• BC Christian News • APRIL ISSUE 1999 • VOL. 19 #4 • Formerly "Christian Info News" •

C.S. Lewis chose Joy -- and suffering
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By Peter T. Chattaway

• Shadowlands

at Jericho Arts Centre, April 2 - 25

IT'S ONE of life's little quirks that C.S. Lewis, the confirmed bachelor and renowned rationalist who named his autobiography Surprised by Joy, spent the last several years of his life falling in love with, then marrying, then grieving for a woman named Joy. The story of their relationship was the basis for two films and a play written by William Nicholson, all called Shadowlands.

Darlene Arseneault stars as Joy Davidman Gresham in the United Players production of Shadowlands, playing April 2 - 25, Thursday to Sunday, at the Jericho Arts Centre in Vancouver. She says that playing such an intelligent, feisty yet vulnerable person has been a "wonderful" challenge.

Jeffrey Smyth (l) as C.S. Lewis, Darlene Arsenault as Joy Davidman, and John Poliquin as Douglas (Joy's son).

"Mortality is a tricky thing to deal with," she says. "Joy converted to Christianity late in her life. In her writing, she talked about Christianity chasing her down her whole life, and there's this struggle that she has, hanging onto that as she's dying."

Joy wasn't the only one who struggled to hold on to faith. C.S. Lewis (performed in this production by Jeffrey Smyth) kept a journal after Joy's death in which he wrote some of his most painfully honest observations on suffering, doubt and faith; the journal was published as A Grief Observed and is a partial basis for Nicholson's script.

One of the central themes in Lewis's work is that some suffering may be necessary in order for us to become the people that God wants us to be. His short-lived marriage to Joy put that tenet to its most severe test -- but he passed it, says Arseneault.

"Joy sort of saves C.S. Lewis, in a way. Her death does make him stronger. You'll have to see the end of the play and decide what this particular C.S. Lewis comes out with, but I think he buys it. I think it does make him stronger. One of his lines is, 'As a child I chose safety. As a man I chose suffering,' and she helped him to do that."