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Lewis Festival Scholar Series
"Imagination in Lewis’s Journey to Faith" Sarah Arthur Ep. 2 LFSS Season 7
00:45:09
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Welcome to the c.s. lewis festival scholar series. I'm your host, david krause. Since inception in 2003, over 22,000 people have attended a variety of cultural, religious and educational events each September at the renowned Great Lakes center for the Arts along the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan. For this year's festival, please Visit us@cslewisfestival.org for events and registrations in Petoskey, Michigan. As part of this growing podcast series, we're taking a look at the 2024 CS Lewis Festival featuring a unique group of speakers and authors delving into the theme the Seeker and the storytellers featuring C.S. lewis, Madeleine Lingle, and Thomas Merton. All three were 20th century seekers whose moral imagination and spiritual quests were transformed by reading great books. All three went on to become renowned authors, poets and storytellers of faith whose works are widely influential today. Today's podcast features festival co founder Sarah Arthur. Sarah is the author of a dozen nonfiction books on the intersection of faith and great literature, including the award winning A Light so the Spiritual legacy of Madeleine L'. Engle. Sarah also co directs, along with Sophronia Scott, the L' Engle Writing Retreats held annually in the U.S. sarah's young adult fantasy series, Once a Queen and recently featured on NBC's Today show is inspired by authors like Lewis and Lengle. Sarah's talk is from reader to reluctant the Role of Imagination in CS Lewis Journey to Faith. Now Sarah Arthur
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David has introduced me as one of the founding board members with my husband Tom of the C.S. lewis Festival. But my interests have been more than just Lewis. I mean, my first book was called Walking with Frodo and it was Spiritual Reflections on the Lord of the Rings. I had just finished about seven years in youth ministry and I really felt it was important for people to when the movies had come out, which tells you how long ago this was to have really thoughtful conversations about the spiritual themes in the Lord of the Rings and especially in settings where you have charge of young people and their spiritual formation. That was important to me to provide thoughtful ways to do that. And that book did very well so that after seven years in youth ministry and then doing the book, I moved into writing similar things. So I wrote something for the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and for the Hobbit, and I did something about dating with Jane Austen and formative materials for teenagers was really how I got my start in writing in nonfiction. But my real love is writing fiction and that goes back a long, long way. So every time I would get back into my very first novel, which just came out this past January. It's called Once a Queen. I'll be signing it down at McLean and Akin. Every time I was trying to get back into this novel that I worked on for 20 years. 20 years, I would get tugged into writing something else. So Zondervan approached me about writing a spiritual biography of Madeleine l'. Engle. And so these. So as I was researching the book, that was the light. So lovely spiritual legacy of Madeline. Is it? It's out there. Is it out There Has a lovely picture of Madeline on the front. It's her engagement photo. They cut Hugh Franklin out of it. They were married a long time. She loved the guy, but they wanted the picture. So I had the wonderful opportunity in doing that nonfiction book. I wasn't as grumpy about having to set aside my fiction because I had a chance to meet Madeline's granddaughters, Charlotte Jones Voiclis and through Charlotte, Lena Roy, her sister. So all of a piece with my love of fiction and also deeply embedded me in reading Madeleine widely, understanding her world better and putting her in conversation in that book. I do a lot with Lewis, too. Like, I'm. They were, you know, not contemporaries, but they both had a huge influence on my childhood imagination and on the overlapping Venn diagram of ways that, as spiritual writers, they have influenced a lot of people, but particularly through their fiction and their children's books. So my topic is about Lewis's journey to faith, from reader to reluctant convert, the role of imagination in Lewis's journey to faith. And I added, and more, because I'm going to be speaking out of my discipline as a theologian and realizing that, like, part of my point is that it isn't just one thing that leads to somebody's, you know, that that is part of our faith journey or anybody's faith journey, whatever their spirituality. There's a whole ecology of things that are part of that imagination. For Lewis is one of those. And I'll get into that more in a little bit, but to begin. Okay, so you saw this last night. Just a quick recap for people who aren't Lewisy people. He was born in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland, to a family that was part of the Church of Ire. So his mother's father was a clergy person in the Church of Ireland. And he. So we think of him as, like, English, but he was actually Irish, and then was educated in Britain and made his home in England from the time of his childhood as a student in boarding school. And of course, he's known for the Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity. And Surprised by Joy specifically, which is the memoir