Lewis wrote about this in an essay called “A Meditation in a Toolshed,” in which he imagined himself standing in a dark little garden shed with a beam of light coming in over the closed door. He used that beam of light as a metaphor for two different ways to know. To look at the light, standing apart from it, was an image of scientific, modern knowledge, the kind of knowing we prioritize in the modern world because we can observe something, measure it, prove it is real. But there’s a whole different way to know just waiting for us if we step into the beam of light and look along it into the golden day outside, into a green summer world that comes to us as color, warmth, and beauty. That, said Lewis, is the knowledge of experience, an encounter with reality that comes to us from inside the emotion we know in loving family or children, the awe we encounter in worship, the thrill of a happy ending in our favorite fairy tale.
To look at it another way, consider me, in this moment, as I write at my favorite local café on a sunny English morning. I can look at the table under my laptop and see that it is made of scuffed old pine board, that it is sturdy (if uneven), with legs painted green. I can observe the surprisingly good weather, the hum of my laptop, the word count for this chapter, and in so doing I stand apart, I analyze. But some things today I know only from experience: the hope and strength I drew from listening to Ralph Vaughn Williams’s “The Lark Ascending” on my walk here; the love that suffuses my being when I glance up from my keyboard to glimpse my husband sitting across from me, conjugating Greek verbs; the joy I find in striving to get these complicated concepts down on the page. I can’t stand apart from that satisfaction or love or the joy of the music, and I can’t measure it; I can only know it by being within it.
And here’s the key: the joy and assurance we find in reading a story is an instant when we know truth from the inside. We inhabit it. Lewis loved the myths surrounding the Norse god Balder, who died a sacrificial death, and realized later that what he loved in that tale was its echo of the true God incarnate coming to die in order to save the world. I love the epic of Middle-earth; I melt into a puddle of aching, grateful tears at the image of Aragorn entering his war-torn city not to conquer but to heal, “for the hands of a king are the hands of a healer.”[1] But this is only an echo of the beauty surrounding the real victor in the world’s battle, the hero who makes us like himself: Christ. When I read Pilgrim’s Inn by Elizabeth Goudge, its story of a home whose beauty brings healing to the brokenhearted fills me with both joy and aching desire. It gives me an inward glimpse into the belonging that will come to me in the new heaven and new earth, and in that taste, I can believe that it’s true.
Stories, in Alison Milbank’s lovely phrase, leave us with “a feeling of homesickness for the truth,”[2] and that is why you, my reading friend, need never fear that the hope you encounter in imagined worlds is somehow separate from the faith you embrace in the real world. All of us, as we read, are like the Pevensie children in Narnia when Aslan sends them back to their own world and tells them,
There I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.[3]
We grow to know God better as we encounter his reality in stories that richly image his splendor or his power or even his humble presence among us. Can imagination be false? Of course. We can be deceived in the language of story just as we can in the language of atheistic science. But we humans are not merely “thinking things” (as James K. A. Smith puts it) who can survive by assenting to a list of doctrinal truths. Rather, we are “defined by what [we] love,” and our loves are deeply shaped by the stories we tell, the narratives we believe. Our worldview, Smith argues, is “more a matter of the imagination than the intellect,” because our desires are shaped by our image of “the good life.”[4] We find those images all around us; we might draw them from the narratives thrown at us in nonstop advertisements, alluring us with the promise of a thinner or more stylish self. We might draw our images from people we admire. Or we might draw them from a story: the bravery of Aragorn, the faith of Lucy Pevensie, or the tale that Paul is always telling us in his letters, calling us saints and holy ones.
The luminous truth I came to, won by hours of study and the patient words of my tutor, was the truth that a book girl imagines. She looks for God’s reality in the realm of story; she finds hope in beauty, grace in a fairy tale; and she revels in the crimson truth of a sunset. A woman who reads understands that symbol and image, story and song, the heft of mountains and the arc of the heavens speak to us in a language without words. A book girl knows that imagination—that faculty by which we perceive meaning beyond the mere surface of things, by which we picture and believe in “things hoped for . . . not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, NASB)—is vital to faith in the God who crafted the world to tell of his presence and made us in his image as artists, storytellers, and creators.
A book girl is free to imagine the full glory of what that might mean.
[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 894.
[2] Alison Milbank, “Apologetics and the Imagination: Making Strange,” Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, ed. Andrew Davison (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 33.
[3] C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 247.
[4] James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 24, 57.
