Worth revisiting

There are some books that are good to read. Plenty of books out there really are enjoyable and bring good stories to your mind that can fill your world for the hours, days or even weeks you spend reading them.

Many of those books though – in fact I’d go so far as to say most of those “good” books – are really only worth reading once. Most of the time, when you pick up a good book the second time through, it’s just kind of old news. You’ve lived the adventure. You know how it ends. It’s just not the same.

And then there are the GREAT books. I know there must be thousands of GREAT books out there, and I am not going to claim that I have read even a fraction of them. But I just felt I must just give my two cents’ worth on a particularly GREAT series of books.

So here you go. My opinion.

The Chronicles of Narnia.

There. I have put it out there. I have a hunch that it may be a series that is condemned by many Christians, since it is hard to deny its magical content. But, if you can look past the word “magic” and really just read it with a little grace, it is well worth anything you must overlook, in my humble opinion.

So here is the thing about the Narnia books. Every single time I have read them in my life, and it must be at least four times I’ve gone through them now, I get something new out of them.
When I was a little girl and my dad read them to me, I was completely enchanted by the stories themselves. I loved the characters. I loved the idea that there were worlds outside our own. I was so excited by the thought that one might actually just stumble into such a world by mistake. What a lovely thought for an imaginative and lonely only child… that I might just walk into a room and fall out into a beautiful land of green grass and friendly mythical creatures. Oh how I dreamed the dreams of Narnia as a little girl.

And then when I was a young adult, still not a committed Christian but aware of the idea that there was some allusion to God in there, I did get that little glimpse into the real STORY beneath the story. But it was most definitely vague at that time. Really what I got out of it was just a deeper understanding of the characters and a renewed excitement for adventure.

But the more times I have read the books, the deeper I seem to go. The first time or two as a Christian that I read them, I noticed how obvious the Christ message was in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. How could I have missed that? And wow. The simple, childlike way in which C.S. Lewis brings that message home is really amazing. Self sacrifice. Willingly giving innocent blood in place of a sinner’s. I was really amazed. And that was just the one book that started it all.

Really, in hindsight, I saw God in that particular book even in my young readings. But the thing that has gotten me as I have read the other books a few more times as a believer is how much wisdom can be gleaned from them, and how scriptural the ideas are even though there aren’t any direct scriptural references cited.

I’ll spare you a rewrite of the entire series here, but I feel compelled to at least list a few of the really meaningful parts of the books that have really hit me hard this last time reading them through.

In A Horse and His Boy, I really like when Aslan makes the point, more than once mind you, to Shasta and to Aravis that their story is their own, and what happens to another is not for them to know. He also makes it clear that no one is to know “what might have been” when they ask Him if things might have gone differently had they made other choices. I also felt God’s spirit in the underlying meaning all throughout the book that no matter how bad things looked, no matter how much Shasta in particular wondered why he had all the bad luck, Aslan was orchestrating it all. And in the end each and every event in Shasta’s life was planned perfectly. Each difficulty was meant for a purpose. Each trial made him stronger. Many fearful moments were actually forcing him into situations that in the end were helpful and necessary. And the funny thing is, that is one of the books that really hardly even stood out in my memory when I thought back on the series.

I love in Prince Caspian the part when Aslan calls Lucy to follow Him, but since no one else sees Him or believes her she chooses to follow the others instead, going the opposite direction from which Aslan had told her to go. And when she finally speaks to Him and asks why she didn’t follow, she explains that no one believed her so she couldn’t go with Him. Then He makes it clear to her that it made no difference what the others said. She knew He was telling her to follow, and that should have been enough. How much do we need that reminder in our own daily lives? I know I need to remember that more often than I care to admit.

I was also taken aback this time reading through The Magician’s Nephew. Again, this is one of the books in the series that never really meant much to me. Mostly, I am just peeved that they put it at the front of the series now when I still think The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe should be the first book of the series one ever reads.

But I digress.

