By Francis X. Maier

When an ambitious man is young, his thinking is a race car. It runs full throttle toward the target of success, however he imagines it. Men of more senior years, with fewer ticks left on the clock, think differently. The mind turns to making sense of things; to getting to the heart of the matter of one's time in the world. The task becomes ordering a riot of random memories into a coherent story; the fabric of a life that has meaning.

What's needed is an experience that, like a needle, sews the past and present together, because seemingly unconnected things often aren't. Here's an example.

I've been a C.S. Lewis fan for more than fifty years. I've read nearly everything he wrote. But the Christian heart of the man himself was at least as interesting as his work.

In 1993, Anthony Hopkins played the longtime bachelor Lewis in the film Shadowlands. It's the story of Lewis's late-in-life friendship with, then love for, and then marriage to, the American poet and convert Joy Davidman Gresham. Joy died of cancer barely four years after they married, and Hopkins does a masterful job of capturing Lewis's intense suffering at her loss. It's a beautiful film. But an even better telling of the same story preceded it by nearly a decade.

In 1985, BBC Wales produced the television film C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands (available on Amazon Prime), starring Joss Ackland. On his death in 2023, age 95, Britain's The Guardian newspaper described Ackland as "a beacon of power" as an actor, "part of the backbone" of British drama, and a man of "modest goodness."

His career spanned more than 130 stage, film, and radio roles from Shakespeare to Evita to Lethal Weapon 2. But the special force of his role as a tender and suffering C.S. Lewis grew from two not-so-obvious roots. Unlike so many others in his profession, Ackland was married for fifty-one years, until her death, to the love of his life; and with her, he fathered seven children. He was also a believing Christian, and not shy about his faith.

This made his role all the more memorable as a senior demon in the HarperAudio version of Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. Ackland gives a brilliantly devilish performance precisely because his Screwtape is simultaneously so urbane, bureaucratic, condescending - and cruel. Ackland brings an exquisite purity, a relentless logic, and an ingenious, unsleeping tactical mind to the demon's loathing of "the human vermin" and "hairless bipeds."

Screwtape's contempt for God in debasing the "high dignity" of the spiritual world, by polluting it with half-breed creatures of the flesh, is equally fierce. And Ackland delivers it with icy clarity. God sees humans as sons and daughters destined to share in his joy. Screwtape sees them as cattle for food.

The reader can, of course, sense all of these things on the story's original printed page. But when Ackland gives them voice, they take on a new and vivid reality.

What lives acutely in my memory is the moment when Ackland's Screwtape - in counseling a junior devil - stresses that good intentions in a human target's soul should never be feared. Quite the contrary. Hell is full of the amusingly desperate damned who intended well in life, but never did anything about it; never took the smallest step to make their fellow-feelings real.

That's the goal of a really accomplished tempter: a well-meaning paralysis in the human heart. Intentions are reassuring, but they have the substance of a mist. An unselfish act in the service of another, and the inconvenience it costs, has weight.

Christianity, as C.S. Lewis himself learned, is more than a matter of intellect. It's a matter of love. It's concrete. It sanctifies the world. Which is why the Epistle of James urges Christians to "be doers of the Word and not hearers only."

So what's the point of mentioning any of the above? Just this. I suggested at the start that sometimes an experience, like a needle, can sew together the past and the present; memor...