Novels of Eucatastrophe: The Fantastical Stories That Taught Me Hope
(OR, THE QUEST FOR A GOOD KIND OF MAGIC)
LET US SPEAK BRIEFLY of magic: enchantments in old fairy tales, spells spun by Hermione, runes intoned by Gandalf. I grew up reading fantastical tales with imaginative abandon—magic, that fantastical and otherworldly resource pervading some of the most fascinating stories the world has had the pleasure to read. Precisely because of magic, however, many of those stories have long been seen as suspect by Christian readers who are uncertain of how imagined magic fits into a healthy account of the actual power of the spiritual world. Mindful of the biblical prohibition against mediums and interaction with the occult, a careful reader is entirely justified in questioning the use of what seems to be supernatural power in these classical stories. As C. S. Lewis himself said, the supernatural was, for him, an “illicit dram,”[1] a hindrance to his journey toward faith.
Yet C. S. Lewis went on to articulate his deep and profound belief in the Christian faith through a series of fantastical stories complete with enchantments, witches, and magic. His lack of concern was based at least in part on his understanding of the difference between magic based in incantation and that accomplished by invocation. Incantation involves the saying of spells, something present in many of the fantastical novels on this list. This is the presentation of magic as an element in a fantastical otherworld (not the real world). Like electricity, magic is a neutral force that can be used for good or ill. Invocational magic is very different; it is a power gained through calling on a person or spiritual power and is the kind of magic we associate with the occult.
While discernment is always needed and magical worlds should not be taken lightly, this definition may help you in identifying healthy and harmful magic in the fantastical books you read. A more in-depth exploration of this subject can be found in Michael O’Brien’s wise and compelling A Landscape with Dragons (see review on page 148).
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Imagine a slightly more grown-up Harry Potter, set in an alternate history of nineteenth-century England in which magicians are respected members of British society, consulted in matters ranging from the military to medicine. Add that it is written in imitation of an actual Victorian novel (complete with annotation and learned asides) whose prim order is invaded by the ancient presence of the Raven King, and you have one of my favorite r
ecent fantasies. I’ve read this twice for the sheer delight of its world-crafting splendor, its capacity to evoke mystery, and its ability to re-enchant the world of the everyday, which is as magical as anything we could imagine.
The Pendragon Cycle by Stephen R. Lawhead
My brother Joel and I listened to the first book of this series, Taliesin, on a three-day road trip through the wintry American West, and even after driving twelve-hour days, we could have hopped back in the car for a few more hours of this riveting story. Drawing on the legends of the Welsh Mabinogion and the richness of Arthurian legend, Lawhead has crafted a cycle of tales that feel historical in their evocation of ancient Britain and their imagined accounts of Taliesin, the great bard and singer, and Arthur, the fabled king. But the series is also fantastical, beginning on the lost isle of Atlantis, a world in which the Christian faith is woven in beautifully with a rich historical vision of the ancient world.
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
You’ll find the work of C. S. Lewis scattered throughout every genre in this book. His hearty, intelligent, imaginative voice, with its capacity to make the deepest truths of Scripture plain to my hungry heart, has been a companion and mentor to me in every phase of my life. He’s one of those authors I hope to read in entirety before I die (and there’s a lot to read), but if you could read only one portion of his work, I’d argue for The Chronicles of Narnia. Yes, over his many learned works, I’d choose his stories for children, because in them, he uses the language not of reason but of vivid and holy imagination to tell us afresh the story of the world. You are probably familiar with the plot: of English children drawn through wardrobes or by magic rings into a fantastical world where animals talk and a White Witch rules in wintered cruelty. You’ve probably heard of Aslan, the great lion who isn’t safe but is good.
What you might not know until you actually read the books (and the movies do not count!) is that in Narnia, from the instant Aslan sings the stars and talking beasts to life to the moment he dies at the hand of the White Witch to free Narnia from the curse that makes it “always winter and never Christmas,” you as a reader, like the Pevensies, are being drawn into the presence of the great Lion of our own world. For as Aslan himself said to Lucy, “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”
(Read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, reviewed on page 149, to discover the larger literary and spiritual scheme shaping the creation of the Narnian world. And read Rowan Williams’s The Lion’s World for an exploration of the spiritual insights so richly to be found within the Narnia books.)
Also by Lewis:
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
Lilith by George MacDonald
In all my reading, I have rarely encountered a writer who could use symbol, image, and fantastic narrative to evoke the spiritual world as powerfully as MacDonald. Nor have I read many authors who so deeply grasp the Father-heart and love of God. It was on reading MacDonald’s Phantastes as a convinced young atheist that C. S. Lewis first encountered holiness. In that story of a young man’s sojourn in fairyland, his yearning after an ideal lady, his discovery of his own “shadow,” Lewis felt that his imagination was “baptized.”[2] This is the quality so radiantly haunting all of MacDonald’s fantastical works, a quality that comes to its fullest power, I think, in Lilith, one of MacDonald’s final books.
