Thursday, September 2, 2010

A Good Shock of Pain

Jeremiah 18:1-11

"There's nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic."
              - C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (6th Chronicle of Narnia), Scholastic Inc., 1953, pg. 181

The witch of Underland has captured Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum in their mission from Aslan, the Lion, to rescue Prince Rilian,who has been enchanted and held captive by the witch for ten years. She has unleashed a magical substance into the air, borne up in the flames of a fire, that, along with her soft talk and strummed music, is causing the members of the rescue party to forget who they are and where they have come from. Whenever one of them tries to explain to her that there is another world with a sun (using the analogy of a lamp in the room), or yet another world, Earth, with an England, or the lion, Aslan (they compare a lion to a house cat), the witch calls forth her charms of confusion:

I see . . that we should do no better with your lion, as you call it, than we did with your sun. You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You've seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it's to be called a lion. Well, 'tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.
              - pgs. 179-180

Before the entire company succumbed to her spell, Puddleglum used his feet to kick out the fire that support the magical spell. Between the scattered fire and the pain of burned feet, Puddleglum, his head clearing, delivered one of the most powerful speeches to be found in the Narnia chronicles:

"One word, Ma’am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world that makes you real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for the Overland.
              - pgs. 181,182

Few would envy the time Jeremiah lived (627-560BC). The kingdom of Judah saw its last days as a vassal state, revolting, bounced between hope of religious revival and the despair of new foreign incursions - and, ultimately, exile. Samaria in the north (Israel) was little more than a memory. So, to picture the God of Judah ("Israel" writ large) using a potter's studio as a study of his enduring rule must have seemed, to many, the "stuff of babies making up a game." Does God's world consist of nothing more than a staging ground for the the biggest battalions rendering the landscape as colorless and dark as the witch's Underland? The question could be posed in our own world, from the drug-cartel controlled villages of Mexico to the Rwandan villages of survivors of the 1994 genocide. Where is the hand of God? Perhaps we can only say, with Puddleglum, that the worlds concocted by delusions of power are not creation, but shoddy imitations. Even if the nation fails, as Judah ultimately did, God will use the discarded pieces to create hope. It may take a shock of pain to break the spell that holds us hostage to the sorrows of the present moment, as if it would go on forever.

© 2010 Andy Gay