of his conversion from atheism to Christianity. Okay, I think I've set this up backwards. I need this a little closer to me. Hold on. And if I lose that, we know it'll come back. Okay, the tech people aren't here, so wish us luck. All right, so how many of you have read Surprised by Joy, the shape of his early life? Okay, so it's a really, really famous memoir. And part of what? The way that that story gets narrated about his journey from a childhood connected kind of loosely with Church of Ireland, which is the Anglican Church, like part of the Anglican Church more broadly. And then the way that it's narrated by Lewis himself is that his childhood faith didn't mean a whole lot. Like it was more rote. Everybody did this. Like you went to church, you did the thing and you were baptized. And of course, his grandfather was a clergy person. So what we get down the road in Surprised by Joy is I was churchy with a churchy family. It didn't mean much. It didn't affect my heart and my emotions, therefore it didn't count. And then when I was a young man or when he was a teenager, he became an atheist while at boarding school and kind of an obnoxious and hard boiled atheist. And then eventually goes through university in Oxford, goes into World War I. And it was after the World War that things began. I don't know how you would want to describe it, but the wall that he had put up had begun to crumble, but in stages. And then he has a moment where he becomes a theist, where he comes back and says, okay, there is a God. And then after that is when he finally surrender his life to claiming Jesus as the Lord of his life. And he's gonna now make the turn finally to being a Christian and a practicing Christian, where it matters, it matters immensely to him. And after that, his writing, he kind of is kind of an evangelist. He wants you to know about why this Christian faith is plausible and reasonable and can be. You don't have to check your brain at the do to be a Christian. And so the bulk of his work after that and how he became famous is inseparable from that, from those changes and those moments of transformation. And I. So I've put some of these things up here. So there's Surprised by Joy where he narrates a lot of this. And you all, many of you have read it. I threw one of the biographies up Here. The man who Created Narnia by Michael Coren. I don't even know if this is still around, but it was really designed for kind of like the biography that Lena and Charlotte did of their grandmother. It's called Becoming Madeline. And I believe they have it out there. And there's a lot of photographs. It's kind of more for middle grade readers. Like if your teacher says, who do you want to do a book report on? And this kid says, I want to do it on the guy who wrote the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The teacher will say, well, this has lots of great pictures and it's written very simply so you can get a good sense of his life. And I love it because the pictures are fun and it's not just specifically about his faith journey. Whereas a lot of the other biographical material charts that. I mean, the conversion is like the thing, right? Like this is what has so deeply impacted so many people. Alan Jacobs, well known professor of literature, did the the Life and imagination of C.S. lewis. There's so many, I mean there's just dozens biographies out there and I wanted to throw a couple of them up so you can get a sense of what they are. But something that I began to notice as I was researching this talk is that when people narrate in their biographies about Lewis's journey to faith, they either agree with him or don't question his sense that his childhood faith didn't matter or didn't count, or that. And, and they. No, I, I want, I want to investigate that a little bit because my training in theology is not in systematic theology, it's in practical theology, which I think is a really funny title because if like all of that is like the heady, like, you know, irrelevant stuff, but we matter in practical theology. And I just kind of, I get tickled by that. But what it really is talking about is in the disciplines of theology and those of us who have been brought up in kind of more Reformed and Reformed adjacent traditions within Christianity, the focus really is on systematic theology. And this is true in the Baptist, a lot of Baptist traditions. And it's true if you're engaged in non political evangelical conversations about theology. Is that possible anymore? I don't know. But so if you're engaged in those, the sense is that systematic theology is the clear description of what Christians believe and why it's plausible and why it matters. All right? That is systematic theology. It is helping you understand and us understand the internal logic of the Christian faith. And so you see the Apostle Paul in the New Testament doing that in his letters. He's doing some systematic theology in Romans when he's talking about the covenant and God's promises to Israel. And now where do Gentiles fit into the story that is systematic theology? He is assuming that his listeners and readers, and it would have been listeners with the early church, his letters would have been read aloud to probably some grumbling and complaining. They would have been read aloud. And he assumed that you as a listener know the core stories and practices of the church and the Christian faith. He is assuming you know those the letters are to churches. And if you do not have those core stories and core practices, the letters are not for you. It is really hard to do systematic