Adversity | Death | Failure | Father | Joy

A SAD HERITAGE
In George Sayer’s biography of C. S. Lewis he describes the impact of the life and death of Joseph Greeves, the father of one of Jack [C. S.] Lewis’s best friends, Arthur Greeves. He describes his life and death as follows: Arthur Greeves [Lewis’s friend] grew up in a house called Bernagh almost opposite Little Lea on North Circular Road in the Strandtown area of Belfast. He father, Joseph Malcomson Greeves (1858-1925), who managed a prosperous linen firm, was tall and good-looking, but severe and humorless in expression. He bullied his five children unmercifully and treated his wife so harshly that she was often in tears. We are told in The Lewis Papers that Joseph Greeves “was timid, prim, sour, at once oppressed and oppressive.” An uncompromising Plymouth Brother, he conducted frequent family prayer sessions, reading the same passage from the Bible and expounding the same explanation over and over again. Not surprisingly, he died unmourned. Albert Lewis [Jack’s father] described…