“The word as normally used brings to mind pictures of distance: the transcendent is what is unattainably far off, outside our range of understanding. [Lewis helps us see] not an incalculable separation but an inexhaustible strangeness, a refusal to be captured. And in Lewis’s narrative (the Narnia stories], this is expressed in terms of rebellion, the joyful overturning of a self-contained order in the name of an uncontainable truth”: Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World, p.139.

Rowan Williams has this to say:

“It is not true that large numbers of people reject Christian faith –  if by ‘reject’ we mean that they deliberately consider and then decide against it. They are imperceptibly shunted towards a position where the ‘default setting’ is a conviction that traditional Christianity had nothing much to be said for it. People who have settled down in this position are not likely to be much moved by argument: they need to be surprised into a realization that they have never actually reckoned with what Christianity is about” [The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, 2012, pp.14-15].

“that is why we experience Joy: we yearn, rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called ‘we’. Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ached for that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we had had, but that we were a dream” [Surprised by Joy].

C. S. Lewis seems to have spent his life yearning for a sense of other-worldly joy and bliss. He attained this, momentarily, at first in his intense interest in Norse sagas, Wagnerian legends and music, George MacDonald’s fantasy stories and in flashes of landscape. He admitted in his autobiography Surprised by Joy that for a long time he made the mistake of striving too strenuously and consciously for this transcendental joy. It was not to be attained this way. It was elusive. It came, not as an end-product of reading, acting, striving or imagining, but as a side-product of these things, something that just happened. Nor should you expect it to last. Trying to make it last didn’t work. It could not be captured. Many mystics had discovered this.

C. S. Lewis, famous of course for his Narnia stories, was well known in his own time as a major defender of Christianity, someone who made the core beliefs of Christianity accessible to ordinary readers. Alister McGrath, Lewis’s biographer, makes the point that Lewis. in his celebrated book Surprised By Joy (1955), picked up on a Wordsworh poem of 1812, when he was grieving over the death of his three year old daughter. After some time Wordsworth came to see a “visionary gleam of joy” and hope. Seizing on this, Lewis “offers his reflections on  the source of a deeper vision of Joy, rooted at one level in the yearnings of the human heart, and at another in the nature of God. It is God who shoots such ‘arrows of Joy’ as a means of heightening his sense of longing, stimulating his reflection, initiating his questing, and ultimately achieving his transformation… Memory, joy, and longing then become gateways to God” (McGrath, The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis, 2014, pp.8-9).