Letters to Malcolm Chapter 15

What reminds you regularly that God is real?

My copy of the book

We open chapter fifteen with Lewis’ charge that Malcolm’s wife is involved in their correspondence, but only by talking with Malcolm. I contend talking with anyone married, we should expect their wives or husbands to be involved in the conversation or at least privy to it. I don’t keep secrets from my wife and she doesn’t keep them from me. It is the way of a happy marriage, in my opinion. Certainly, there are things I do that my wife isn’t a participant in nor cares about, and vice versa. The point is that our marriage partners get allowed into every aspect of our lives because we are now one flesh joined under God to be a complete person again as He originally intended. That doesn’t happen by keeping secrets, or trying to keep secrets, from what is now essentially “ourselves.”

Lewis’ reference to, “Remember the night in Mullingar.” (p.103) refers to a town in Ireland, which you can read about HERE. All this opening paragraph leads up to Lewis admitting he is making essentially a mountain out of a molehill when he says Betty has declared, “I am making very heavy weather of what most believers find a very simple matter.” (p.103). That simple matter is simply praying to God. There’s more to it than that though. I think this book and his fictitious pen pal in Malcolm are really a cathartic exercise to work out his grief through prayer, or how he worked out his grief through prayer. Why else ascribe a deadly childhood malady to a fictitious child of a fictitious pen pal in Malcolm?

Lewis makes an outstanding point in answer to why he is making a mountain out of a molehill and we would do well to remember it in all things when we try to communicate a point of scripture. “But it depends on who one is.” (p.103). Everyone is different, as many differences as there are sands on the seashore, stars in the sky, and blades of grass on the prairie. We can only speak to our personal experiences, what we’ve seen and done, and what has happened to us. Fortunately, those experiences are shared by some subset of the world’s population. In this case, Lewis goes on to explain who he is in that he converted from an Atheist, what he calls “the intelligentsia” (p.103) meaning those people in the world who consider themselves to be our betters by the simple matter that they deem themselves smarter than we are. Their grounds for that declaration are nothing more than they believe we’ve been convinced to believe in the impossible; a God that doesn’t exist came to earth and became a man, died, and came back to life. They find that simple fact unbelievable and since we express it as a certainty we must be dumber than they are in all things.