theology if you don't first have the core narratives and practices of the community. Now a four year old is not going to like. We don't kick off our kids programming like we did last week in my home church in Lansing with the Book of Romans. We're kicking it off with the Gospels. We're starting with there was a girl, young teenager named Mary and an angel talked to her. And so in my discipline, I at Duke Divinity School did not do systematic theology. I studied practical theology because it is about the practices of faith communities. And the practices are what we call the primary discourse of the Christian faith. These are the things that come first, not the catechism, right? Like what is the chief end of man to love God and enjoy him forever. I don't start there with my 11 year old yet, like right when he was little. I started with once there was a man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves, right. I start with the parable of Jesus. I start with the birth of Jesus. And in a faith community, what's happening in that worship space with the liturgy and the reading of scripture and the music and the rite and things that we participate in, that is primary discourse. So we have within practical theology, we are investigating how those practices of the Christian faith, of engaging in story, of singing the scriptures, of hearing the stories of Jesus, of praying there are words in our prayers as Christians. That's primary discourse. How are those shaping and forming us in our faith? So you have systematic theology, which is important. You know, we have at some point we need to reflect on why, like we talk about, like, why do we do what we do? Why do we pray? Where does that come from? What does it. What are the beliefs that we are embracing as we engage in this prayer? Why are Gentiles invited into the family of God? These are important things. To talk about. But until you have those primary practices and that primary discourse, you have nothing to talk about in secondary discourse, which is systematic theology. So the Lewis Festival is famous for inviting me to argue with C.S. lewis. And in the past, I've argued with him about his views of women as women we should be. Have you read Mere Christianity? And so I'm going to argue with him again because we're going to. And we're going to look at some of his quotes about his early childhood experiences of faith. And I'm going to, you know, one of my. One of our seminary professors that we heard said, I, you know, when he was preaching a sermon in the chapel, he said, my sermon. At the very beginning, he said, my sermon has one point, and here it is. And my point is this, I think the shape of his early life and faith before the intellectual journey, that mattered. I think that that mattered. And I'm going to make a case for why. And I'm going to sound much more confident than I actually am, but I will be coming out of my discipline as a theologian. I would love my water up here. Thank you. Okay, so I'm going to go back. We're going to go way back that. I don't know if it's mine, but I will drink his. That's great. The only one. Okay, so as I take a sip, you can take a look at what this is. And actually, I'm going to skip ahead. I want you to hear this quote from Lewis in Surprised by Joy. Let's do this first, because I've said that. He says it doesn't matter, but where's my proof? Here it is. If aesthetic experiences were rare, religious experiences did not occur at all. And then I think it's hilarious what he says next. Some people have gotten the impression from my books that I was brought up in strict and vivid Puritanism, but this is quite untrue. And I would love to know what he means by Puritanism, because he. I mean, Puritanism began in England, and so he must have a better understanding of it than I do, because he was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church. And I naturally accepted what I was told, but I cannot remember feeling much interest in it. So in my mind, Puritanism is rigid. You know, you're doing these things, not just beliefs, but like you're behaving in a certain way. And here he is being, you know, made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church. And he accepted what he was told, but it didn't intrigue his. His brain and his heart. Like, it didn't interest him. And therefore, according to Lewis, it didn't matter. I believe what our. What happens to our bodies does matter. And what happens to us when we were children, whether we are, like, super interested in it at the time or not does matter. So this will be kind of the angle of my argument today. So I'm going to go back because I think it goes back all the way back to here. I reached out to Marge Mead at the Wade center at Wheaton College. She's long time, like, assistant director at the Wade Center. In fact, she was there as a student at Wheaton when Madeline was first invited to speak there. Shortly after, I think it was after a circle of quiet had come out. And it's most likely that that's where she met Lucy Shaw, who became a lifelong friend and was of a more conservative Christian background than Madeleine was. But they hit it off because they both liked the color green. Lucy told me when I interviewed her for my book, and because they both liked Bachelor, the way we make friends is so weird. But so at the Wade center, and we'll hear from Marge a little later because I'm going to. I have a video that I want to show you of her discussing something in their collections about Louis. So I reached out to her and I said, tell me if this sounds crazy, but I'm going