Life & Faith of C.S. Lewis, The

This is one very fine documentary that looks at the making of the C. S. Lewis legacy as a Christian writer and apologist in the 20th century. It consists of a series of well-connected commentaries by experts and friends committed to giving us a clearer understanding of Lewis' life as a boy, man, author, husband, and Christian. I like this film for the simple reason that it effectively explores how Lewis evolved intellectually in his efforts to understand who God was in his life. As a scholar, Lewis, early in life, chose to immerse himself in the arcane world of medieval myth, with all its romantic notions of chivalry and heroism, as his way of dealing with personal disappointments. He reluctantly but wonderfully found a way to reconnect with the world around him by becoming a Christian in the nineteen thirties. Lewis remade himself as a very popular figure in English literature only because he was able to take the abstract world he had fled to and convert it into an everyday set of experiences through the use of literary invention, namely, the world of Narnia. Through this creation, the reader gets to see how this writer was able to show how Christ and the great spiritual realm beyond has entered into our lives to make its very real claim on our earthly lives. For Lewis, as explained in this film, God is coming to us to make Himself known in the hopes of establishing an eternal relationship that has all kinds of heroic implications such as rescuing us from ourselves and making us fit for Heaven. What better entry point for that message than through the creative ability of children to imagine the existence of that bigger world that contains the likes of God (Aslan) and Screwtape (the Devil) in mortal combat for the souls of mankind. This documentary serves to highlight those events in the Lewis timeline where his view of God becomes enlarged to include periods of joy, grief, contentment and apprehension.