Enter the Story pt. 1 of 5
Philippians 4:8 Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.
How much time have you spent thinking this week? What tends to claim your thoughts? And how much time would you say were focused on things that were pure and lovely and admirable?
I want to help build some bridges between your world and a world of fantasy that I believe will help us live better in this world. Understanding fantasy that is saturated in what is true and honorable and right will cause us to think differently about reality.
Tell me what you know about this…
IMAGE OF ASLAN
Tell me what you know about this…
STRANGE IMAGE OF GUYS DRESSED AS WOMEN FOR A DRAMA
How many possible directions could you go with this?
What if we put your picture, even dressed normally on the screen. What do you know about this?
We would have to know some of the story that surrounds that image.
There are two things I want you to start thinking about this morning. I don’t expect to solve much for you today I suppose. But I do want to help you start thinking about the concept of STORY and prepare you to see a great story that will teach us, through fantasy, much that is true about God and you.
Two things: First, your life, my life is a story. Your life is “story” that unfolds over time and the characters that enter your story and the events that unfold impact this story of your life.
But, when did the story start? Did the story that is your life just start with you? When you made that dramatic entrance into the world was that the real beginning of the story?
Think about your parents and others who helped give your life shape. Did their story start when you came on the scene? Did the things that happened to them affect you? I can tell you that the after-affects of the Great Depression had significant impact on my parents and on the way I was raised. Our story is not “self-contained”.
Our life is “story”. And, second our “story” is part of a “grander story”. And, here is a significant key to life. You and I have no way to discern the steps we ought to take in our story until we come to understand the greater story that we are a part of.
In order to understand our world, to make sense of our lives, and to make our most important decisions about how we ought to be living, we depend upon some story. Individual experiences make sense only when their seen within the context of some story we believe to be true of the world: each episode of our life finds its place there.
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story do I find myself a part?’ There is the assumption there is more than one basic story competing in our culture for acceptance and which story a person lives out of makes a huge difference.
The two basic stories in our culture would be the biblical story and the secular story. Biblical Christianity claims that the Bible alone tells the true story of our world. The secular story makes the claim that life is best understood apart from any thought of a grand design.
As we move into December we’re going to spend the next four weeks thinking about the STORY behind The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. But more than that, I pray that God takes us to a better understanding of the story behind us!
This coming Friday will be the release of the movie version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. This is going to open the door for literally millions to enter into the world of Narnia and I hope, will bring all kinds of questions about a world so different than our own. A world that shakes us from the known (at least what we think we know) and predictable (at least we think predictable) to ask the questions we need to ask.
LLW was written by C.S. Lewis in 1949 but, of course that’s not where the story started. In1939 at the outbreak of World War II, a million and a half children we dispersed from London all over England. The group of children were assigned to the home of the Kilns. A house Lewis shared with his brother, Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen. There were quite a few children who stayed in this house over the war years. According to Colin Duriez, a Lewis biographer, Lewis was impressed with the children but he was baffled by their inability to amuse themselves. They gave him an idea for a book for children.
Lewis wrote this: “This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But it is most about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of Air Raids and because Father, who was in the Army, had gone off to the War and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were sent to stay with a kind of relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived all by himself in the country.”
The story was soon abandoned and slipped into one of Lewis’ desk drawers and forgotten. About ten years later in 1949 Lewis rekindled the idea and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was born. This time Peter was joined by his brother Edmond and sisters Lucy and Susan.
Lewis will push us to imagine. To dream. And he will shake us with images and words.
Here’s the work that those of us who have reached adulthood have cut out for us in the next few weeks…
Less than a month before he died in 1963, C. S. Lewis wrote this letter to a young girl who wanted to know if any other Narnia books were going to be produced.
Dear Ruth,
Many thanks for your kind letter, and it was very good of you to write and tell me that you like my books; and what a very good letter you write for your age!
If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope that you may always do so. I’m so thankful that you realized the "hidden story" in the Narnia books. It is odd, children nearly always do, grown-ups…hardly ever.
