Chronicles of Narnia: Review of Books

Dr. Kenneth Hawley: Good morning. Welcome to the beginning of the 16th annual Writing Carnival.
This is the fourth time we've gone through this series of events together.
When it began, we started with the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.
The next year we did Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and then Harry Potter, and then Princess Bride, and then we did Star Wars.
Then we did the cycle again, ending with Pride and Prejudice.
Then we did the cycle again and ended just last year with Fairy Tales.
today we begin Narnia all over again
and it's great that we do
because that's one of the great themes of the Narnia
series that it's time to begin
again that's one of the things we'll talk
about today and tomorrow there'll be chapel today
and chapel tomorrow after chapel today
the reading marathon will begin
with our own Dr. Jesse Long kicking it off
and then at the end of chapel
tomorrow the riding carnival itself
will start there'll be a free lunch provided to you
by our friends at Aramark out in the mall
lots of games prizes other things available
to you there. When we look at The Chronicles of Narnia, we're talking about a series that many of
you are probably familiar with, but some of you might not be. There were some popular films that
some of you are familiar with, but these stories are about children who get transported to another
land. And if you think about some of the stories that we'll also talk about, like let's say Harry
Potter, you think about this child who was just minding his own business, doing his own thing,
and here he was told that he's a wizard. And then the rest of the series is him figuring out what
that means for his life.
And you think about something like Lord of the Rings.
There's Frodo just minding his business,
just like Bilbo had been doing for many years
before he was called to adventure.
In this story world, though, it's a little bit different.
There are children in England minding their own business,
and they find themselves in Narnia.
They're transported to this whole other world.
And it's like there's a portal between the world of Narnia
and the world of England.
It's kind of a parallel universe, a multiverse.
And in this other world, in the world of Narnia,
Aslan is its king.
Aslan is its lord and god, its creator.
And he's also a Christ figure in the story.
And the children come to know him.
And that's part of the whole reason why the whole series exists.
That Lewis would find a way to try to tell stories that connected young children with truths about God and about their lives by taking them and transporting them to this whole other world.
And it's populated with animals, animals that can talk.
And, again, the king of all the animals is the king of the beasts, Aslan, the lion, who in all the stories represents Christ.
And in all the stories, he finds some way to help these children learn who they are.
And so in one sense, they find themselves in Narnia because they didn't realize it was even there.
And here they are in Narnia, and they have to make sense of what that means for them.
But they also find their actual selves, their real selves.
Their true self is awakened or discovered or challenged in a way that makes them who they're meant to be.
and Aslan helps them all the way through.
And the two main themes that I'd like to talk about today
are breaking the spell and beginning again.
Now, again, the story world is comprised of seven novels.
They're 75 years old this year,
and each of the novels tells a different story.
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
is the one where they get transported in the first place,
and this is where Aslan finds a way to save all of Narnia.
Prince Caspian, an adventure where the true king is placed on the throne.
Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where they travel all the way across the world of Narnia to find Aslan's country.
The Silver Chair, where a prince has been kidnapped and captive under the ground in an underworld kingdom ruled by an evil witch, and he has to be rescued.
The Horse and His Boy, a boy's captured in captivity.
He's enslaved there, but he's truly a son of Narnia.
He's a king to be.
He's a prince, and he doesn't know it.
Magician's Nephew is a prequel.
It goes back and tells how all this world was made.
And the last battle is something like the book of Revelation.
It tells how all of Narnia came to an end.
I'd like to look first, though, at the voyage of the Dawn Treader,
the story about a journey across the seas.
As these children are brought into this world,
at the beginning of each story, that usually happens in the first chapter,
it's usually just this one set of family,
these children, the Pevensie kids, but they have a cousin.
And their cousin Eustace is a jerk.
He's a twerp. He's rude. He's awful. He's mean.
He's selfish. He's cruel. He's condescending. He thinks he knows it all.
But he doesn't know these kinds of stories. In fact, in this story world, someone might call him a muggle.
He doesn't believe in anything like the spiritual world.
And Eustace gets dragged into this world. Again, he didn't see it coming, but here he is.
And this story, in the heart of this novel, is about Eustace being transformed.
And you see from the image here, a dragon has a golden ring around his, I guess we call it an arm.
And the dragon is in pain because he had been the boy Eustace.
But when he woke up, he was in fact a dragon.
As the story explains, he had found a dragon's hoard.
And falling asleep there on the dragon's hoard with greedy dragonish thoughts in his heart,
he had become a dragon himself.
Eustace didn't believe in magic, didn't believe in anything like a dragon could really exist,
finds himself as one.
And he has to come to grips with what this means and what he needs to do next.
And he obviously doesn't want to stay that way.
He wants to become undragoned.
And he encounters Aslan on the shore one morning while everyone else is asleep.
And he says, I tried to do it myself.