to argue with Lewis about all this. And she said, this is not crazy. I think this is fascinating, and I think you need to dig deeper. And I was like, okay. And so I did. And by the time I was a few days into this, with Marge's encouragement, I was like, this is a freaking dissertation. I am now on a freighter in Lake Michigan that I've jumped off of, and the freighter is leaving. And I'm like, I'm just kidding. Come back, Marge. I need. No. So I'm sending her questions, and she and Laura Schmidt, Stanifer, who's amazing there, also been there 20 years, they start sending me images. So please do not take pictures of this. Okay, I'm just gonna say there's a couple images you're not allowed to take pictures of. So this is a picture that Laura and her husband John took. This is the baptismal font at St Mark's Dundala Church of Ireland in Belfast where Lewis was baptized and O used by permission. That should also say, please don't replicate. Take pictures. I will quickly change that. So Laura was so excited, and I was like, it's kind of like stone. Like, it's like a baptismal font. Not super exciting, but I'm using it because I love Laura. But I wanted you to see where Lewis would have been baptized. He was two months old, would have been January of 1899. He was baptized by his grandfather and Thomas Hamilton. Thomas. Sorry, gotta just confirm that. There's a lot of details in my brain at the moment about Lewis and all of his. I mean, his family would have been there, so lots of aunts and uncles. He had lots of family in Belfast and a baptismal experience. Now, how many of you are from a tradition where infants are baptized? Okay, so we have a fair amount of you that come from settings where the theology is such that infants are full participants. They can be full participants in the family of faith. And that later then the right of confirmation, when you're at the age of accountability, is the place where you have the chance to say and claim the beliefs, specifically in the catechism, at least in the Anglican sett of the Christian faith for yourself. Because an infant is not going to be able to say, I believe in God the Father Creator, you know, like, they're not going to be able to do that which is part of, you know, that's the creeds and it's part of learning the catechism. And so the steps of baptism in a more liturgical setting are the infamous is brought before the community and in the baptismal or in the baptismal and confirmation liturgy in the Church of Ireland and the Church of England at the time, the godparents played a role. So like the community, it's not just the family and it's not just the priests. The godparents are involved. And they're saying essentially this child belongs to God as part of God's family. And this family of faith then also makes commitments to the child and to the family that this will be their spiritual home. When they have questions and they're growing up in their spiritual life, this is. This is their family. And it's of a piece with what we see in the Old Testament with, you know, infants were circumcised because that covenant, they belonged to God's family from the time that they were little. So you have in systematic theology that would be difficult to accept because the beliefs are the main thing, right? That like. Like, you know, we accept. These are the doctrines we sign onto before we can be a Christian. But in practical theology, the practices also shape and form us into the Christian faith as a member of a broader community that will hold us accountable, that will love us, that will walk alongside us. Of course, this is all in best case scenario, right? That's the vision. That's what it. That in practical theology might be impractical in its hope for how faith communities can do that. But there also is lots of research going on about the formative nature of these Christian practices. Okay, so he's baptized and his family and his community have made commitments to raise him in the faith. I think that's important. And I'll get into that a little more. He's super cute. I'm just saying this is from that middle grade little biography about him. I have no idea if I'm doing this properly, but I don't think I could just use that image, but I think I can use it if it's in a book. But please don't take a picture of that either. So there he is, he's like 2ish. And you see him, he's in Belfast, which has some Catholic influences, but in Northern Ireland, it's still very connected to England. And so the Church of England would have been. I mean, there's this tug of war religiously. And for the rest of his life, even after his conversion, J.R.R. tolkien, who is a Catholic, wanted him, in the phrase to come all the way to Rome. Like, if you're gonna convert, let's just do the go big or go home. And Tolkien would complain that he was such an Ulsterman, that he was. There was some prejudice there and he wouldn't, you know, he. That was Tolkien's read on Lewis. So it was in. So even the religious tension in the community figures, even from a young age into his journey, because he. Well, you. Anyway, I mean, you see him talking about Belfast, there a Roman Catholic stronghold, right where he. The section he was in. Okay, we read that quote. So the other thing that's going on for Lewis. And again, please don't take a picture of this. Are we recording? Okay. Oh, no. Oh, shoot. Okay, I thought we were. We'll figure this out for the upcoming lectures. So Lewis as a child was educated close to home, and he was close to his mother, as children are. And the warmth. And her, she was just a loving and warm presence, but