"Come further up and further in!"

 "It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy never could make up her mind. And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty..." --C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

I'm sure that about a million Internet posts are written every day about the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia, especially during this Easter season. Don't worry, I'm not going to analyze it. But there is something that I must beg you before you read this post. If you have never read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, please don't read this post. Even after you've read it, don't read this post for at least a year or two. Let it sit. Let it distill. 

Five minutes ago, on the internet in a near-fruitless search for quotes for this post, I found a SparkNotes page explaining the Christian symbolism in Narnia, and the explanation was surprisingly good. But still I shuddered a little for whatever poor kid had to read Narnia as a school assignment, and explain and decipher everything all in an afternoon. You simply can't sit there decoding chapter after chapter when it comes to Narnia; you have to enjoy it as a beautiful and moving fantasy first, and then let the beautiful and moving reality that it represents dawn on you slowly.

I have a confession to make. When my mom first read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to me, I was only five or six years old. And the sledgehammer symbolism didn't occur to me once, not at all. I thought I was just listening to a book--the best book I had ever read. And I did feel that it was good, very deeply good. About a year later we were in the car, talking about books or about God or something like that, and my mom mentioned in passing that Aslan represented Jesus. It was one of the most amazing revelations of my young life. It was like finding out that my sister and best friend Mary was an angel in disguise.

Everything else occurred to me bit by bit, as I read and re-read the book over the next ten years; to myself in advance of the movie, to my brother in advance of Christmas. Every symbol in the book had its place in that far greater book, the Gospel; and it helped me see the fine print through a kind of childlike magnifying glass of story and poetry. But perhaps it's not so childlike, that book. Perhaps it's a book for mothers and fathers, for priests and prophets, for the ignorant who need it and the wise who need it still more. Perhaps when we forget that Jesus is real, there's something about reading fiction with reality in it that wakes up our senses just as the cry that spread across Narnia did -- "Aslan is on the move!"

You'll notice, reading the series, that it isn't until the very end of the last book that we hear Aslan's call, "Come further up and further in!" --inviting us to discover the deeper meaning of this world that He created. When you read Narnia to children, don't ever tell them right away that it's about God. Otherwise they'll be looking for Him in every word and chapter, and He won't come as a surprise. Let them follow Tumnus and Lucy first; let them listen to Mr. Beaver's words, let them be horrified by Edmund's betrayal and brought almost to tears by Aslan's death--for me, the first literary death that I had ever witnessed, and still the most meaningful. Then, maybe a week, maybe a year later, drop a little hint about the country from which Aslan truly comes. This could be the only chance a child ever has to hear the thoughts of Mary Magdalene when she took a closer look at the gardener and discovered that He was Christ. 

G.K. Chesterton, in his book Orthodoxy, has a chapter called The Ethics Of Elfland, devoted entirely to fairy tales. He writes, "These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water." When I read that quote, I realized why it was that, if the Stations of the Cross failed to make me cry, I used to re-read that chapter, The Triumph of the Witch; why the Easter story inevitably came with Lucy and Susan Pevensie riding in triumph on the risen Aslan's back to wake the poor creatures of Narnia frozen in statues of stone.

Sometimes, when Jesus wants to win himself a young heart, he chooses the best disguise, a disguise that is really no disguise at all--the disguise of a lion. 

Let's help keep Him on the move.

Comments

[Dawn Eskew]

How nice!

[Elizabeth]

This is beautiful. You are a wonderful writer and have great insight into the magic and mystery of reading a great book.

[Emily K]

"You simply can't sit there decoding chapter after chapter when it comes to Narnia; you have to enjoy it as a beautiful and moving fantasy first, and then let the beautiful and moving reality that it represents dawn on you slowly."

This is so so true. I learned that the hard way when I chose to read Out of the Silent Planet for an assignment in school last year. >.< I become so overwhelmed with picking out specific symbolism, character motivations, etc during the first read that I felt as if I was learning less from it than I might have if I had read and experienced it naturally. :/

Good post ^.^