Moving with the Lion

I saw Narnia last night and I was, as you all can expect, deeply rocked by the experience. Grand epics like that, those symphonies in the key of fantasy and mythology, really help me understand the life I lead in a real and profound way. Our God is awesome. He is creative and real and not tame. As real people, we've got to understand that: not as cogs in the machine of a god we don't really understand and certainly don't love. People complain about these books because they feel that telling the Story of Christ in Myth forms a caricature of the real thing of God; However, I would dare say that the caricature is not Aslan, but the world's picture of Christ.

We don't realize that we have totally mistaken the face of our Lord. He's not afraid to act, nor is he able or willing to let injustice go unpunished. Yet He refuses to buy in the world's lie that His enemies sit in a dark room, plotting His destruction with every kind of malicious intent. The Lord knows that wickedness comes from desires that run contrary to God, not an evil heart or an unsalvagable soul. In the movie, this allowed Aslan to love the traitor Edmund but still oppose the nefarious White Witch. In the end, Edmund knew that the throne offered of the Lion and the throne offered of the Witch resulted in an acceptance of either the purposes of Life or that which ran contrary to life, namely death. He choose life and lived. The Witch opposed life and ran into what else but death?

This choice helps us understand that we are all one choice away from either kingship or evil. It simply rocks our paradigm of spirituality. We make this choice between life and death in everything, our work and school, our family and friends, even our cravings for a little bit of Turkish Delight. We certainly don't choose the way of death because we like being dead! We choose it because we think it will bring us life. What if the church brought this to bear on any number of our relations with one another (or, may the Lord haste this day, the outside world!)? Instead of calling people wicked, what if we understood them as deceived: deceived with a very deception all of us fall pray to daily. What if we have pity on the Edmunds in our midst because we are Edmunds, trying to desperately to restrain our cravings for petty, paltry things when the Lord offers us deep themes of kingship and destiny? Would we settle for Turkish Delight when there is greater destiny to be had? Do we want to?

May the Lord haste the day when this is so!

I didn't get into the caricatures of the Lion, more on that tomorrow.

Daniel