Chronicles

The first teaser trailer for 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' is out and is available here.

I'm very much looking forward to the movies (the first of which is released early this December), especially having recently read through the series and having enjoyed it immensely. I hope, along with every other literary fan who watches the tomes of choice get adapted for the silver screen, that the movies become faithful representations of the books. Although I don't expect the films to carry through all of Lewis' analogies, I do hope that at the least they carry forward a sense of faith or providence which carried through with the LOTR movies. (Yes, I am aware of the debate about the content of faith in the novels - but nevertheless many people came away with that sense and enjoyed the analogies.)

I think one of the greatest lessons I've learned from Lewis' writings is to make use of one's imagination in faith. To have an unashamed love for and practise of dreaming. One of my toughest personal struggles has, at times, been knowing what to do with my dreams and ideas. Having a heart full of desire and a mind full of dreams, but wrestling with submitting my life to God - and seeking to echo Christ in following His Father's voice and doing His Father's work, and not anything of myself. A million ideas can come to mind, but what is more precious is to seek and hear the voice and direction of God and doing that.

It's a balance I find one of the hardest to keep, but time spent with Lewis in Narnia have been a real blessing, roaming with God. Learning that God desires us to use our imaginations and not only our intellects or reciting Bible verses only is a very freeing and exciting lesson, that takes one from pacing the sometimes cold, hard walls of the monastery and allows one to fly free over hill and dale and throughout this glorious world, dipping in its oceans and spinning through its woods. That to me is the stuff of life and faith, the world challenging and inspiring, the monastery giving meaning and explaining.

In his book, The Four Loves, Lewis offers this, "Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means. And not, on the Christian premises, by accident. The created glory may be expected to give us hints of the uncreated; for the one is derived from the other and in some fashion reflects it..." That is, it helps us to understand what love, and fear, and wonder and beauty are - it gives us a richer vocabulary of life than we would have if we never left the monastery halls. Yet those halls are not to be loathed.

Lewis continues, "We have seen an image of glory. We must not try to find a direct path through it and beyond it to an increasing knowledge of God. The path peters out almost at once. Terrors and mysteries, the whole depth of God's counsels and the whole tangle of the history of the universe, choke it. We can't get through; not that way. We must make a detour - leave the hills and woods and go back to our studies, to church, to our Bibles, to our knees. Otherwise the love of nature is beginning to turn into a nature religion. And then, even if it does not lead us to the Dark Gods, it will leads us to a great deal of nonsense."

Perhaps what I enjoy of Lewis' Narnia is that I find a place where the wide world and the monastery combine. The one teaches the other and it then responds in joy by filling the air with glories and wonders.

From one who loves to walk with God outside,

Peace be with you, and walk with the Lion!