St. Mark's

Above is my scrapbook page of St. Mark's, Dundela, Belfast, the church where C. S. Lewis was baptized and in which he had his early training in the faith. (The picture below shows the baptismal font in the center.) Lewis's maternal grandfather was the first rector of St. Mark's, and thus Lewis's mother, Flora, grew up in the Rectory (above left). Lewis could see the tower of St. Mark's (above right) from the third floor window of Little Lea, the window at the opposite end of the house from the Little End Room.

Lewis wrote the following about his early church experience in Surprised by Joy:

"If aesthetic experiences were rare, religious experiences did not occur at all. Some people have got the impression from my books that I was brought up in strict and vivid Puritanism, but this is quite untrue. I was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church. I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannot remember feeling much interest in it. My father, far from being specially Puritanical, was, by nineteenth-century and Church of Ireland standards, rather 'high', and his approach to religion, as to literature, was at the opposite pole from what later became my own. The charm of tradition and the verbal beauty of Bible and Prayer Book (all of them for me late and acquired tastes) were his natural delight, and it would have been hard to find an equally intelligent man who cared so little for metaphysics. Of my mother's religion I can say almost nothing from my own memory. My childhood, at all events, was not in the least other-worldly."

Then later on in Surprised by Joy Lewis writes:

"My relations to my father help to explain (I am not suggesting that they excuse) one of the worst acts of my life. I allowed myself to be prepared for confirmation, and confirmed, and to make my first Communion, in total disbelief, acting a part, eating and drinking my own condemnation. . . . It is true that I did not and could not then know the real nature of the thing I was doing: but I knew very well that I was acting a lie with the greatest possible solemnity. It seemed to me impossible to tell my father my real views."

(C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955, pp. 15, 153.)

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Will Vaus

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