Yesterday a friend asked me why I like C.S. Lewis so much. Good question. And good questions deserve thoughtful answers, so I’ve been thinking about it since then and have come up with the three biggest reasons:

1. Heaven. How can I describe this? There’s a feeling in Lewis’s books — particularly in the Chronicles of Narnia and in The Great Divorce — of “further up and further in,” of a next life where things are greater and grander and more solid than they are here on earth — so much so that this life is a mere shadow of the next (thus Shadowlands). Reading Lewis’s books fills me with a wistful longing for that land beyond the sunset. (On a side note, the song Into the West from the Return of the King soundtrack is amazingly beautiful and captures a lot of this feeling.) I suppose you could call it the land of dreams, except that the dreams will be real and even better than we could possibly have imagined. That’s the heaven I’m looking forward to.

2. His explanations of things Christian. Lewis had a knack for taking things that pass underneath our noses — usually bits of human nature or doctrine, often small but rarely inconsequential — and crafting ingenious and memorable descriptions that pierce to the very center of the thing and ensure that it will never slip away without our notice again. And some of his Christian imagery is just incredible. Take, for example, this quote from Mere Christianity: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” Or this: “If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell” (The Great Divorce, Preface).

3. His love of books. This wasn’t why I first started reading Lewis, but when I got to Surprised by Joy and discovered how much he read — how deeply and how broadly — he became my literary role model. If you have the chance, check out some of the collections of his letters — they’re full of his comments about the books he was reading at the moment. Delicious stuff.

P.S. If you’re interested in C.S. Lewis quotes, check out Wikiquote’s page on him.

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