Good Reads: Readings from Narnia

My current copy that I am reading from

For as long as our kids can remember, we've started out each school day with about fifteen minutes of family reading and prayer together. When they were very young, I would dutifully plod through The Beginner's Bible (published by Questar) we usually gift parents on their child's Dedication Day. (In fact, we still read chapters 1, 2 and 3 - “The Beginning”, “A Special Helper” and “A Sad Day” - of our now dog-eared copy on the first day of each school year.) As they got older we moved on to The Chronicles of Narnia, The Book of God, The Hobbit and several of Corrie ten Boom's books including The Hiding Place and Tramp for the Lord. Only Emma now is part of our small circle and this past year we read Dancer Off Her Feet by Julie Sheldon and Born Again by Chuck Colson. Last Wednesday, with only seven mornings to go before summer vacation officially begins, I decided that I would read excerpts from some of my favorite moments in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Wednesday, May 30: Chapter 7 “How the Adventure Ended” from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

In my opinion, it is one of the most powerful moments in the entire book (if not the series). Poor Eustace, who had unknowingly drank magic water that turned him into a dragon – a doppelgänger of the boy he really was on the inside – is miserable and lonely and in searing pain from the gold bracelet he had put on his arm before his transformation. Later, when he has been “undragoned” he shares with Edmund how he was returned to his boy-self. While he did not yet know him by name he had met the Lion who invited him to bathe in a pool in the middle of a garden. But before he could step into it he was informed he would have to undress first. Just about the moment he was going to inform the Lion that he wasn't wearing any clothes it occurred to him that “dragons are snaky sort of things and...can cast their skins.” And thus begins his futile attempt to undress himself. After three attempts to do just this all that he has to show for his efforts are three sets of skins lying in lumps upon the ground. And then the Lion says “ -You will have to let me undress you.” Were he not so incredibly desperate at that moment, he would have flown away but in the absence of any alternative, he lays prone before the lion.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker and more knobbly looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me…and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again…after a bit the lion took me out and dressed me –“

“Dressed you. With his paws?”

“Well, I don’t exactly remember that bit. But he did somehow or other: in new clothes.”

It is such a rich picture of our baptism and ultimate sanctification. Our attempts to clean ourselves up never go deep enough to the heart of issue. It is just so much “snake skin.” There are some people who by strength of will can “clean themselves up” and become respectable in the eyes of others but as Isaiah once warned an outwardly religious people,

We're all sin-infected, sin-contaminated.
Our best efforts are grease-stained rags. (Isaiah 64:6, Msg)

No matter how we look on the outside, he sees the inside and has the cure that we require.

I love Lewis' last comment on the rest of Eustace's story:

“It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.”

Healing and salvation (the same words in Greek in our New Testament) is never a straight line. All of us – even the ones we esteem the highest – are not only saved at a moment in time when we open our heart to the Savior but are also in the process of being saved. Like Lazarus we shuffle out of the tomb Frankenstein-like and need the careful attention of Christian brothers and sisters who come alongside us to help us step out of our grungy grave clothes and be properly fitted with the attire suitable for a son or daughter of the King. Sometimes we think we know what is right for us (even though we should know better). Scripture always assumes we belong to a loving faith community that bears with us as salvation works from the inside out.

Thursday, May 31: Chapter 11 “The Unwelcome Fellow Traveler” from The Horse and His Boy.

Of all the Narnia books, this one is my least favorite. It's a good yarn and happens during the days when “Peter was High King in Narnia and his brother and his two sisters were King and Queens under him” but it is probably the only one in the series I've only read twice (once for myself and then, later, with my kids.)

Shasta is a boy growing up in a little village in far southern Calormen the only son, as it were, of a fisherman. But the truth is he was found as a baby by the fish monger and when Shasta learns that he has been sold to a powerful Calormene lord he serendipitously meets up with a talking horse from Narnia named Bree and they decide to make their get away riding north to Narnia. Along the way they meet up with a young Calormene woman named Aravis (and her talking horse Hwin) who is also seeking to get out of Calormen to avoid being married off without any say in the matter. The four become traveling companions and endure many different adventures in their quest to reach the safety of Narnia.

