I’m one chapter into LWW (Lion, Witch, Wardrobe) and I already have so much to write about; so much that is True. What I didn’t expect is that even the dedication to Lucy Barfield would yield fruit.
There is an almost throw-away line in the dedication that prompts a wistful smile from most of us Narnia fans and then passes out of our heads as we get to the beloved first line which began everything for us.
“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.” (Oxford comma is my addition here because my copy is neglectful. He taught at Oxford. I assume he would honor the comma.)
Let’s at the sentence which is in the very center of the dedication as if planted there by providence itself to show us its importance.
“But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
When we are young we need fairy tales for a myriad of reasons. There is no culture on the planet that does not have some sort of folk tale or “tall tale”, as they were called in the American West because with each telling they got bigger. We are wired for tales of heroes and terrible situations that must be righted by good deeds or fairy magic. The world is unjust and those tales told to young children give us a much-needed hope that all things will be righted again. Children believe in them, emulate them, and want more than anything for them to be true. Adults do as well.
A peculiar thing happens as we age, though. The very people telling fairy tales to their children don’t believe in them nearly as much as the eagerly awaiting ears and hearts and minds that they affect. The parents have often given up on fairy tales a long time ago, realizing that the fantasy built up in their head doesn’t match the reality they encounter on a day to day basis. The parents believe that the bedtime tales are important, but the very thing they believe is important about them isn’t borne out in their own day to day lives. They have turned into the Peters, Susans, and Edmunds.
Each of Lucy’s siblings have practical reasons, real-world reasons to believe that what she tells them, of another world in a Wardrobe, must be false. Their reaction stems from how each has decided to deal with the brutal realization of the “real world”.
Susan knows that the world is not a fantasy but she does want to make it as pleasant as possible. She is the feeling one, always concerned with people’s emotion not getting hurt and protecting Lucy as much as she can. It’s an easy leap to make that Susan likely wants to keep Lucy in that believing place for as long as she can because she remembers; remembers the joy and then the hurt that comes with the “real” invades. She is the nurturing mother who reacts with positivity to Edmund’s grumbling when it rains.
Peter continues to protect some part of himself that still believes. For boys this often manifests in pretending to be the hero, seeking adventure, and being driven by possibility. All boys his age are capable and fearless. The memory of Hercules and the Pre-Mordred Arthur still brings a swell of pride to their chest. In reading about WWI, I was not surprised to learn that so many young men went to war with dreams of heroic glory and honor in their hearts and they found an industrial charnel house that may as well have been hell. The depravity of man to man was that eye opening crush of “real” for a whole generation that never recovered.
Edmund reacts to the invasion of the “real” shattering his childlike belief by becoming pessimistic and bitter. He expects to be lied to and treated poorly. The part of the fairy tale he clung to was that the world would be out of balance and people would suffer, most likely him. But he was not going to be one to go down without a fight. He hated this portion of fairy tales so much, that he can’t rely on magic and virtue to make it right, that he is perfectly willing to do unto others before they do unto him. He will be on the most powerful side even if it isn’t the right side. He carries around the bitterness like an open festering wound.
We often fall into one of these categories in reaction to the “real”: the protector, the part believer, or the bitter. Susan later develops into another who buys in wholesale into the “real” and forgets Narnia. But there is yet another category…the true believer, Lucy.
The Pevensie children being to explore the house and, after a few other rooms, they come to the room that was, “…quite empty except for one big wardrobe…There was nothing else in the room at all except a dead bluebottle on the windowsill.” Peter declared, “Nothing there!” and all exited except for Lucy.
“She stayed because she thought it would be worthwhile trying the door of the wardrobe, even though she felt almost sure that it would be locked.”
And here is where I come back to the dedication. “But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
What a strange thing to say. In our childhood years we form our ideas of how the world works around fairy tales and then the “real” pummels it out of us. We react and we order our lives around the new crushed paradigm. Why would we ever want to return to fairy tales when we have already rejected them as foolish kid stuff? For the same reason we read them to our children again and again perpetuating a cycle.
We have tried the “real”, found it lacking or worse and recognize a long held suspicion…that there was truth, a value we can’t quite articulate, in there after all…that we left something behind in the ashes and “it would be worthwhile trying.” Worth trying when others have already declared it dead, empty, and foolish.
We crave justice, so there must surely be justice. We crave magic, so there surely must be magic. We know that there is something wrong and broken in the world so there must be something that we can do to fix it. All these cravings and knowings pull at us.
It is no different for us Christians.
When we are raised on the stories of the Bible we have a horrible tendency as we age to think of them on a similar level as fairy tales. We begin, in our youth, believing them to be really real. We are wide-eyed and full of surety and joy resting in the notion that the Heavenly Father is on the throne so why would we ever worry? We are protected by guardian angels, and although there is evil and monsters and malevolence in the world the good guys were going to win. All we need to do is pray and God will surely hear us and provide.
Somewhere along the way we had a moment that changed us forever, that shocked us into compliance. The World says, “Speed up,” we speed up. The World says, “Work is more important,” we work as if our lives depend on it. The World says, “Faith is nothing more than good psychology,” and we listen to pastors who sound little different from everything on the self-help shelf at the bookstore. The World says, “You need constant entertainment,” and we plug in to flashing lights and surround sound. The World says we should wrap our identity in “things” and we rush out for the newest phone.
Usually what happens is we get older and we realize the time we lost and the dead ends that each of those commands sends us down. There comes a time when we are ready again for “fairy tales” because we finally realize they actually are true and real.
I challenge you to reject the voices, both secular and religious that say in regards to Christianity, “Nothing there!” Be like Lucy who “stayed behind because she thought it would be worthwhile trying the door or the wardrobe.” Just like the Chesterton quote, the wardrobe was not tried by Peter or the others and found wanting…it was found wanting and never tried.
I challenge you to be old enough now for what the world would call a “fairy tale” because, as C. S. Lewis found with the help of a friend, that the Christian story is a myth: but it is a myth that is actually true.
Finding Narnia 
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