This time while reading it, what struck me was Lewis’ telling of the creation of Narnia. I had never before noticed how similar it must be to God’s own creation of our world. What must His voice have sounded like as He called plants to life and brought forth the creature of the earth? It is not something that I have taken the time to really ponder when reading it in actual scripture, but when mixed with the fancy and beauty of a fictional telling, it just sparked my imagination like wildfire to make me really want to know what those six days of creation must have been like. Oh, to have been there… the beauty, the wonder of it all. The colors, the lights… so much from nothing… all from the one Voice that existed before all time or matter existed at all. If a complete work of fiction can make me look to our Creator with such awe and wonder, well, I think it just goes to show that God can work through anything he chooses. And I feel like, at least for me, He has used these children’s stories to really speak to my heart and to call me closer to Him… to really help me to see some of His creative self.

And, since it is so fresh in my mind from reading it out loud to Punky these last couple of weeks, I cannot believe how much I missed the first several times reading through The Silver Chair! I won’t put each and every detail here, but the one that sticks out the most to me as I sit here tonight is in chapter twelve when Jill, Eustace, Puddleglum and the prince are in the castle with the evil witch who has held the prince a captive under an enchanted spell for the past ten years. They are deep in the bowels of the earth, miles and miles below the earth’s surface with no natural light to be seen… nothing but darkness and eerie silence… and when they confront the witch (who appears to the observer to be a beautiful and charming young queen) and demand to be released, she calmly and quietly puts some sweet smelling powder in the fire and begins playing a simple, lovely and rhythmic tune on a small instrument. They try to tell her to let them go home to the Overworld and she turns all their words around on them. She convinces them all with simple, soft words, spoken from a beautiful woman with a lovely and kind voice that none of the things they speak of ever really existed. With her alluring and deceptive ways, she begins to convince them that her world, this dark Underworld, is really and truly the only world that ever was. I was so struck as I read this (and believe me, Lewis writes it so much better than I can retell it here in short) that Satan uses such similar tactics to lull so many people into believing that life here, the things of this dark world, are all that are really important. Heaven, God’s beautiful paradise, really must not exist at all except for in the imagination of man. So many of us are tempted into loving and longing for the things of this life. So many people who do not know God feel no need to even search for Him, because they have been so misled by Satan’s lies. And though some may think that his lies are big, ugly and obvious… I was really reminded by this part of the book how alluring and lovely his lies can really be.

Anyway. I cannot do justice to The Chronicles of Narnia in my own short and broken examples here. But for almost a year now Punky and I have been reading through them together for his first time, my 4th or 5th. And as I read through the books yet again, I am touched by Punky’s fresh love for the story, the characters, the excitement and the adventure. And I am thrilled to see that he actually has a decent understanding of the STORY beneath the story – much more of a grasp than I had at 6 or 7 years old. And as a woman who has willingly offered her heart and life to Christ for the past 4 years, I have just been amazed time and time again how much I have gotten out of these stories, yet again.

So maybe you have never read them. Maybe you have, but not since you were a kid. Or heck, maybe you read them a few years back when you were already a believer but it’s just been a while.

Might I suggest that it may be worth your time to pick them up again?

Maybe one of your kids is ready to begin the adventure with you for the first time. Or maybe you can just carve out a little time each week to enjoy them yourself. Or, like my husband and I did 7 or 8 (or was it 9 or 10?) years ago, maybe you can read the series aloud to each other before bed for a bit each night. Whichever way you do it, I think that you may very well find it well worth your time. And you never know what new little sub-story you might find this time through. There are treasures to be found hidden in those pages, no doubt. I really think this is one of those GREAT books (series of seven books, no less!) that you can’t go wrong when re-reading. I have yet to read it through without finding something that really filled me up in one way or another.

So there you go. My opinion on some books that I really like. I am just thankful to God that, no matter what hand He had in the author’s efforts of writing the story, He has clearly used these stories to speak truth to my heart in a way that has brought me closer to Him.

And that, my friends, is the sign of a book worth reading (again).