“It is winter in Narnia,” said Mr. Tumnus, “and has been for ever so long…. always winter, but never Christmas.”
-Mr. Tumnus, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Finding Narnia
When I was growing up, my favorite books (as I imagine was the case for a great many of my peers) were the Chronicles of Narnia by the writer, CS Lewis. As a child, my father used to read to my brothers and I remember being enchanted by the magical world that Lewis created within their pages. When I found out that I was going to become a father, I continued the tradition by first reading to my wife’s belly at night as she fell asleep and then again with my oldest son when he was to a point that he could handle it. (The first time we tried to read the stories to him he found the trickery engaged in by Mr. Tumnus when first he encountered Lucy to be more than his already keen sense of right and wrong could take.)
I have thought about Narnia and Lewis’s epic tale a lot over the past couple of weeks. In the second book in the series, though without a doubt the most popular and well-known, The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children, having been removed from London in the midst of the Blitzkrieg and sent to stay in the house of an eccentric old professor, stumble into Narnia through the back of an old wardrobe. The situation they encounter is one in which the whole of the land has been frozen in a permanent state of winter by the White Witch. The totality of the circumstance being captured by the aforementioned Mr. Tumnus, who laments to Lucy that it is “always winter, never Christmas”—a condition that continues until the Christlike character of Aslan the lion draws near and Santa Claus arrives to deliver gifts to the children. In many ways this is the state of suspended animation that the church has found itself for almost exactly a year—always Lent, never Easter.
I returned to Narnia in my head not because of the analogy of winter and Christmas offered by the faun (as great as it is), but because of the impending arrival of Aslan in our own country. Coming in the form of now three vaccines, something that starts to look like normal seems to be sitting somewhere in the relatively near future. At the end of the book, order having been restored in the land and the children having had long and peaceful reigns as the Kings and Queens of the mythical nation-state, the now adults, go hunting for a rare white stag. Seeing it, and in their exuberance, they accidentally pass back through the wardrobe and return to the World War II era of their childhood with only seconds having passed while they were in Narnia. The children once again try to get back to the country through the back of the Wardrobe but find that it has been sealed off. This is where the church finds itself today.
For the past year, the Church has found itself in a mythical land, perpetually frozen in time by an invisible enemy that has threatened life and limb for the whole of the world. While there, we have learned a whole new language, rituals, and practices ( how best to stream worship services while trying, often in vain, to create meaningful experiences for pastor and pastorate alike). In the last few months, some of our congregations have begun to dip their toes back into the waters of in-person services using painters tape and sectioned off sanctuaries, mask mandates, and temperature checks, while leaving behind responsive and shared liturgy, corporate singing of hymns, and anything that resembles the times of fellowship from before. As we get closer to normalcy, while drawing nearer to the metaphorical (and actual) Easter, there is going to be a seemingly magical draw trying to send us back through the wardrobe and to the land that we knew—the land where we are most comfortable—to wipe the sweat of our collective brows, offer up an air prayer of thankfulness to God for carrying us through the rushing waters and roaring fires, and pick up where we left off last year at this time. That would be a mistake with potentially ecclesiastically deadly consequences.
We have, for better or worse, come to a different place in the story of our faith and the Church and any attempt to return back to the specters of the old way of doing things will only result to being cast back into the world and away from the new thing that the spirit is doing right now. And just as in the Chronicles, each time we try to get to these inflection points in the future it will be that much harder to live into them—to get back into Narnia—because of the weight of the past.
Rebuilding Narnia
Over the last year the myth of American greatness has been stripped down to the studs. Economic systems, healthcare, education, and what qualifies as “employed” have all been exposed in all their weaknesses. At the same time the historic issues around racist attitudes towards persons designated as non-white—those that always seem to be at a full boil—finally expanded over the rim of the pot with the back-to-back killings of Ahmaud Arbery Brionna Taylor before exploding across the nation and the world with the televised killing of George Floyd. All this has destabilized the body politic in the nation and left far too many looking for something, anything, else to place their trust in.
Into this, it is time for the church to reassert itself not as a political power (at least not in the way that it has been over the past 45 years), nor a cultural warrior (at least not in the sense that is has been over the past 120 years), but as the chief proponent for kindness and grace, peace and hope, and lifting the one up who has come to believe that no one really cares. Moreover, it is time to for the Church to, as Bishop Desmond Tutu teaches us, move beyond the ministry of pulling folks out of the river and ask, “why are they falling in, in the first place?” And when we figure that out, we must turn the full resources of the organization to bringing about systemic change, not just temporary relief.
After a year of time, in which so many functions of the church have ground to a screeching halt, it can no longer be assumed that we will be wanted or needed again upon our return. The reality is that in the midst of pandemic, some have gone on to their great reward, others have wandered away choosing to journey elsewhere, some have lost their faith. We can’t assume that all our people will be walking through the door when we return to in-person services.
At the same time, the world is largely in disarray. Whenever we return back from our time in the wilderness, our land is likely to look like Israel following the Babylonian Exile. Our fields may well be farrowed. Our structures aged from a year of non-use. Our systems of governance no longer able to handle the new world in which we find ourselves for so much has fallen away until, in many ways, there is no stone left on stone. But maybe, that is why Lent has come once again, to give us an opportunity to topple the structures in our lives that bring about separation from the God of creation. And once we have brought down all the safety rails, it will fall to we who remain to return to our core mission to share the gospel of love and action with a world that has a lot of rebuilding to do.
The True Narnia
The Chronicles draw to a close with a battle between good and evil in which the true Aslan must sacrifice the old Narnia—corrupted by malice and deception— as father Time, reigns down the stars in the sky onto it and puts out the sun causing it to freeze. Aslan, in turn takes those who have been faithful to him to the true Narnia in which the story goes on forever and ever. In the same light, we in the church must not lose sight of our ultimate journey—a trek from fallenness to redemption, from doubt to faith, and led always by Christ who is forever and always taking the children of God back to their true home. That remains the mission of the faithful here. To follow in Christ’s footsteps bringing sight to the blind and release to the captives all the while proclaiming the year of God’s favor for all people.
May, those that have survived the lost year, honor and memorialize those who did not by finding that which brings us, and the Church to life, because, as Howard Thurman noted, more that anything, the world needs folks who have come alive—never looking back but always walking into the rising sun of a new day.