The following is out of the massive tome that you can read about on the Homepage.
It has had only a small number of edits for this post.
Enjoy!
For the Fame of His Name
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“Some Day You Will Be Old Enough to Start Reading Fairy Tales Again”
I think reading this C. S. Lewis quotation would not have settled with a similar sense in the pit of my heart until I really suffered, and my fragile humanity came to life as I pondered death. Over the past decade, I can confirm an upsurge in all manner of yearning and aching, which has not supplanted my need for true ideas, but has also mandated a need for these to speak about what is more, where only God’s magic can work such wonders.
I have considered this detail after watching a Disney remake of, Pete’s Dragon, which just so happened to be shot in New Zealand. It is amazing how such familiarity can speak into the many times of experiential incubation in my breath-taking Middle Earth. I found this children’s movie to be surprisingly moving, evoking emotion where sincere tears became an internal cleanse, as God reminded of His renewing grace made personally manifest.
There is a specific scene that I believe encapsulates the impact of having the right Gospel orbital vision.
I will do my best to set it.
Pete is a young boy who survived his parents life-ending car crash, in the middle of a forest, by living with his Dragon-rescuer. Fantastical. After years of seclusion, Pete makes himself known to a Ranger’s family (I believe you would describe this vocation in a US context). The Ranger just happens to be the daughter of a father who is the only other person to have visioned this giant green mythical figure.
Upon the arrival of Pete into their world, this daughter has a poignant conversation with her Dad about the truth of this beast, which starts below on the subject of a picture he drew for her:
Daughter: How old was I when you drew this for me? Father: Ah maybe, five or six, just before your Mother passed away. I remember then, you hung on every word I ever said. You were so full of questions. Daughter: Dad, what did you really see out there? And please, don’t tell me another story, just tell me what you remember. Father: What I remember, what I remember is, I was out hunting, and the sun was shining down, and the wind was blowing through the trees, and I remember thinking, boy, this is exactly where I belong. I stopped by a creek to get a drink, suddenly I realized I wasn’t in the sun anymore, and I looked up to see what was blocking the sky, and what did I see but… a dragon. I see a dragon. I’ve never been so scared in all my life. But when I raised my gun to shoot, suddenly there was this feeling, this, it was like magic. There’s no other word to express it. It was magic. So I put my gun down, and just sat there; sat there across the creek from each other, just looking, and just sat there looking, and then the dragon turned and disappeared into the woods, and I remember thinking, I am one lucky guy. Of course nobody believed me, and I knew what people were saying about me and I must admit there were times when I thought, maybe they’re right, but then I thought about the magic. It changed the way I see the world; the way I see trees, the way I see sunshine; the way even I see you. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. (Emphasis Mine).
When we are young, we read fairy tales that do something deeply transformative within. They provide a language to the inner codes of our person. Whether these translate with a sense of purposeful longing, or that there is more to this idea of life beyond the physical curtain, this early stage of relative simplicity from the pride-of-normalcy encourages us to seek no false explanation, but to ably rest in the wonder.
Then we start to believe the lie we have grown-up. We move onto more complex ideas and solutions of adult life. But, if we are blessed, this journey will find a break in the forest. The means may be heart-breaking and life-altering, but as these experiences provide an incision with the finely-tuned articulation of the Creator, we become old enough to handle and understand these tales of our youth. We grasp how they often represent the well-worn time-periods of our historic civilization; the building blocks of our nascent humanity, which we have allowed the years of detail and information to obscure.
Like a secret garden, once the obstructions have been cleared, and we are able to get back inside, we begin to understand what it means to come to Jesus like a little child (Matthew 18:2-4; Mark 10:13-16; Luke 18:15-17). We have confused the point of this account, not understanding what it means to live these lines. We have failed to see how Jesus has connected our deepest needs with the internal experience of a child. Speaking to our best outward impressions that we have now grown-up in these intervening years, when the ego is peeled back and we become uncovered, we grasp how our fundamental needs remain the same. At this point, we better understand the Bible’s words on the nakedness of the new birth singing with existential clarity, and how our distorting flesh wants to clothe us like an emperor without any groove.
As I settle into these words, I think of another special place.
I am not sure if in your growing years, you had a singular family home that dominated these experiences of love, joy, and peace. I reflect on this reality, because there was a time when this passed in my experience. As that contrast fills my person, I believe this memory works in a similar way. I don’t think it is definitively the physical specifics, as we know any re-creation will alter dynamics for any number of reasons. What we intensely hunger-to-fill is the effect of that history into our moment, which so imbued our lives with a type of flourishing that our restless hearts long for, and become contented with, that we want it even more, now that it has gone.
This is what the Gospel answers.
While religion will distort our focus through a re-creation and control of the externals, the Gospel moves with our ever-changing time, but always brings us back to the place; that secret garden; that family home. The Gospel is supernatural morse code for contentment. While religion can offer an external vision to facsimile, the Gospel provides new eyes and fresh vision to see everything old, but experience it afresh, like it is new every morning.
Outside of all the required reasoned arguments, the practical personal power of the Gospel is proven in how it changes our world; how it transforms and informs how we now view the world. We live differently. We see differently. We act differently.
While Pete’s Dragon is make-believe that expressed something we must make real, the Gospel is truly-real that expresses something we must make-believe. The incipient desire that is evident in our lives when entertaining such tales should become more translatable in our fulfillment of the true accounting in God’s Gospel story that we make-believe.
And the words of C. S. Lewis become realized in our time.
If this is presently a fairy tale in your world, time to make-believe, and then daily step through the closet into a new world beckoning.