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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joe Rigney
Read between
November 3 - November 3, 2021
“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Growing up doesn’t mean replacing old loves as much as it means adding new ones.
Thus, a love of Aslan and Narnia ought not be limited to children, as though it were beneath adults. In fact, adults ought to be able to find more to love in the stories (this has certainly been my experience). Especially, if the author intend...
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It is absurd to suggest that fictional characters, whom most readers know more intimately than they know their own parents, do not have a similar effect. Earlier critics took it for granted that literature, an imitation of life, presents models for imitation to the reader.16
Indeed, as Aslan says to Lucy on one occasion, “This was the very reason you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you might know me better there.”
It makes me want to eat my bread with joy and drink my wine with a merry heart, because God approves (Eccles. 9:7). It makes me want to guard my heart against gluttony and miserliness. It makes me want to live so that those with shriveled hearts and icy minds accuse me of self-indulgence and waste. It also makes me want to live so that the accusations are false.
And the glorious truth is that Lewis’s vision of feasting through winter and glorying in spring and resisting the seductive dullness of the Witch’s world is not just a fairy tale, but the way the world really is. In the bleak mid-winter long ago, Spring landed in Bethlehem and began to unthaw the world. Frozen rivers melted and stone statues began to come to life. The Son of Man came eating and drinking and magically turning water into wine and multiplying loaves and fishes on a grassy hillside. Accused of gluttony and indulgence, he endured the scorn and violence of men with ice in their
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Given the kind of person that I am right now becoming, what would be my reaction if I heard Aslan’s name for the first time?
But Aslan, like Jesus, is full of grace, and he reaps what Edmund had sown.
For manners, whether in the court or at the dinner table, are simply love in the little things, love in the trifles.
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” (Ch. 14)
Biblical metaphors aren’t merely creative ways to communicate; they are deeply and fundamentally true, divinely designed analogies that enable us to more fully understand God and his world.
Perhaps, like Ramandu, angelic stars are able to appear on earth in a human form and then return back to their blazing spheres of hydrogen and helium.
By all means, let us explore the physical and material world, wisely and faithfully using the tools of science to discover how the world works. But let us never fall prey to the seductive reductionism that explains away the wonders of God’s world. Let us resist with every fiber of our being the banality of restricting reality to those things that we can weigh and measure with our fancy instruments.
1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.
I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.
Aslan’s Light is the cause of our deliverance. Because of him, we need not fear the terrors of the night, nor the arrows that fly by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.
In all of these instances, the sight of the Bright and Shining Lion leads to repentance and restoration, scattering the darkness of sin and disobedience. In Aslan is Light, and his light is the light of men, shining in the darkness, unable to be overcome. Like Jesus, he is the Light of the World, and in another beautiful twist from the writings of the Apostle John, he is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, the Lion of Judah who scatters light from his mane, the one who answers Edmund’s question about whether he is in our world too with the simple phrase: “I am.”
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.40
“If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.”41
[Shasta] had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one. (Ch. 10)
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.45
Moreover, he chastises his youngest son for mocking the defeated and imprisoned prince, saying “Never taunt a man save when he is stronger than you: then, as you please” (Ch. 15). In other words, even mockery has its proper place, provided you are the sole faithful prophet on the mountain, surrounded by 400 prophets of Baal who are making fools of themselves before their false gods.
Kingship and headship, as both Aslan and Jesus have shown us, is about love and sacrifice, giving up your whole self for the sake of those in your care, even unto death.
And this is where we find them—two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world, but now huddled in the presence of a Great Lion who is about to change their stories forever.
Aslan knows. He knows pain. He knows sadness, anguish, and loss. He is a Lion of Sorrows, acquainted with grief. And he so identifies with the weakness and suffering of a lost, little boy that tears well up in his eyes and, in a moment of glorious condescension he stoops to give Digory a Lion’s kiss.
“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” (Ch. 11).
“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. (Ch. 11)
Don’t their stories really demonstrate how crucial it is to put first things first (even if in the end, they also have second things thrown in)? Indeed, might the real comfort, the deep comfort come, not from the restoration of a mother’s health, or the recovery of a happy father, but in the shining tears and smiling face of the High King above all kings?
God does not shield his saints from Darkness. Many of us have drunk Terror, that uncontrolled passion that crashes in wave after seemingly endless wave upon the shores of a troubled mind.
And still there was no change in the night or the wood, but there began to be a kind of change inside Tirian. Without knowing why, he began to feel a faint hope. And he felt somehow stronger. (Ch. 4)
The lesson is that we must prepare for dark nights by cultivating strong relationships while it is yet light. “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (Prov. 17:17).
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken. (Eccles. 4:9–12)
More importantly, we must come to understand the enemy within. External enemies are no true threat unless their lies find a willing embrace in our hearts and minds. We must not be malleable and simplistic like Puzzle, lest we fall prey to sneaky apes.
As the Narnians learned in The Silver Chair, it is no use arguing with the devil on his (or her) terms; far better to pick up a sword and kill the dragon.)
Breathing Narnian air has strengthened me in the pit, kept me believing when my faith went wobbly. The stories have delivered me from the Dwarfish cynicism that is worse than death, the enslaving inability to believe the obvious because, being so afraid of being taken in, I refuse to be taken out. They have given me courage in the blackest night because I have known in my bones that I am now, as always, between the paws of the true Aslan.
Round and round the hilltop he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs. 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 could never make up her mind. (Ch. 15)
Aslan gets bigger as we get older. Discuss.
Prince Caspian is a book about the incredible worth and value of Old Things and Ancient Stories. Two thousand years after the resurrection of Jesus, that’s something worth remembering.
The Narnian creation narrative is glorious, with echoes of Genesis, the Psalms, Job, the Middle Ages, and Tolkien. This world is God’s song, and his music resounds in every place. Which is to say, you should read Michael Ward’s books on Narnia.
He responded, “Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he is doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before.”65
After all, Lewis means for us to see Aslan as Jesus. “There [that is, in our world] I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name” (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Ch. 16).
My hope is that one day they come up to me and say something like, “Dad, is Aslan Jesus?” I’d just smile and say, “Why do you say that?”
