Such is the power of myth, of story, that nearly 40 years on I can still recall that feeling of entering the wardrobe for the first time – the one that leads to the enchanting land of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Opening the book itself was like stepping into that other world of magic and talking animals. I knew nothing of C.S. Lewis then, but I still have the Puffin paperback set – the $5.95 sticker is still on the box—that was first printed the year I was born, a mere three years after Lewis completed the series.
This year, on Dec. 9, backed by churchgoing U.S. Presbyterian billionaire Philip Anschutz, Disney's version of Narnia will open on the big screen. It will be wrong to compare the movie with the book, though I shall certainly be near the front of the line; the two are totally different media. This is especially so with a writer like Lewis who put enormous stock in myth, in the power of the word.
Lewis wrote about myth in both academic articles and books as well as in his stories. He called it the "romantic longing" in humanity. His collection of wartime radio broadcasts, assembled into the book Mere Christianity, is an entirely different Lewis from Narnia and anything remotely romantic. There he is straightforward and dry, a very model of British common sense philosophy, a "man-to-man" kind of approach: He hadn't yet met Joy.
Helen Joy Davidman Gresham was to turn his world, if not upside down, then certainly on its side. I don't know if he put it quite this way, but I think Joy incarnated love for Lewis. (And although there are Lewis scholars who will disagree and it certainly can't be proved, I suspect that had she lived longer, she would have knocked Lewis's ideas about the role of men and women, as defined in Mere Christianity, on their head.)
The interesting thing about his marriage is that it clearly provided a vehicle for expressing truths in the same way that stories do—and in so very different a fashion than something like Mere Christianity.
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes this about the gospel stories:If ever a myth had become a fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it… Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, man. This is not "a religion," nor "a philosophy." It is the summing up and actuality of them all.
Compare that to what he writes in the fifth book of Narnia, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" where the narrator says of Lucy, "a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book," a story "about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill."
Lewis was not alone in his interest in the power of stories to relate truths. Among his friends were the writers Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and J.R.R. Tolkien, (members of the literary group, the Inklings), as well as G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald and Dorothy Sayers.
Unsurprisingly, J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter movie Goblet of Fire will have opened by the time this is published, has acknowledged her admiration for the Inklings. Between Hogwarts, hobbits and, now, the characters of Narnia, a good deal of Christian-influenced myth is now in circulation in popular culture.
It would be interesting to get Lewis's take on this because he was both an astute observer of society and far more generous than many today on what Christianity means. But this is supremely the season of stories, and about one particular story. Charles Schulz knew that, just as Luke the gospeller did, which is why Linus's lines in the Christmas pageant are: "And there were in the same country shepherds…"
May this Story become incarnate for you and your family and friends this Christmas, and may you, like C.S. Lewis, be surprised by joy.