I started scratching myself.
The scales began coming off all over the place.
But just as I was going to put my feet in the water, I looked down and I saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly, just as they had been before.
And then the lion said, I don't know if it spoke, you'll have to let me undress you.
And the very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.
And as Eustace explains this to his cousin Edmund, he didn't exactly understand what was happening.
But he was surrendering himself to Aslan to let him do the hard work of transformation.
That he would no longer be his dragon-ish self.
As he continues, he says, he peeled the beastly stuff right off.
There I was, smooth and soft, a peeled switch, smaller than I had been.
and he caught hold of me, and I didn't like that much,
for I was very tender underneath now that I had skin on,
and now he threw me into the water.
It smarted like anything, but only for a moment,
and I found that all the pain had gone from my arm,
and I saw why.
I turned into a boy again.
And in this baptismal moment for this Eustace,
who didn't know anything really about religion,
didn't really even understand that he was a jerk and a twerp,
eventually began to realize more about himself,
and it was becoming a dragon that helped him see that most clearly.
And he realized, I want to change.
I've got to change.
But he realized also he couldn't do it himself.
He had to let Aslan do it.
And as the narrator, Lewis, explains, it'd be nice, fairly nearly true, to say that from that time on, 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.
And here Lewis reflects a long-standing tradition in the Christian life that the idea of transformation, redemption, healing,
it's not some kind of instantaneous, automatic righteousness and perfection that becomes us, but a slow process of healing.
St. Augustine said that we all undergo throughout our lifetime the process of healing in the hospital or in of the church.
And that we help each other and nurture each other through the growth and the transformation that's necessary.
But in this story, we realize something that Lewis was trying to teach through his other writings, not just his fiction.
In his lectures, he said, every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you,
the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.
Every choice you make means that the next time it's time to make a choice,
the fact that you made that choice prior to the one you're about to make means you're a different person.
who's about to make the next choice.
And that's true whether you've been making good choices or bad choices.
It transforms you into a different kind of person
who's about to make the next decision.
And Lewis says, if you take all of your life as a whole,
with all your innumerable choices, all your life long,
you're slowly turning this central thing
into either a heavenly creature or a hellish one.
And he uses this fiction about Eustace becoming a dragon
to reflect that truth, that idea,
That concept that everything we're doing is turning us into something.
And for many years, we may go along and not realize that it's happened to us.
Not realize that we've become a person that nobody really enjoys being around.
Not realize that we've become a person that is a hassle to everyone who's trying to love them.
And when we do realize it, we might ultimately also realize that that's hard to fix ourselves.
And we might need divine guidance.
We might need a miracle to undo the kind of work we've done by making all the choices
that made us who we are today.
It's also worth noting that Eustace had some idiots for parents too, so all kinds of contexts
and influences make us capable of either choosing something or not choosing something.
They also didn't assign readings like the Chronicles of Narnia.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader then shows us Eustace learned that he needed to change,
But he couldn't do it himself.
And what he was doing was beginning a journey.
And that this story is reflective of our own.
That we know what it's like to realize, I can't believe I did that.
I can't believe I said that.
I can't believe I am this person.
And I wish I could do something about it.
And maybe we make good faith efforts to make those changes.
But I think we'll find over time that we're not capable of changing our hearts in the
way that God can change them, in the way that Christ can redeem. And so we begin a journey
that allows him to do just that. The silver chair is the other story that sort of explains what
these kinds of journeys are like. And as you can tell from the image, it features a young prince
who's been held captive. The other three there are those who've been sent to save them. Two of
them are the children who were brought into this world, and one of them is Eustace. And it's time
for Rillian to be freed because he had been held captive. He'd been kidnapped as a child, and he'd
been kept here in this underworld, never going to the surface of the world, kept down in
these caves and networks of these places where he was kept by this witch queen. And he was
told that at 11 o'clock each night, you become mad, you become crazy, you become insane.
And so for your own good, we'll put you in this chair and we'll bind you here so that
you won't harm yourself or anyone else. The truth is, for that one hour of the day, he
actually was coming to his senses. The magic she had been using against him was wearing off,
and it was in that one hour that he could have broken free and escaped from this horrible world,
but she wouldn't let him. She made him believe that it was for his own good that he was held
captive in that chair, and when they come and rescue him, they have to free him from that
illusion and from that reality. He explains, "Every night I am sane. If only I could get out
of this enchanted chair, it would last. I should be a man again, but every night they bind me,
and so every night my chance is gone.
It is at this hour that I'm in my right mind,
it's all the rest of the day,
that I'm enchanted.
Then when the spell is finally broken
and he destroys the chair,
he says, now that I'm myself,
I can remember that enchanted life.
Though while I was enchanted,
I could not remember my true self.
Who he really was.
A son of the king.
And that's how it goes, isn't it?
