It is here in Narnia that the children learn their true identity: they are sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, destined to become Kings and Queens if in this new, ultimate war they choose to ally themselves with Aslan, Goodness and Truth Incarnate.
So begins "The Lion , the Witch, and the Wardrobe," the second in a series of seven books, entitled "The Chronicles of Narnia." The second book alone has been dramatized for stage, television, radio, and cinema. But don't make the mistake of thinking these are "only" fairy tales for children. Their Deep Magic is far deeper than that. The man who invented Narnia, C.S. Lewis, said once "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
Lewis himself had his own journey to make in his search for goodness and truth. He was born in Belfast, Ireland. His first major life journey was to England, where he held academic positions at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He still always considered himself an Irishman, maintaining a close friendship with one of Ireland's greatest poets, W.B. Yeats.
But it was Lewis' inner journey that would have the greatest influence on his life and his writing. Although he was baptized in the Church of Ireland, he fell away from his faith in adolescence. He was appalled by the evil in the world, questioning how a good God could allow such evil and pain. How, he asked, could a good God design a world as frail and faulty as the one we see? He became an atheist, interested in mythology and the occult.
At Oxford he became active in an informal group of writers called "The Inklings," in which he became good friends with Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien (who wrote "The Lord of the Rings") and G.K. Chesterton, noted Catholic apologist. Tolkien and Chesterton had a profound influence on both Lewis' writing and his religious beliefs. Lewis fought against their every argument. But gradually he took the journey to religious conversion, as he says "kicking, struggling, and resentful."
His inner journey had brought him to a new vision: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
Lewis became a member of the Anglican Communion of the Church of England. But, because of the sad experience of religious intolerance and violence between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, and the influence of his Catholic friends, he practiced an ecumenical Christianity, praising all branches of the Christian faith, and emphasizing the need for unity around the core doctrinal beliefs that they share. His religious fervor permeated all his writing - his novels, poetry, literary criticisms, essays, and non-fiction. He was a true lay theologian.
But Lewis' new faith journey would take a new unexpected fork in the road. He enjoyed a long correspondence with Joy Davidman, a divorcee, and an American poet and writer, considered a child prodigy, who had a Master's from Columbia University - the first woman Lewis had met who could hold her own in intellectual discussions with him. Joy came from a Jewish background, had become a Communist and an atheist. Gradually, through their letters, Lewis brought Joy to Christianity.
Joy traveled to England, enchanted by this man seventeen years her senior. Eventually they married. At first it was a marriage of convenience to allow Joy to remain in England. Shortly after, however, Joy was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The deep suffering of finally knowing that Joy was near to death brought Lewis new vision once again, this time a deep, poignant understanding of what it means to love someone passionately and totally. Finally Joy and he became two in one in a real marriage of lovers.
He later wrote "New beauty and new tragedy have entered my life. You would be surprised (or perhaps you would not?) to know how much of a strange sort of happiness and even gaiety there is between us."
But Joy's death catapulted him into a new dark place on his journey - a struggle once more to believe in a good God. In "A Grief Observed," a memoir so raw and personal that he first published it under a pseudonym, he confronts a grief that feels like fear, the reality of grief rather than grief as he had imagined it to be.
"...In grief, nothing stays 'put.' One keeps emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But, if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often - will it be for always? - how often will this vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The death of a beloved is an amputation. The same leg is cut off time after time."
He wrestled with Scripture: "'Knock, and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?"
What he came to believe was that "God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't.... He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down."
He had discovered that experience, faith refined in the fire, is the most brutal of teachers, but "you learn, my God, do you learn."
C. S. Lewis died three years after his wife, on November 22, 1963, the same date as the deaths of two other great men: Aldous Huxley, and President John F. Kennedy. He always believed that Death was the final stage of the journey, the one that brought us to our true home: "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
In the meantime he leaves us with Narnia, a world very much like ours yet with a foretaste of the world to come. And Aslan, the great King who dies to set his world free from sin - a symbol of Christ.
Lucy, one of the child journeyers, asks Aslan " Will you come and visit us in our world?"
Aslan answers "I shall be watching you always."
Lucy, always filled with curiosity, asks further "How?"
Aslan speaks of the Deepest Magic: "In your world, I have another name. You must learn to know me by it. That was the very reason you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."
Surely C.S. Lewis has been embraced by Aslan in that eternal world, in Divine Thanksgiving for the journeys he has brought so many of us to take, so that we too could discover Aslan's True Name.