In this story, loosely considered a companion to Phantastes, another young man named Mr. Vane finds his way into another strange world. There he meets the enigmatic Mr. Raven, whose appearance is half that of a tall, dark bird and half of a man wearing a coat with long tails. Mr. Raven, we find, is actually the biblical Adam, forgiven and redeemed, who with his radiant wife, Eve, has been given the keeping of a house where repentant souls come to sleep and to die, in order that they may wake to life indeed. Their daughter, Mara, the veiled and tender lady of sorrow, is the figure whose presence haunts this story. This story is ultimately MacDonald’s exploration of sin and repentance, of the self-love that is a living death, and of the grief that comes like a fire to heal us. This is a strange book; I’ll make no bones about that. The reader, with Mr. Vane, will encounter dancing skeletons, little people, stupid giants, and an evil princess who can transform herself into a leopard. But in this tale, there is also the holiness that so gripped the young Lewis, present not only in beauty but also in the ministry of sorrow. MacDonald wrote this in fevered creativity, convinced that it was more vision than idea, a gift of grace to his readers.
Also by MacDonald:
Phantastes
At the Back of the North Wind
The Princess and the Goblin
David Elginbrod
The Harry Potter Series by J. K. Rowling
I didn’t read the Harry Potter series until I was an adult, living for a summer in a Catholic boarding house in Cambridge (it’s a very long story). On the day the seventh book released, I walked down the Cambridge streets to see literally half of my fellow pedestrians carrying copies of the book, and when I stumbled into my lodging that night, I found the three resident nuns on the couch, each with a copy of her own. I decided right then and there that it was time I figured out what this Harry Potter madness was about. Thus, in the ivy-walled garden the next evening, I sat in the half-light and discovered (along with a whole generation) a series of novels centered on the redemptive power of love to defy death and overpower evil. This is the intricately imagined and adventurous story of the orphaned Harry, the “boy who lived,” as he discovers his place in the wizarding world, his history as the child of parents who died in their fight against the evil Voldemort, and his own doom as the hero who must lead the fight in his own time. Accompanied by the bookish Hermione and the loyal (if clumsy) Ron; and guided by the wise, sparkling, and enigmatic headmaster, Dumbledore, Harry comes into his identity as the chosen one who must prevail over Voldemort, not by might, but by love.
Some Christian readers were alarmed at the magical element in Harry Potter in the early days of its publication, fearing that the use of spells and wands would interest children in witchcraft. But many people now recognize the books’ profoundly Christian themes (consider How Harry Cast His Spell by John Granger), and Rowling herself has been frank about the “religious parallels” and Christian imagery of her books—stories that she wrote in part to process the death of her mother. I wrote part of my final project at Oxford on the theological aspects of this series because I think that one of its defining passages powerfully describes a love that can only be rooted in the image of Christ. It comes in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry is known in the wizarding community as the only known person to have survived the dreadful and forbidden “killing curse” moments after his mother died to protect him. The infant Harry survived, to everyone’s astonishment, and it is Dumbledore who explains to Harry that it was his mother’s sacrifice of her own life for her son that instantly left its mark. “To have been loved so deeply,” Dumbledore explains, “will give us some protection forever.”
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien
I had to include this series here just to remind you one more time that you simply must read these books. But since there is quite a long review already on pages 57–58, you should probably turn there to find out more.
The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin Jr.
A fierce, strange tale, an animal epic set in a time before humans roamed the earth. A rooster named Chauntecleer is its hero, tasked with defending the animals in his care from the dreaded Cockatrice, the fell and terrible Wyrm. The troubadour rooster, “blessing” the day with his canonical crows, leading the animals in brave resistance, is the riveting center of a story that immerses us in questions surrounding evil, the Fall, and the battle of God against Satan. Wangerin is both a medievalist and a pastor, identities that marvelously inform this r
emarkable tale.
The Once and Future King by T. H. White
Oh, the wonder and wit of this enchanting tale! It begins in King Arthur’s boyhood, when he was a sprite called Wart, immersed in an eccentric education by the temperamental Merlyn, yearning for greatness and not yet imagining his destiny as Britain’s most famous king. Loosely based on the famous Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, this retelling of Arthurian legend is quirky and human, making the characters of legend come alive with wit and affection, the series suffused with Arthur’s yearning for true knighthood.
[1] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), 220.
[2] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 172–75.
Books about Imagination: Why You’re Never Too Old for Narnia
(OR, WHY IMAGINATION IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR)
I ONCE TOOK five children under twelve on a walk. We rambled a bit wildly down a country road whose maples and oaks were on fire with autumn color in air so crisp and cold we had to keep moving lest we freeze. The road was quite narrow, and I quickly realized that when the occasional car appeared, I needed a means by which I could get all five (including the two boys, always a dozen yards ahead) off the pavement in an instant. The solution was obvious: we needed a touch of imagination. I gathered them round and told them a story that ended with this: What if we were brave captains of explorers’ ships on the high sea, sailing in search of treasure and adventure, and the cars were pirates, come to plunder our gold? From that moment forth, I had only to yell “Pirates!” at the sight of a car, and all five would dive instantly off the road and into the forest on either side.
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