Each month, you’ll hear from one of us on what we’re reading and a little bit about the book. Enjoy!
I have a friend who is the kind of friend you can always talk candidly with, and it’s her fault I spent the last few months abroad in Narnia.
It started one afternoon when we were talking openly about believing and doubting, of which we have both had our fair share. I asked her about some of her recent doubts. “It’s been different since reading Narnia,” she said. When I asked her what she meant, she reminded me of another afternoon we spent watching birch trees get tangled in the wind. We had both noticed how alive they looked, like they were nodding their heads and shaking hands and mingling with one another. “Reading Narnia is like that,” she said. “It’s like you see that everything is alive.”
You might think The Chronicles of Narnia is for children, in which case, you are correct. But author C.S. Lewis knew that grownups would eventually sneak back into the wardrobe to discover new truths about God. “One day,” Lewis wrote to his goddaughter in the dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, “you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
Like you, perhaps, I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid. I fell in love with the great and fearsome lion that gave his life to save Narnia. This time around, though, I read the books in a different order: The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Price Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; and The Last Battle. While the “correct” order is highly debated, some have said this was the way Lewis intended the Chronicles to be read.
Spending time in Narnia stretched my imagination so much that many of the truths I’d always “known” about Jesus simply clicked. When the great lion breathed a bright and bustling world out of a lonesome darkness, I was overwhelmed by the phenomenon of creation. I understood His dear pursuit of me when I ran through the desert with an orphan, a princess, and two talking horses. I remembered my own belovedness when four children remembered how to be kings and queens. I witnessed true courage and faithfulness on a voyage to the world’s end with a noble mouse. And, at last, I tasted grace and justice when the lion looked in each creature’s eyes at a stable door.
Although I was traveling to Narnia each time I cozied up to read, I still sat in traffic on the way to work. I still went on runs in the afternoons, fixed dinner, and sorted laundry. But somehow, I was changing. My eyes were curiously more curious. My heart was bigger and softer and lighter. Even the air around me felt different. Narnia roused in me a childlike hunger to believe, and what’s more, to believe in the only story truly crucial and wild and fantastic. I had new capacities to consider the wonders of Christ.
I am here to tell you that you can still fit in the wardrobe … even if it feels funny at first to try. It’s much bigger and closer and realer than you would imagine. My advice though, is that if you do go looking for Narnia, don’t search too hard. As all readers and Narnians know, you can look all you want, but the real magic happens when the story finds you.
Caroline Slemp was raised in middle Tennessee and is proud to still call it home. She is a recent graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she lovingly studied Writing and International Studies. In her free time, you’ll find Caroline anywhere under the sun or nose-deep in a good book.