I’m afraid the Narnia series has come to an end, and am sorry to tell you that you can expect no more.
God bless you.
Your sincerely,
C.S. Lewis
Some will have trouble working their way even past the title. The Lion and the Wardrobe we may be okay with but the “Witch”, can that be good? Can or should a story of any value have that word attached. And what was being said?
If you get attached to reading C.S. Lewis writings (and you should) he will not allow you to settle for your first brush of understanding with many words. The beauty of this children’s story is that it takes us to a world where we are free of the limits we’ve already placed on this world and forces us to think, “what if”.
Listen to this. Years after The Chronicles of Narnia were published Lewis wrote:
“Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said. Some people think I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child psychology and decided what age-group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sled, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.”
As a matter of faith Lewis said he had been liberated to write the first story when suddenly “Aslan came bounding into it…Once he was there he pulled the whole story together and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.”
Lewis was good friends with J.R.R. Tolkien writer of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkein was used by God to lead Lewis to faith in Christ. Again going back to Duriez biography, “An enormously important factor in Lewis’s conversion to faith in Christ was thinking through Toldien’s argument that the biblical Gospels have all the best qualities of pagan myth, with the unique feature that the events actually happened in documented history. Lewis was fascinated the Tolkien, unlike modernist scholars did not divorce myth from history.”
If you want something to scratch your head over this paragraph ought to do it for you. This is what Lewis wrote in an essay titled “Myth Became Fact”.
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. Be becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle…To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths.”
Do you have trouble with the word “myth”? Some would just brush that aside as foolishness. Christianity as true myth. The word “myth” comes from a Greek word that means…STORY. “True story.”
Tolkein argued that the very historical events of the Gospel stories are shaped by God, the master story teller. They have a structure of a sudden turn from catastrophe (the hero’s death) to the most satisfying of all happy endings, the “eucatastrophe” (literally, “good catastrophe”). The Gospels in their divine source penetrate the seamless web of human storytelling, capture the human imagination and root it in history.
When C.S. Lewis understood God as the author of the grandest story of all, a story we get to play a part in, he came to faith in Christ.
In 1947 Lewis wrote in his book “Miracles” He confessed: “I never had the experience of looking for God. It was the other way round; He was the hunter (or so it seemed to me) and I was the deer. He stalked me, took unerring aim, and fired. And I am very thankful that is how the first conscious meeting occurred. It forearms one against subsequent fears that the whole thing was only wish fulfillment. Something one didn’t wish for can hardly be that.”
In the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe there is a line that is in the book (I hope is in the movie). It’s a line that made me stop in my tracks and wish at first it wasn’t there. Surely that was a mistake but when you understand a bit of how God worked in Lewis’s life it makes sense. Aslan refers to “a deeper magic the witch did not know”.
A deeper magic…almost pushed me off the bridge. Why did he have to use the word “magic”? Again, it forces us to think about the word even Webster’s defines the word magic this way “an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source”. Just like “true myth” the word magic finds it home because it is an extraordinary power or influence that doesn’t just seem to be from a supernatural source, it is from a supernatural source.”
Until I started working on this series I thought of the Chronicles of Narnia as allegory. When Lewis read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Tolkein, he didn’t like the story at all because he thought they were too allegorical. Lewis said he was exploring what he called “supposals”—suppose that there was a world of talking animals ruled over by the king of beasts, a talking lion who was also the maker of that world; suppose God had chosen to become incarnate in that world appropriately as a lion.
Lewis didn’t intend Aslan to be an allegory of Christ. In a letter just after Christmas in 1958 Lewis said in writing the Chronicles he wrestled with this thought: “What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to become incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours?”
It’s not unusual for me to give you assignments to apply what we’re talking about. This week, here is your assignment: I want you to go to the movies. Take your kids if you have some. Take your neighbors and their kids. Next week we’ll step through the wardrobe into Narnia and discover that Aslan is on the move.
