By the Lion's Mane

"But," said Eustace, looking at Aslan. "Hasn't [Caspian]-er-died?"

"Yes," said the Lion in a very quiet voice, almost (Jill thought) as if he were laughing.

"He has died. Most people have, you know. Even I have. There are very few who haven't."

"Oh," said Caspian. "I see what's bothering you. You think I'm a ghost, or some nonsense. But don't you see?I would be that, if I appeared in Narnia now: because I don't belong there any more. But one can't be a ghost in one's own country."

Chapter 16, "The Healing of Harms", The Silver Chair

The tributes to C.S. Lewis are numerous; perhaps not numerous enough (the BBC news did not even have the 50th anniversary of his death on its main page today), but there are many people who have made a point of recognizing this man's influence. Why another?

The reason lies deep within my own personal story. Within the deep woods of northern Idaho, I treasured a Christmas gift received from my grandparents--a boxed paperback set of the Chronicles of Narnia. I sat down and read them that snowy winter, as did every single person in my family. They captured my imagination and kindled a longing for forests not found in this world, and a childlike devotion and reverence for the character of Aslan.

It was about 8 years later when I broke through the tangled and perilous groves of adolescence to discover the country I had been hungering for since Narnia: a real Paradise, a real Lion, a real Resurrection. In a word, Christianity.

Not as people invent it, but as Lewis would say, 'mere' Christianity. The core... what Jesus and the apostles declared to the world in the first century AD. God made people; people rebelled, thus laying a curse on themselves and their posterity. God would be perfectly just to let the whole world go to hell, but since He is perfectly merciful He chose the unthinkable: to personally take the hit for His own creatures who have the nasty habit of thumbing their noses at Him. Jesus, God's own Son, descended to earth as God in human flesh, and lived a perfectly obedient life and died an undeserved death on a Roman cross. By faith in His mercy and sacrifice for our sake, we are saved from the penalty of sin (hell) and forgiven. With guilt erased, we are actually adopted by God as His own children, and called to follow Him in a life of discipleship, changing by God's grace and empowered by His Holy Spirit.

This is 'mere' Christianity. It is what mainstream, Bible-believing Christians have persistently said for 2,000 years. It's the basics.

But back to Lewis. I thank God for him because Lewis first enchanted me through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, then awoke my Christian mind in his book Mere Christianity.

50 years ago, Lewis entered his rest in Heaven, a very real person. He doesn't belong here anymore, except in his works; he belongs in that far green country under a swift sunrise.