The movie struck me just as powerfully as it did the first time. I anticipated the scenes that I knew would end sadly, and the despair was all the more deep: King Peter’s pride that led to unnecessary loss, Caspian’s near mistake of bringing back the White Witch. The contrast between good and evil is so clear… but how tempting it is to turn to the power of darkness when your faith in the Light has waned.
But it was the Stone Table that got to me. Once a solid piece standing in the middle of the Narnian wilderness, the 4 siblings re-discover this symbol of Aslan’s death and resurrection buried beneath hundreds of years of fortress and rubble. The inscriptions and illustrations on the walls of the room, telling the story of the High Kings and Queens of old and of Aslan’s sacrifice, reminded me of the stained glass windows I see in European cathedrals today. They tell a story that many people now think of as legend, and only a few have the faith to believe as truth. It is the story that we celebrated and remembered today- the story of a death and resurrection with the power to save the world. (Pastor Harrop spoke today about the power of resurrection. He related it, in his practical way, to the Hoover dam, whose generators create power for thousands of people who live hundreds of miles away from it. Their flippant turn of a switch to ignite their electricity is far removed from the source of that power; and we 21st-century Christians sometimes lose sight of the source of our power the farther away we move from it.) We could be compared to the Narnians, who remembered only vaguely, and had never seen for themselves the person of Aslan whose power they claimed. Every year at Lent, I hang a cross on my wall; I read prayers and the stories of Scripture that remind me of the real events that I now remember… and it seems so far removed from the reality of Jesus. Removed, like the electricity in LA from the Hoover dam; removed like the Kings and Queens of Narnia looking at their pictures carved on the wall. I can’t even imagine what it would be like for the Apostle John or Peter or James to show up in the 21st century. What would they think of our crosses, our stained glass windows, our resurrection Sunday services? I have a feeling that it would seem to them like the carvings on the wall of the Stone Table cavern seemed to the Pevensie children- so far removed from the reality they had experienced that it didn’t even seem real. And as I watched, I longed to understand what these children understood- the reality, the knowing of One whom others had only heard about, and whom they could only believe in through the gift of faith.
I know, I know, “blessed are they who, not seeing, believe.” It’s not that the believing is hard, necessarily; particularly not for me, having been blessed with a Lucy-like [relatively doubt-free] faith. It’s just that I sometimes wonder, am I even getting it right? What if the things I’m believing, my understanding of these things I cannot see, is all wrong? I’m reading The Shack right now, and while I’m relatively unimpressed with the book, the one thing that strikes me is the way the main character is smacked in the face again and again with the discrepancies between what he thought Christianity was all about and who God actually is. I know that when I meet God I will be surprised, and things will not fit into the theological box I have built for myself. I wish I could demolish that box altogether, but it’s hard to destroy it without something to put in its place. And what I need is the real thing; the reality of the Trinity in all of its mystery. I just can’t grasp it.
Now we see things imperfectly, as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
1 comment:
beautiful and well-stated. my heart resonates with your words. thanks for sharing, rachel.
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