Happy Birthday!

Clive Staples Lewis was born this day in 1898.

My quote-of-the-day-email-guy notes this passage from the end of Chapter 3 of Lewis' Mere Christianity:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic... or else He would be the Devil in Hell... let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher."

(The quote puts my QOTDEMG's nose out of joint, but I believe that Lewis is spot on.)

I was first given an anthology of Lewis' writings when I was a first year law student. And I remember quite clearly that it was only in reading him that I finally began to grasp any notion of what was really meant by Faith. Of course, Lewis never became a Catholic himself, but it's quite safe to say that he was largely responsible for my first tottering steps towards the banks of the Tiber, and has continued at my side even as I splash about in its waves. However, I'd recommend him to anybody, regardless of their particular denomination.

The eldest Llama-ette and I also make the Chronicles of Narnia our primary bedtime reading. This year, we've gone all the way through the cycle, and are now (on the insistence of the gel), reading them in reverse order. Currently we're in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and the gel talks ominously of starting the whole business all over again once we've finished The Magician's Nephew. I think, I think, that the morals of the stories are starting to sink in on her. (She seems particularly interested in characters such as Edmund and Eustace who turn from their former, rotten selves with Aslan's help.) However, I also happen to know that she loves the Brit inflections I put on the children's speech. Recently, she said, "You know, Dad, you sort of sound like that when you talk." She meant it as a compliment, but I was a bit startled to be caught out in my pretentious Anglophilia by a mere nine year old.