That while we're in the midst of whatever it is
we're doing and becoming,
it's often unclear to us what the truth is.
And in this case, it's when he is in his right mind,
he sees it all clearly,
and he can tell the difference between enchantment and reality.
But when he's enchanted, he has a hard time making good choices.
That's just the fact of it.
And so as he explains further to the queen,
he stands up to her and says,
I am the son of the king of Narnia,
Rillian, the only child of Caspian.
She tries to make him believe that none of that is even true,
that none of it is even real.
Narnia she said Narnia I've often heard your lordship utter that name in your
ravings but dear Prince you're very sick there's no land called Narnia and when
she continues with him they try to explain actually Queen no there's this
whole other world outside your own kingdom and there's a son and there's a
lion who rules there and she challenges all of those ideas with these questions
now you see what when you try to think clearly what this son must be you can't
tell me. You can only tell me it's like a lamp. But your sun is a dream. There's nothing in that
dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing. The sun is but a tale,
a children's story. There's no Narnia, no overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. And her
magic is not just in her potions, but in her words. And as she is fooling them into submission,
we might be thinking of another story from many years prior that Lewis knew very well,
It was Plato's allegory the cave and it tells the story about how there are many who are bound in darkness and kept in that darkness
And all they know are the shadows cast on the wall
They have no conception that there's a fire in the middle of the cave
They have no idea that the things which pass between the fire and the wall are the things that are casting the shadows
They don't know that there's anything besides the shadows that anyone would call real. They have no idea
But there are some who've escaped that bondage and they've learned to understand what this whole
prison cave of the world is and as they escape they find outside the cave a real son the true
son that puts everything else in perspective but many of them are hard to convince that they should
look beyond the shadows and the darkness and find life elsewhere but those who have found it are
obligated to return and help those who've seen the light they know what's real they know what's true
and they're obligated to go to the cave and help those who've been bound and ignorant and confused
for so long. That's the plot of the silver chair. The children are there to enter into that cave
and rescue Rillian from the darkness. It turns out that that enchantment is strong and the shadows
are real to them. And at the moment that this is happening, Jill is being persuaded by the witch.
It says that at this time, it didn't come into her head that it was enchantment. For now, the magic
was in its full strength. And of course, the more enchanted you get, the more you feel that you're
not enchanted at all. That's the way of enchantment. It makes it to where you cannot achieve real
perspective and real vision and real truth. Breaking the spell is like waking up from a dream.
And if we look toward the end of their journey, they've escaped the cave world, they've defeated
the witch, and they're almost out, but they spend the night on the edge of the world above. When Jill
woke the next morning and found herself in a cave, she thought for one horrid moment that she was back
in the underworld. But when she noticed that she was lying on a bed of heather with a furry mantle
over her and saw a cheery fire crackling as if newly lit on a stone hearth and further off
morning sunlight coming through the cave's mouth, she remembered all the happy truth.
This is Lewis narrating the story of the allegory of the cave. Here she is in the cave and trying
to figure out, am I stuck? Am I still bound? I know there's something outside this cave. And now
that she's awake, she knows that she can escape and find real life, the true son, the real life
that she's meant to live. And she has, along with her friends, rescued the prince. He was enchanted.
He was confused. He was blinded to his true self. And what he needed was not just divine intervention,
but good friends who helped him break the spell and escape. Ultimately, when he knew who he really
was, he had power, he had freedom, he had capability, and he could escape. But while he was there,
while he was under the enchantment, when he was under her power, he couldn't see clearly,
couldn't think clearly, and the forces were too great. With someone like Eustace, we had
kind of forces within, bad decisions, bad character, all kinds of things making him who he was.
With Rillian, we had these external forces impinging upon him, and he couldn't break free
without help. But in both cases, we have people that need to be freed, that had to be freed. And
the whole story is about their freedom, their transformation, their redemption. But it's not
exactly the same kind of story. And I think we know the difference when we feel like we've got
to make a change and we ask God for help to make such a change. When we know we need to escape,
but we can't do it alone and we don't want to do it alone and we need our friends to help us.
And both of these stories remind us what it's like to be in a world where there are spells everywhere that confuse and enchant and enslave and keep people from seeing the truth.
Not just about the world or about God, but about their very selves, about who they really are, about who they're meant to be.
And that spell has got to be broken.
And it comes by the power of God and it comes through the help of friends that they have an opportunity to begin again.
and this story and all the others like it,
all these good stories remind us
that that kind of life can be broken free of,
that there is another possibility for you and for me,
and that we can begin again,
and it's never too late to begin again.
All the happy truth can be true for us,
but we need the help of God,
and we need the help of friends,
and we need stories like this to help us remember it.
We hope you enjoy your day,
and we hope you enjoy the Writing Carnival today and tomorrow.
Thank you.