[You may not be interested in this blog entry unless you've read Voyage of the Dawn Treader. You may not be interested anyway, since this entry is rather long.]
Young Lucy took on an assignment, in Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, in order to save the lives of her friends. Invisible creatures threatened to kill her, Edmund, Prince Caspian, Reepicheep, and the other members of their party if she did not march up the stairs of a two story house, locate a book of magic, and find the spell to make all invisible things visible. A magician who lived in the house was also invisible and so it was believed that Lucy would be risking her life to save the others, because he could attack her without any warning. The invisible creatures were tired of being invisible, were afraid to go into the house for fear of the magician, and for various reasons required a young girl, who happened to be Lucy, to go in and read the spell to make them visible once again. They threatened to kill all of the crew, if she failed to do this task. We find out later that the magician is a good person and wouldn’t harm Lucy, but that doesn’t matter because it was the fear she had to face before knowing this that made it such a heroic and terrifying act.
On a side note, it is important here to see the distinction between the tension in the plot and the underlying story that is being told. The plot obstacles are the fears she faces and the fact that she needs to find and read the spell to make all invisible things visible, or she and her friends die. This is the overt conflict in the story between Lucy (and her friends) versus the invisible creatures they can’t fight against.
There is an underlying story or metaphor that is occurring here, however, and it has to do with the following question: Why is Lewis using this idea of making all invisible things visible? Is there a second layer? The answer is yes and we’ll see this as I tread through the rest of the story.
Lucy enters the house, goes upstairs, and locates the magic book. She turns the pages but there is no table of contents. There are no words for that matter. They simply begin to appear as she turns each page, one by one. She can’t skip to the spell she needs to recite. Thus, she must read through all these other spells. In fact, these spells are very tempting. She learns how to cure people of all sorts of ailments, how to see what other people think about her, how to make her the most beautiful woman in the world (at least more beautiful than her older sister, Susan), and even reads the most wonderful story ever written, which she then forgets. Unfortunately, she does read the spell that allows her to see what her friends think of her and it is horrible. She misunderstands what one of her friends says about her and she feels shame, anger, and pain. The face of Aslan the Lion (the Christ-like figure in this book) seems to jump out from the page at her after she forces herself to fall victim to the temptation to read this spell and she quickly turns the page.
What I find so amazing and true to the human condition at this point in the story is that Lucy is distracted by these other pleasures or abilities in the magic book when, in reality, the lives of her and her friends are at stake. I think of the many addictions we face in life (both physical and psychological addictions) and how we risk our very spiritual, physical, and emotional lives in satisfying our pleasures in these distractions. Lewis is dead on in describing the human inclination towards sabotage. No pun intended.
Finally, Lucy locates and reads the spell which makes all invisible things visible. After reading it, she turns around to walk out the door and Aslan the Lion (the Christ-like figure) is standing in the doorway. She runs into his mane and they embrace. She says, “Why didn’t you appear before?” He says, “You made all things visible and I was always here with you.”
If it were just this simple that Lewis was trying to show us through Lucy that we often think God is not present when he is invisible, then it would still be a good story. But, the metaphor goes a little further, I believe. Not only is God present always even though He is invisible, but there is a lesson here to be learned about how the reasons for doing things are so often invisible, but once we go on with doing them that these reasons become visible afterwards.
Lucy, for example, probably faced all sorts of fears, second guessing, and analyzing of her situation as she walked through the house and up the stairs, in order to find the magical book. In fact, we know this from Lewis's description of her journey up those stairs. At any time, she might have freaked out and left. Had she done so, she would have felt embarrassed, ashamed, and afraid to return to her friends, especially since she knew it meant their deaths. Most likely, she would have run away into the forest in an attempt to hide her shame and escape her fate. Thank goodness, Lucy didn't do this and pressed forward, trusting that all would work out for the better. In the end, when all things became visible, she found not only that Aslan was there with her all along, but she also discovered many of the reasons why the other creatures were invisible, along with the good nature of the magician, and she also discovered the horrible things she was capable of while reading through the book.
What I'm trying to say here, is that Lucy never knew exactly why she had to go through this particular assignment until after it was over. Once she actually went through with it, ALL THINGS BECAME VISIBLE, EVEN THE REASONS SHE HAD TO GO THROUGH IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
In our own lives, we often hear the expression hindsight is 20/20. I myself have taken many personal risks in this past year that have gone against the internal, dysfunctional, and unbiblical rules of my heart. Each time I have taken such a risk, it feels like I've been asked to do what Lucy was asked to do. I feel like I might die, especially because I don't know what the consequences will be. God is odd to me because He sets tasks before us that we have to accomplish without telling us the results, ahead of time. In the end, I actually have to trust Him, walk into the house, go up the stairs, risk being killed by a magician I'm unacquainted with, and find the magical book. Then, once I have done so and read the spell, I find that things invisible have now been made visible. The more I try to calculate the results, the less I learn about what is really happening. This is a trust issue.
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