Narnia
I have just been to see "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe". I think that on the whole it was a very good adaptation of the wonderful story by C.S. Lewis. Given the strangeness of the world that the children found themselves in, complete with umbrella-carrying fauns, centaurs, talking beavers, and Father Christmas (not to mention the lion Aslan) it could so easily have collapsed into a ridiculous pantomime-like Christmas show, all the sublimity of Aslan's costly victory over Jadis and the coronation of the four sons and daughters of Adam and Eve being completely lost. But the casting (and acting) was so good and the special effects so compelling, that this did not happen.
What I wonder though is how many people in audiences around the world will really grasp what a serious business myth-making of this kind (and of the kind that we have in Lord of the Rings) really is. For most people the story will come and go just as another "fairy-tale", to be dismissed to the realm of entertaining (or not so entertaining) fantasy, consigned to the periphery of life while the real business of living has to be got on with. But that would be to miss the whole point. Lewis and Tolkien both believed that there was nothing more serious, and nothing more real, than the truths that lay at the heart of their fantasies. What we call the "business of living" is indeed, more often than not, the means whereby we are distracted by the enemy of our souls (the being embodied in the LWW by the White Witch) from truths which we neglect at our peril. The things that occupy and entertain us are the equivalent of the turkish delight which the White Witch offered Edmund. They keep us from really getting to grips with the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? Who put us here and for what purpose? When the children were drawn into Narnia, there they were confronted with these questions.
What is it going to take for us to realise that if God exists, if Jesus Christ was who he said he was and had come to do what he said he had come to do (and why shouldn't we face that possibility) , there is more to life than the "four walls" that surround us. Maybe there is a realm that we can barely conceive of now, but about which we occasionally hear the odd rumour or from which we occasionally see a light glimmering in the distance. Maybe we should follow these rumours to see where they lead. We might be in for a surprise!
What I wonder though is how many people in audiences around the world will really grasp what a serious business myth-making of this kind (and of the kind that we have in Lord of the Rings) really is. For most people the story will come and go just as another "fairy-tale", to be dismissed to the realm of entertaining (or not so entertaining) fantasy, consigned to the periphery of life while the real business of living has to be got on with. But that would be to miss the whole point. Lewis and Tolkien both believed that there was nothing more serious, and nothing more real, than the truths that lay at the heart of their fantasies. What we call the "business of living" is indeed, more often than not, the means whereby we are distracted by the enemy of our souls (the being embodied in the LWW by the White Witch) from truths which we neglect at our peril. The things that occupy and entertain us are the equivalent of the turkish delight which the White Witch offered Edmund. They keep us from really getting to grips with the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? Who put us here and for what purpose? When the children were drawn into Narnia, there they were confronted with these questions.
What is it going to take for us to realise that if God exists, if Jesus Christ was who he said he was and had come to do what he said he had come to do (and why shouldn't we face that possibility) , there is more to life than the "four walls" that surround us. Maybe there is a realm that we can barely conceive of now, but about which we occasionally hear the odd rumour or from which we occasionally see a light glimmering in the distance. Maybe we should follow these rumours to see where they lead. We might be in for a surprise!
posted by Roger Marshall at 1:56 PM
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