very brilliant, like a brilliant mathematician. And his father was a solicitor. Very gregarious. But also, you read in surprised by Joy, hilarious descriptions of, like, trying to get his father to, like, converse with him about anything. And you would say things like, he would say, well, remember that time that, you know, your aunt came over with the bread and you'd be like, no, no, that was the neighbor. And then he would get it all muddled in his head and then blame you when the story was incorrect later. So it was like he just couldn't have a conversation with his dad. But as a kid it didn't matter so much. But when he was 9, his mother got very ill and died in August. And this is. It's heartbreaking to me. As I was looking through the timeline, there were very few of the biographies that really drilled down on this. He was then sent to boarding school away from Ireland. Never had left Ireland. Never left this area for the first time besides France. He would vacation in France with his mom sometimes. He had never left home until three weeks after she died. He was sent to boarding school. Three weeks. And his dad, the dad didn't take him. He went with his brother. Like, wow. And so dad went into. Was probably a pretty severe depression. Lewis's older brother was gone. And so Lewis didn't have a companion even at school to connect with. And his brother Warny was his dearest friend, his older brother Warny. And so he writes in Surprised by Joy about how during his mother's illness he would pray. And it was sort of like a. Like this is what we do. We're supposed to pray. And he prayed that she would be healed and she wasn't. And what he has to say about that and Surprised by Joy is kind of along the lines of, I was a kid and like, you ask for things for Christmas and you don't get it. So it's like, oh, well. And this was kind of the same thing. And he talked about how it was very much, again, not really a religious experience. I don't know what definition of religion he's working from because religion is not just like the dead practices that you do by rote, out of duty. You know, that that's. And neither is it that that's kind of how we often think about it. But then he seems to be thinking about it as something that like, deeply affects you, a sense of the other world breaking in. And this was what Lewis was good at evoking in his fiction, right? This sense of the other world breaking in, that you're having this, it's affecting your emotions and your imagination. And yes, that's also religious. But I'm just still clearly haven't gotten to the end of my dissertation because I have not figured out why that. Why having his emotions involved was such an important part of his sense that everything before that didn't matter. Right. So the sadness Here. And I think he's a teen. He's a teenager in this picture. So it'd be 19, 18. No, he's approaching. He's 19 because he was born in 1898. So they look very loving. But it was in fact, a very fraught and very sad and difficult relationship. And so later then, as one does in a liturgical Anglican setting, he was confirmed. And he was actually quite. He was like a lot of my confirmands when I would teach this and I would do confirmation in the Methodist Church were seventh grade ish. So like 12, you know, 12, 13. Lewis was 16. And I think because of the journey in, you know, going off to boarding school, I think that, like, he just wasn't home much to participate in whatever confirmations were happening. And this would have been, you know, the bishop comes to the church and confirms any of the kids that are ready. And if Lewis wasn't home at the time, then he just wasn't. So this is, though, is what he had to say about it in Surprised by Joy. You know, his relations to his father helped explain, but not excuse, one of the worst acts of my life. Remember, he's 16. I allowed myself to be prepared for confirmation and confirmed and to make my first communion in total disbelief. So by this point he had become an atheist, acting apart, eating and drinking to my own condemnation, which is. He's borrowing words from scripture about that. And as Johnson points out, where courage is not, no other virtues can survive except by accident. Which is kind of making light of things. But it's also. This is sad. This is really sad in a couple of ways. One, that. So Laura sent me a letter from the father, Albert, and it's an image in a PDF that I could not figure out how to get up here. Sorry. But it shows you, the father saying, so there is to be a confirmation and you need to change up your visit home so that you can participate in this. And I was like, that's kind of hardcore. Like, no other confirmations like this one. Turns out as I dug into it, his cousin Joey was also being confirmed. They're around the same age, so, like multiple families in the Lewis family involved. It was at St Mark's in Belfast, where his grandfather had been a clergy person. So this is him absorbing. It wasn't that he felt pressure from the broader community to participate. He puts it to not being willing to make his dad sad about this. And this is a parent who's deeply grieving, still in the church where his wife's father had been the pastor. So it's like there are all these layers of expectations for Lewis and he couldn't say no. So when you get into those rites of catechesis and confirmation from the Book of Common Prayer. This is the Book of Common Prayer in the Church of Ireland. I'm going to show you really quickly what those look like. Huh?
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It is being recorded.
