author and teacher who’d reached American readers with his clear and lucid writing, his logic and intellectualism.

Soon I’d read everything Lewis had written—more than a dozen books, including a thin novel of such searing satire that I found myself drawn again and again to its wisdom hidden in story: The Screwtape Letters.

“Bill.” I held up Lewis’s book I was rereading, The Great Divorce, over dinner one night as the boys twirled their spaghetti. “Here is a man who might help us with some of our questions.”

“Could be,” he mumbled, lighting a cigarette before dinner was over, leaning back in his chair to stare at me through his rimless spectacles. “Although, Poogle, I’m not sure anyone has the answers we need.”

Bill was cold hard correct—believing in a god hadn’t been as simple as all that. Every philosophy and religion had a take on the deity I hadn’t been able to grasp. I was set to give up the search, shove the shattering God-experience into my big box of mistakes. That is, until I contacted Professor Walsh, the writer of the article, and said, “Tell me about C. S. Lewis.”

Professor Walsh had visited Lewis in Oxford and spent time with him. He was turning his articles into a book with the same title and he replied to me. “Write to Mr. Lewis,” he suggested. “He’s an avid letter writer and loves debate.”

There Bill and I were—three years after my blinding night of humbleness, three years of reading and study, of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and debate, of joining the Presbyterian church—when an idea was born: we would write a letter to C. S. Lewis, a letter full of our questions, our ponderings, and our doubts about the Christ he apparently believed in.





CHAPTER 2


Open your door, lest the belated heart

Die in the bitter night; open your door

“SONNET XLIV,” JOY DAVIDMAN





1950


Didn’t most everything begin with words? In the beginning was the word—even the Bible touted that truth. So it was with my friendship with Lewis.

I descended from my second-story office in our farmhouse into the frigid January day to grab the mail. Two separate trains of thought ran along the tracks of my mind: What would I cook the family for dinner? And how would my second novel, Weeping Bay, be received into the world in a few months?