Learning about the Life of C.S. Lewis

Presentation Highlights from the Rev. Dr. Paul St. Germain, Transition Priest in Charge

Oxford and Cambridge don C. S. “Jack” Lewis (1898 – 1963) has been called the  “greatest Christian writer in the English language” – opening the door of faith to millions  of readers. His words on Christian apologetics are indeed ones of “global ministry” – are all not only in print but have been translated into most languages – and continue to sell  millions of copies annually.

The Kilns, also known as the C. S. Lewis House, is a house in England’s Oxford  suburb of Risinghurst, where the author wrote his “Chronicle of Narnia” series and other  classics.

The Kilns was built in 1922 on the site of a former clay works for bricks. The lake in the  garden is a flooded clay pit on the shores of which Lewis’s brother Warnie built an  Oriental Garden. In 1930, The Kilns was bought by C. S. Lewis, and it became home for  himself, his brother Major Warren Lewis, and Mrs. Jane Moore. Janie Moore was the  mother of Lewis’s university friend Paddy Moore, who had been killed in the First World  War in which Lewis also served and was injured.

The Kilns was restored in the mid 2000’s (see poem below) – and is currently owned  and administered by the C.S. Lewis Foundation, which operates it as the Study Centre  at the Kilns for students majoring in English Literature graduate studies at Oxford

University. Paul spent a semester at Trinity College, Oxford in 1986 and had the  privilege of staying at The Kilns for a seminar in 2007.

Working at the Kilns

“The noise and fury of twenty hands rebuilding the house around me never intruded on my  thoughts as I set to do the work before me.

Ripping up the rotten floor and cutting new parquet to match the old in Joy’s room. Cutting out  the boards by hand and nailing them together to match the bookcase in the picture of Mrs.  Moore’s room; Tearing brick and mortar apart with a miniature jackhammer to open up the  fireplace in Jack’s bedroom; Scraping the ladder on the quarry tile floor and nailing into the  ceiling to hang a towel rack above the Aga in Mrs. Miller’s kitchen.

My pen move steadily across the paper while I sat at the dining room table until I finished my  chapter, looked up, and thought, “Jack wrote here.”

Harry Lee Poe

“C.S Lewis Remembered” – 2006