The Chronicles of Narnia has become one of my favorite series of books. I know I’ve quoted them before, and I know I’ll quote them again. Please, stick with me as I give a little bit of back story to this excerpt, and then stick with me for the rest.
The excerpt comes from Prince Caspian, a moment after a bear tries to attack Lucy. Lucy’s sister Susan and a Dwarf companion both shoot at the bear with arrows. Susan misses, but the Dwarf doesn’t. The bear is killed and Lucy is saved.
Susan is a great shot with a bow and goes on to explain that she missed because she was afraid the bear was a talking bear. In The Chronicles, talking animals are markedly different from regular animals. In the creation of Narnia, Aslan (the Jesus character) called certain animals to be talking animals, and they were set apart, noble, intelligent, and free. It would be a great travesty to kill one of these noble beasts, and that is why Susan hesitated and missed the shot. Thankfully, this was not a talking bear, but just a regular, dumb beast.
The Dwarf tells Susan, after her explanation of why she missed: “That’s the trouble of it when most of the beasts have gone enemy and gone dumb, but there are still some of the other kind left. You never know, and you daren’t wait to see.” That could be a whole post of its own. But just after this is where we pick up.
… When they had sat down (Lucy) said: “Such a horrible idea has come into my head, Su.”
“What’s that?”
“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”
“We’ve got enough to bother about here and now in Narnia,” said the practical Susan, “without imagining things like that.”
This is one of those short, poignant moments that C. S. Lewis somehow breezes right by, but which evokes an awe in me as I read. You have to remember the era that Lewis writes in. Prince Caspian was first published in 1951, just a few years after World War II. His readers’ minds would be drawn immediately to the images of concentration camps, ghettos, war zones, starvation, violence, and all sorts of the depravity that engulfed the world during that time. Imagine the impact a statement like this would have made while the world was still rebuilding after one of the worst evils it had ever seen.
Lewis seems to be saying, “What we have seen is not men as they were meant to be. What we have seen is not men as they were created. What we have seen is something that looks like men but that has gone wild inside.”
I especially love that the comparison is to wild animals. We, a culture who for some reason likes to equate ourselves to animals, could use a good reminder that there is something in us that is quite different from animals, and that when we see humanity truly acting like animals, we look with horror, not admiration.
I think Susan’s reply is revealing as well. “We’ve got enough to worry about here and now.” I think that’s most of our reply to this sort of thing as well. “I’ve got enough in life to worry about, I don’t need to add the thought of going ‘wild’ inside.” But it’s worth pointing out that in The Chronicles, Lucy is always the most sensitive to Aslan. She is the first one to find Narnia. She is the most perceptive to Aslan’s feelings and mood changes when he has made a deal with the Witch. In this same story, in this very chapter, she is the first to see Aslan when nobody else can see him. We “practical” people like to busy ourselves with the here and now. But Lucy’s spiritual perceptiveness reveals that God would have us take thought about the inward life seriously.
“Am I allowing myself to go wild inside?”
What a question.
What are the things that draw us closer to each other, that draw us closer to God, that make us bigger on the inside? What are the things that isolate us, that we do for ourselves despite the cost to others, that champion the external, which inevitably fades away? And which of these sets of things do we find ourselves doing more often?
In Lewis’ time he witnessed what happens when people go wild inside. It hasn’t stopped happening since then. Are we going to be the type of people that notice and act? Are we going to be the kind of people who intentionally keep ourselves out of that camp? Or are we going to be the type of people that have no time for imagining things like that?
The Endeavor 