In chapter 11, Shasta has made it to Archenland and King Lune (who he doesn't yet know is his long lost father) and must travel with the king and his courtiers to meet the oncoming Calormene troops who are coming by stealth to take the kingdom. But along the way he gets separated from the king and his party and up in the mountains enters a fog so thick he cannot see anything. And while traveling along, feeling more alone than ever he meets Something – or Someone in the fog.

“I do think,” said Shasta, “that I must be the most unfortunate boy that ever lived in the whole world. Everything goes right for everyone except me. Those Narnian lords and ladies got safe away from Tashbaan: I was left behind. Aravis and Bree and Hwin are all as snug as anything with that old Hermit: of course I was the one who was sent on. King Lune and his people must have got safely into the castle and shut the gates long before Rabadash arrived, but I get left out.”

And being very tired and having nothing inside him, he felt so sorry for himself that the tears rolled down his cheeks.

What put a stop to all this was a sudden fright. Shasta discovered that someone or somebody was walking beside him. It was pitch dark and he could see nothing. And the Thing (or Person) was going so quietly that he could hardly hear any footfalls. What he could hear was breathing. His invisible companion seemed to breathe on a very large scale, and Shasta got the impression that it was a very large creature. And he had come to notice this breathing so gradually that he had really no idea how long it had been there. It was a horrible shock.

Shasta, atop a borrowed horse, continues to walk cautiously through the mountain pass with an increasing fear of this silent, breathing presence until he can take it no longer and then asks:

“ ‘Who are you?’ he said, scarcely above a whisper.

‘One who has waited long for you to speak,’ said the Thing. Its voice was not loud, but very large and deep.

‘Are you – are you a giant?’ asked Shasta.

‘You might call me a giant,’ said the Large Voice. ‘But I am not like the creatures you call giants.’

‘I can’t see you at all,’ said Shasta, after staring very hard. Then (for an even more terrible idea had come into his head) he said, almost in a scream, ‘You’re not – not something dead, are you? Oh please – please do go away. What harm have I ever done you? Oh, I am the unluckiest person in the whole world.’

Once more he felt the warm breath of the Thing on his hand and face. ‘There,’ it said, ‘that is not the breath of a ghost. Tell me your sorrows.’

Shasta was a little reassured by the breath: so he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. And then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the Tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of the desert journey and how they were almost at their goal when another lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since he had had anything to eat.

‘I do not call you unfortunate,’ said the Large Voice.

‘Don’t you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?’ said Shasta.

‘There was only one lion,’ said the Voice.

‘What on earth do you mean? I’ve just told you there were at least two the first night, and – ‘

‘There was only one: but he was swift of foot.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I was the lion.’ And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. ‘I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.’

‘Then it was you who wounded Aravis?’

‘It was I.’

‘But what for?’

‘Child,’ said the Voice, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.’

'Who are you?' asked Shasta.

'Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again “Myself,” loud and clear and gay: and then the third time “Myself,” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.”

There is this wonderful word called “providence” that used to be quite common among followers of Christ. But it's a word you don't hear very much any more. Maybe because it sounds too big or it has too many consonants. In any case, it's a word to describe the “happenings” in our life that at times look “unlucky” but through the eyes of faith and the passing of time we see God at work silently behind the scenes. One of the men from our fellowship was in a terrible motorcycle accident a month ago. Outsiders (and maybe even some insiders) would call him unlucky, how unfortunate that three deer chose to cross the road at the instance he was coming down it. But his wife sees it differently. She is overcome with thankfulness that there was a car at all out on that road immediately following the incident (he was on a country road) and that the accident occurred 200 yards from the driveway of an emergency room technician. It's the kind of stuff that contributed to her still being a wife instead of a widow. Our forebears would have said it this way: “Providentially, the girlfriend of an emergency room technician came along immediately following the collision and was on the phone with her beloved soon after.” Am I saying God caused the accident? Of course not but the sovereign God of space and time knows where his own are and in the “st. nick of time” had a trained individual on the spot beginning treatment that probably saved his life. And, of course, Steve's story is just at the beginning of the telling. Time will only tell what God is up to in all this havoc that surrounds his family right at the present time. But we are buoyed by Scripture which affirms unequivocally that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28, NIV). “In all things” means what it means and so at the end of the day we may not have a clue what God is up to but we can be reminded that He is good and means our good and in that can take comfort.

More to come...