The great Christian apologist, author, and lecturer, C. S. Lewis, wrote during periods of hardship and upheaval, especially during the Second World War and the onset of the atomic age and the Cold War. He had to learn how to deal with changing circumstances, and he sought to convey some keys truths on this to his listeners and readers.

Life does not always go along smoothly and without interruption. One day you might be living a normal life, doing normal things, when suddenly your world is turned upside down. It might be a serious illness, a job loss, a relationship breakdown, some natural disaster, or an outbreak of war.

Think, for example, how so many people in Ukraine are now living. One day it was business as usual, but with the Russian hostilities, life changed radically. Many sons went off to war. Education may have ended for many people. Jobs and careers were interrupted. Life was put on hold, and people had to learn how to adjust.

Or think of those still struggling to put their lives back together in southeastern America following the devastation of Hurricane Helene. An article that just appeared in a Florida newspaper begins this way:

As people hang holiday decorations outside their homes, many homes in Waycross are still covered in tarps months after Hurricane Helene swept through the area, leaving behind damage in its wake. “I wasn’t crazy enough to think it would be probably done by Christmas,” said Reba Smith. Her house in Waycross looks different this Christmas. She, like many of her neighbors, is still rebuilding after Hurricane Helene.

The great Christian apologist, author and lecturer C.S. Lewis wrote during similar periods of hardship and upheaval, especially during the Second World War and the onset of the atomic age and the Cold War. He had to learn how to deal with changing circumstances, and he sought to convey some keys truths on this to his listeners and readers.

Two memorable pieces of his stand out in this regard. In Autumn, 1939 he preached a sermon in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in Oxford. It was titled, “Learning in War-Time.” And in a 1948 magazine he had an article appear with this title: “On Living in an Atomic Age.” I have mentioned and quoted from both pieces earlier:

How Should We Then Live in a Time of War?

Living During the End of All Things

Here I want to simply focus on the 1939 sermon. As the title indicates, he had to tell students and others that life goes on, even in wartime, and getting a solid education is still an important endeavour. As he said early on in that address:

I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons.

And things like reading and learning must go on, despite our difficult times:

Neither conversion nor enlistment in the army is really going to obliterate our human life. Christians and soldiers are still men: the infidel’s idea of a religious life, and the civilian’s idea of active service, are fantastic. If you attempted, in either case, to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better. You are not, in fact, going to read nothing, either in the Church or in the line: if you don’t read good books you will read bad ones. If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions you will fall into sensual satisfactions.

But the sermon’s final paragraphs, which I have not shared in previous articles, are worth offering here. I present them to you in their entirety:

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