Letter to the Author, C.S. Lewis

This "letter to an author" paper was written following a summer honors program at Taylor University that Alexa attended after her junior year of high school.

Alexa Weber
155 Spohn Rd.
Freeport, PA 16229

Dear C.S. Lewis,

When I cracked the cover of Mere Christianity during a course on Worldviews at Taylor University, my heart was heavy with the soul-searchings of previous months. I turned back to my journals and found bitterness and frustration. “God, are you there? Can you be known? Do you know me? Do you care about the simple struggles of mundane life?”

Just weeks before, an email from my friend and role model left me disillusioned. I had seen fire in her eyes; a passion for God that one could almost feel. Thus, when that fire seemed to have died; when she told me solemnly, “if we continue to walk through life thinking that we can know God with an unrealistically positive, super-spiritual view of Christianity and God -- thinking that he will bless us and reveal his will to us -- I think we walk naively. How can we even seek God, demanding a response, when we can’t see him? We can not know God in that way,” her words struck a blow to my morale.

When I first met her three or four years ago, I thought that having a “fire for God” meant having a burning emotion of love in my heart and seeking out some literal voice. I could talk the talk of passion, but when it all came down, I did not and never truly have touched, heard or seen God, at least not in the literal way I’d imagined. I found myself disillusioned by this “experiencing God” mentality. How can I pursue God relentlessly when it is impossible to know Him? What am I expecting in response to my questions? A sign? A letter? A miracle? I can’t feel him moving in me. I left for Taylor University haunted by questions. Are all the emotions, essays full of flowery words, and catchy slogans a facade, part of a deception that says we can experience God? I am generally an emotional person. Close and intimate contacts and relationships appeal to my personality. The ideals of a “Spirit stirring a soul to holiness” were like music to my ears. Even worship songs stress this ideal: “So close, I believe you’re holding me now . . .” and “I want to know you -- to touch you.” Was it an illusion?

As I studied it over the summer, Mere Christianity appealed to my rational side in many ways. God began to answer many of those questions scatted throughout my journal pages. How do I know that what I have devoted my life to is even true? I can not imagine a more solid proof than what you have provided here, as you brought to light the very evidence of God in my own life. There is ultimately fulfillment for every desire, the “apologetic of desire,” as you have called it. If the universe were meaningless, why would man search for meaning? If the world were purely natural, why would we long for beauty, perfection and joy? That we have these desires suggests that either man is a freak, or fulfillment for these desires does exist and that the world is deeper than evolution defines it to be. Yet I still desired to “touch” God.

I closed the cover of Mere Christianity, awed by the confirmation it had brought me. Yet the questions still eluded me. Can we truly know God in an experiential and intimate way? Or are we supposed to live by faith in the unseen -- faith being, as you have said, “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” Yet what is faith in reality? Perhaps, in this world, we can never truly know God or see him face to face. Yet perhaps this unfulfilled desire, a groping groaning for something more to this relationship between man and God, will ultimately be fulfilled. Either I am a fool that desires something that does not exist and ought to “give up chasing the rainbow’s end,” or perhaps, as you have said, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.” You defined hope as keeping alive these desires for things that “no experience in this world can satisfy.” This is faith: being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1).

Till we see God face to face,


Alexa Weber