Coffee with Lewis: this deplorable walk
January 13, 2010
Who wouldn’t enjoy a walk with C.S. Lewis? That depends on a lot of things. Over at Scriptorium Daily, Fred Sanders shares a letter from C.S. Lewis about a walk that didn’t go very well. I’ll let Sanders take it from here:
In second volume of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (Books, broadcasts, and the War, 1931-1949), Lewis tells a story about taking a terrible walk with somebody named Kenchaw, somebody with whom Lewis seemed to have nothing in common and nothing to talk about. “That Kenchaw man,” he calls him, in a letter to his brother Warnie who is serving in the military in Shanghai. Lewis writes the letter (dated March 20, 1932) with obvious relish in sharing a good yarn with his brother, but it really does sound like an awful walk. Lewis had only been a Christian for about a year, and this letter has plenty of the sarcasm, superiority, and priggishness that Jesus was going to work out of him in the coming years of spiritual disciplines. We won’t catch him being quite this catty again very often after 1932, but it’s interesting to know he had it in him.
