Myth Became Fact

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” — John 1:14 (KJV)

After Albert's death, Little Lea was sold. With Jack's share of the money and some of Mrs Moore's, the household at last bought a home in 1930: the Kilns, a low brick house at the foot of Shotover Hill outside Oxford, with eight acres of woods and a pond in an old clay pit. Lewis loved it at first sight and lived there for the rest of his life.

For more than a year after kneeling down, he believed in God but not in Christ. He prayed, went to church, read the Gospels and tried to obey his conscience. What he couldn't do was make sense of the Christian story. How could the death of a man in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago have anything to do with him now? How could one man's death take away another's sins?

On Saturday 19 September 1931 he had two friends to dinner at Magdalen: Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson, a quick, witty lecturer who was also a Christian. Afterwards the three walked out along Addison's Walk, the path beside the river behind the college, and talked for hours about myth.

Lewis loved the ancient stories of a god who dies and comes back to life. When he met them in pagan writers they moved him deeply, and he didn't demand to know what they meant. But when he met the same pattern in the Gospels, he demanded explanations. Tolkien and Dyson turned this around. Why not let the story of Christ move him the way the old myths did, before he could explain it? And then they made the decisive point. The story of Christ was like those myths, with all their power and beauty, but with one immense difference: it really happened. At a real time, in a real place, under a real Roman governor. The old stories had been dim hints of the true one. The myth had become fact.

Tolkien went home at about three in the morning. Lewis and Dyson walked and talked until nearly four.

Nine days later, on 28 September 1931, Warnie drove Jack to Whipsnade Zoo on his motorcycle, with Jack in the sidecar. It was a sunny morning. There was no new argument and no dramatic moment. Lewis later put it simply:

“When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”

He compared it to waking up and realising you are already awake. (Most biographers give that date for the ride; one or two place it a little earlier the same month.) On 1 October he wrote to Arthur Greeves that he now believed in Christ, and that the night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it. Warnie, meanwhile, had found his own way back to faith that same year. On Christmas Day 1931 Jack took Communion at Holy Trinity, the village church near the Kilns, for the first time since that miserable confirmation in 1914. This time he believed. He stayed a faithful member of that church for the rest of his life.

John writes that the Word became flesh and lived among us. That is what finally reached Lewis: God didn't just give the world a beautiful idea; he stepped into history. Sometimes the barrier to faith isn't a lack of evidence but the wrong way of looking. And sometimes faith arrives quietly, without fireworks. If yours feels undramatic, that's fine. Lewis's arrived in a sidecar.

One thing to do this week: read John 1:1-14. Then write one sentence about what difference it makes to you that the story of Jesus actually happened, rather than being just a good story.