Echoes of the Voice Calling You Home

These people all died controlled and sustained by their faith, but not having received the tangible fulfillment of [God’s] promises, only having seen it and greeted it from a distance by faith, and all the while acknowledging and confessing that they were strangers and temporary residents and exiles upon the earth.

Now these people who talk as they did show plainly that they are in search of a fatherland (their own country).

- Hebrews 11: 13 – 14

All of us have read or heard a story that is just right, the sort of story that makes one think that its author had the right idea of what the universe really should be like, a story that makes you examine your life and think, if only I’d been born during such exciting times. I’ve just listened to a talk given by Peter Kreeft on Christianity in Professor J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic tale, The Lord of the Rings, and I remembered that every single time I’ve read a story that tugs at all of my heart strings like The Lord of the Rings I’ve heard echoes of the voice that wants me to come home. It’s like stumbling upon a strange country for a brief moment and getting the queer feeling that it’s the one place in the universe that you’ve always known and then stumbling back to the country of your birth and realising that it’s not where you belong at all and you spend your whole life searching for that strange country you surely must be a citizen of. Sometimes you see something spectacularly beautiful in our world that echoes how the object really looks in that great country you stumbled upon. It’s like Plato imagined it in his theory of the immaterial world of ‘forms’ in which all objects in world, such as tables, draw their ‘tableness’ from a real table in the world of ‘forms’. When Lucy stumbled upon Narnia through the wardrobe she found a country that echoes the country of her soul clearer than England ever could and at the end of The Last Battle she finds that country that Narnia was only an echo of (a very good one I might add). For a long time I wondered why I always found ‘real’ life so tedious and glum compared to stories, for me ‘real’ life was always worse than even bad stories so I was always on the lookout for any medium that provided some sort of escape. A good story is like hearing the echo of the voice calling you home to the country where your soul belongs, it’s not the real thing but because it projects what the author believes life should be like and one of its purposes being to entertain it’s always better than ‘real’ life. The voice calling you home is also present in your ‘real’ life but it gets choked by everyday mediocrities like stress about money, your job, newspapers and what not. We live in a strange age where the benefits of technology are many but the disadvantages are just as many, if not more. Take for example the internet, you have all of the world’s information at your fingertips but you have to wade through tons of rubbish to get to the information you really want. From the moment you wake up you’re being spammed, it’s no wonder you never hear the voice call you. When you are reading a story your mind is alert and thus you hear that echo and it makes you think about that strange country.

I find myself feeling like King Tirian did in the last days of Narnia, I read the epic stories of old and wish that such a wonderful adventure would find me. King Tirian’s adventure finds him and he rises to the challenge, fighting bravely as the last king of Narnia. I feel that we are living in such times and that for us the end is looming, we need Tirian’s courage. In a previous post I said that life is wonderful and that all the greatest stories you’ve ever read are true and that the greatest of these, Christianity, is true and all the others are tables reflecting the true ‘tableness’ of Christianity. Well that’s still the case. The echo of the voice you are always hearing after reading a story that is just right is the Lamb calling out to you… be silent for a few minutes and you’ll hear Him calling you home in this world and in this world you will hear his voice more clearly because you are a pivotal character in the greatest story ever told. Right now, where ever you are, just stop and be quiet and listen to the Lamb’s voice.

"Who is this?" they said to Me
“That the wind and waves obey
Come, let's hang Him on a tree
That His reign should pass away”
But here I am I say to you
Though you turn away, it is My will
To love you for forevermore
Peace be still, peace be still

- Intermission: The Lamb Knocks by Showbread

Small Packages

It has been said that dynamite comes in small packages and this statement has been proven time and time again over the centuries. The elf, Galadriel, in Professor Tolkien's epic tale, The Lord of the Rings says of the minuscule Hobbit folk, "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin who are of very little significance if compared to great beings like Elrond, Galadriel and Treebeard whom they share a world with prove to be made of such stuff as to play pivotal roles in the freeing of a world from the clutches of an evil force of a staggering magnitude. The ring has the power to twist the nature of people and it seems that the more power a person wields the more susceptible they are to its evil influence as Galadriel says, "Instead of a dark lord, you would have a queen, beautiful and terrible. All will love her and despair." Galadriel is an ancient and powerful elf and the ring would twist her nature to the point that she would use her power to become a tyrant. Frodo, having very little power for the ring to work with, is thus small enough to be the ring bearer. He has the heart of a lion though because with the help of his gardener and steadfast friend, Sam, he ventures into the very heart of the Enemy's land to destroy the ring. In a paradoxical deviation from the norm the Hobbits' weakness is their strength. As I write this I am browsing through a master's thesis titled Representations of Satan in the Narnia Chronicles by C. S. Lewis written by Caroline Goodwin and I'm in awe of the the faith of the valiant mouse, Reepicheep, who sails to the end of the world in search of Aslan's country. Reepicheep is another example of how the smallest of us can make the biggest difference. I went to go and see Prince Caspian yesterday and now as I'm browsing Ms Goodwin's thesis I realise the influence The Chronicles of Narnia have had over me as a person. When I started this blog I said that one realises that this series of books is gunpowder on re-reading it as and adult (a state of existence many doubt I've reached) – by that view I firmly stand. This is a series written for children and yet it serves to inspire love, faith and kindness in many adults. Like a Hobbit its strength lies in the fact that it is easy to read and it takes the core Christian values and presents them in a simple allegory. Many churches water down Christianity to suit the masses but Lewis simplifies it so that children (and adults) can be inspired to seek out the real thing.