From Old Narnia to New Narnia

[technically prose; a reflection on the passage of time and of all things as this year draws to a close]

     The closing book of C.S. Lewis' epic Chronicles of Narnia series is The Last Battle.  This is written in a vein very much like what St. Paul wrote in Romans chapter 8, verses 22-24.  This very world is "groaning", waiting until Christ comes to end this world and take His children home.  We will live in a new creation, which He has been preparing for us John 14:3-10).  We will live in restored physical bodies; as St. Paul said in I Corinthians 15:53, it would be like being "unclothed" or "naked" if this did not happen.

     C.S. Lewis described his adventurers entering the New Narnia and the comparisons with the old:    
     "So," said Peter, "Night falls on Narnia.  [Narnia is destroyed; comes to an end.]  What, Lucy!  You're not crying?  With Aslan ahead and all of us here?"
     "Don't try to stop me, Peter, " said Lucy.  "I am sure Aslan would not.  I am sure it is not wrong to mourn for Narnia.  Think of all that lies dead and frozen behind that door."
     "Yes, and I did hope,"  said Jill, "that it might go on forever.  I knew our world couldn't.  I did think Narnia might."...

     "Peter, " said Lucy, "where is this, do you suppose?"
     "I don't know," said the High King.  "It reminds me of somewhere, but I can't give it a name.  Could it be somewhere we once stayed for a holiday when we were very, very small?"
     "It would have to have been a jolly good holiday," said Eustace.  "I bet there isn't a country like this anywhere in our world.  Look at the colours.  You couldn't get a blue like the blue on those mountains in our world."...
    "If you ask me, " said Edmund, "It's like somewhere in the Narnian world.  Look  at those mountains ahead... Surely they're rather like the mountains we used to see from Narnia, the ones up Westward beyond the Waterfall?"
     "Yes, so they are, "  said Peter.  "Only these are bigger."
      [They compare some of the other Narnian mountains to what they are seeing.]
     "And yet they're not like," said Lucy.  "They're different.  They have more colours on them and they look further away than I remembered and they're more...more...oh, I don't know..."
     "More like the real thing," said the Lord Digory softly...
     "Kings and Queens, " [Farsight the Eagle] cried, "we have all been blind.  We are only beginning to see where we are.  from up there I have seen it all---Ettinsmuir, Beaversdam, the Great River, and Cair Paravel still shining on the edge of the Eastern Sea.  Narnia is not dead.  This is Narnia."....
     "The Eagle is right, " said the Lord Digory.  "Listen Peter.  When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of.  But that was not the real Narnia.  That had a beginning and an end.  It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here...  You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy.  All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia..."

     It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste...The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.  I can't describe it any better than that...
     It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling.... "I have come home at last!  This is my real country.  I belong here.  This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.  the reason why we loved the old Narnia is that is sometimes looked a little like this..."

     The light ahead was growing stronger.. And then she forgot everything else, because Aslan [the Great Lion] was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty...Then Aslan turned to them [after talking to other creatures] and said:
     "You do not yet look so happy as I meant you to be."
     Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan.  And you have sent us back into our own world so often.
    "No fear of that," said Aslan.  "Have you not guessed?"
   Their hearts leaped, and a wild hope rose within them.
    [Aslan explains that they died in their own world.   That they and the  Pevensie parents have come out of the "Shadow-Lands" and will stay in the New Narnia forever.]
     And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them...now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which on one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

--C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle.  (c) 1956

Journey of the Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sorefooted,
   refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.

German carved wood Wise Men with olive wood camel and bowl from the Holy Land

There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away,
  and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out,
   and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty
   and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees* on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away
in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for
pieces of silver**,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information,
  and so we continued
And arriving at evening,
not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was
(you might say) satisfactory.

German Nativity

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
   this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us,
   like Death, our death***.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old
   dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.


---T.S. Eliot, 1927  (c) by owner

* A foreshadowing of the three crosses, Jesus's and the two thieves
**Judas betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver; the soldiers gambling for his cloak
**Christ came to suffer death for our sins.  Death was haunting even the birth.