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Oh, it is. Hooray. No, no. Okay. It is being recorded. Hooray. Okay. So what would have happened is Louis and I read back through Joel Heck. If you Google Joel Heck and you go online, he has a blow by blow timeline of Lewis's life. And I thought, oh, It'd be like 1911, like five items. No, it's like January 5, 1911. This happens January 6, 1911. It's like over a thousand pages in a PDF online, but it's all free for the sake of research. And he's looking at family papers and warnings, Lewis's brother's journals and all this stuff. And the catechism, he would have been invited over to the pastor's house the night before with Joey, his cousin, and whoever else was getting confirmed to review the catechism from the Book of Common Prayer. And you know, it's everything from, like, tell us. You're being asked questions and they're. Most of them are related to, like, the beliefs. So you're going through the creed and you're going through the Ten Commandments and all of these things that are. That's heady knowledge. And Lewis at that age would have understood perfectly what he's being asked, and he would have said no to every single one of these things, but he did not. At the same time, I think he's a little hard on himself, to be honest, in what he says about it. Right. If we say that community is important in your formation as a child, it's also important in your deformation, if that makes sense. Like, it can also go off the rails. And in this case, he felt pressured to do this. And so, you know, I can understand his woo. Sorry, that's not supposed to be happening like that. I can understand his sense that what he was doing was wrong and also the deep sadness. That's all part of that. All right. And I'm going to move us along. The role of imagination he accounts for very well. If we're thinking about the practices within practical theology of the Christian faith. There's the practices of the community, and then there's also our own engagement with our imagination and our emotions that are also part of that. And so in his reading, he reads the book FanTastes by George MacDonald, and he says that it baptized my imagination. And this was not even two years after his confirmation, which is an extension of baptism within the faith community. So later he described reading that book, and he says that what I learned to love in that book was goodness or holiness. What it actually did to me was convert even to baptize my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect or my conscience. So now he's turning to, like, here is the other worldly experience breaking in on this one now. And now he's beginning to say, this mattered. My confirmation in the faith community didn't matter, but this mattered. I should have been shocked in my teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in phantasis was goodness. So as an atheist, he's now encountering these things that are beginning to dismantle his atheism. But it's not in the church that he's encountering these things. It's in his reading. And so then he, you know, further on in Surprised by Joy, he describes the influence of Chesterton, GK Chesterton. If you've read with this, like, super powerful intellectual defense of Christianity in a lot of his writing, but also fabulous fiction that's kind of unforgettable. He says, in reading those, I didn't know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful. Careful in his reading. God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous. Maybe one of my favorite parts of Surprised by Joy. So, you know, I'm going to skip really quickly. Here's Marge, and I want to just quickly. I'll wrap up with this. You can go on to YouTube to see this video. It's longer than I thought, so I'm going to have to skip it, Alaska. But what they do is they invite one of the Wade people to take one of the things in their collection, and it's like the wonders of the Wade. So if you just type in the wonders of the wade online and YouTube and she describes after Lewis, through all of these things, through this, you know, his imagination is baptized and then his intellect. And everyone knows this story. If you've read Surprised by Joy, I don't have to summarize it. All the ways that he eventually accepted Christianity and, like, he got the assignment finally that he was taught in confirmation, right? Like, okay, now I get it. I accept these things. He went back to the same book of Common Prayer that would have been used in his baptism in his confirmation. And that became his daily reading. And so they have the 1901 Book of Common Prayer there in the collections that he would have used daily in his devotions, and he would have read the Psalms from that and all of that. So it's a lovely video. You know, she talks through why it mattered, and I. Oops, no. Sorry. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. How do I get out of here? There. Okay. All right. So they have it in the way, there's the inscription page, etc. But I want to say we do our young people a disservice if in their confirmation, it's all about what you believe. Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth? What if we are also in the confirmation process, in our engagement with young people, in our faith communities, in the way we tell the stories of our own faith journeys? We are also saying, let's read fantastes together, right? Let's do these things together instead of separately. What if we are engaging the full person so that we're not. That when they stand up there, it's not just about what they believe and whether they agree with all of these things. It is also them saying, I am choosing this community as a place where I'm going to ask my questions and I'm going to continue to grow and learn and be curious. And these are my people. I won't like them all the time. I won't always like what they believe. But this is a community that has promised to take care of me in my spiritual journey. So we do this together. What if we did it that way? And what if we narrate stories of conversion more robustly than just, here's the moment. Here's the moment when I believed these doctrines. I'm going to land with the what ifs because the dissertation's not done and we need to get into our break so that Sophronia can get ready for our next thing. But if you are moving from this space after this weekend into a faith community where there are teenagers, I would encourage you to engage in whatever way you can by encouraging parents, whoever, like, just get. Get stuff in their hands that is more than just the catechesis and a recognition that. That we are not only called to love the Lord our God with all our minds, but all of our souls and all our strength and love our neighbor as ourselves. Thank you.
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Thank you, Sarah, as a seeker and a storyteller in your own right. This entire podcast has been made possible by the CS Lewis Festival in Botoskey, Michigan, and its generous sponsors to learn more, please Visit us@cslewisfestival.org I'd like to thank the festival as well as as podcast producer Zach Smith of Hands Media.