NARNIA READING PROGRAM AUGUST 14 OCTOBER 1, 2016

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1 THE MAGICIAN S NEPHEW NARNIA READING PROGRAM AUGUST 14 OCTOBER 1, 2016 THE MAGICIAN S NEPHWEW CHAPTERS 9-10 Introductory Paragraph WEEK 5: 9/11-9/17 There is a Russian word that is not easily translated into English. The word is pronounced Toska, and Vladimir Nabokov closes in on it by saying, At its deepest and most painful, (Toska) is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom. We, all of us, are born with Toska, this soul hunger for something we cannot place. What will the outcome be when we encounter the thing that can satisfy it? Enjoy your contemplations this week, With Love, Tricia Wagner THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS / WISDOM Right priorities Oh stow it, Guv nor, do stow it, said the Cabby. Watchin and listening s the thing at present, not talking. QUOTES / EXCERPTS Because God created the Natural invented it out of His love and artistry it demands our reverence. God in the Dock. SCRIPTURES Nehemiah 9:6 Psalm 136:1-9 Redemption of everything Suddenly the Witch stepped boldly out toward the Lion. It was coming on, always singing, with a slow, heavy pace. It was only twelve yards away. She raised her arm and flung the iron bar straight at its head. Nobody, least of all Jadis, could have missed at that range. The bar struck the Lion fair between the eyes. It glanced off and fell with a thud in the grass. The Lion came on. Its walk was neither slower nor faster than before; you could not tell whether it even knew it had been hit Hullo! What s that? said Digory. He had darted forward to examine something only a few yards away. I say, Polly, he called back. Do come and look. It was a perfect little model of a lamppost, about three feet height but lengthening, and thickening in proportion, as they watched it; in fact growing just as the trees had grown. The filth that our poor, muddled, sincere, resentful enemies fling at the Holy One, either does not stick, or, sticking, turns into glory. God in the Dock. Psalm 111 Luke 1:68 Romans 8:22-27

2 Greed and exploitation That s it! Stupendous, stupendous, said Uncle Andrew, rubbing his hands harder than ever. Ho, ho! They laughed at my magic. That fool of a sister of mine thinks I m a lunatic. I wonder what they ll say now? I have discovered a world where everything is bursting with life and growth. Columbus, now, they talk about Columbus. But what was America to this? The commercial possibilities of this country are unbounded. Hope means a continual looking forward to the eternal world It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth thrown in : aim at Earth and you will get neither. Mere Christianity. Psalm 16 Psalm 62 I Timothy 6:17 Longing for youth And then as regards oneself, Uncle Andrew continued, in a happy dream. There s no knowing how long I might live if I settled here. And that s a big consideration when a fellow has turned sixty. I shouldn t be surprised if I never great a day older in this country! Stupendous! The land of youth! People (have) no particular ages in Aslan s country. Even in this world, of course, it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up. The Silver Chair. The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose. An Experiment in Criticism. Isaiah 40:28-31 The irresistible call Some sorts of animal he passed over altogether. But the pairs which he had touched instantly left their own kinds and followed him. One can never see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Perelandra. Matthew 4:18-22 Wake up Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. The Weight of Glory. I Chronicles 29:10-15

3 Knowing before you know It was of course the Lion s voice. The children had felt sure that he could speak: yet it was a lovely and terrible shock when he did. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. Look out! we cry, it s alive. And therefore this is the very point which so many draw back I would have done so myself if I could and proceed no further with Christianity. An impersonal God well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ( Man s search for God!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us? Miracles. Psalm 139 Daniel 10:10-12 Galatians 4:4-7 Living with eyes open Hail, Aslan. We hear and obey. We are awake. We love. We think. We speak. We know. God is basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood. At all costs therefore He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. If He exists at all, He is the most concrete thing there is, the most individual, organized and minutely articulated. He is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language. Miracles. Psalm 115:15-18 John 1:1-5 God has purposes and performs particular actions, does one thing and not another, [is] a concrete, choosing, commanding, prohibiting God with a determinate character. Miracles. The gifts of God Creatures, I give you yourselves, said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emperor He translates His glory into multiple forms into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men. Taliessin Through Logres, Arthurian Torso. (God) is so brim-full of existence that He can give existence away, can cause things to be, and to be really other than Himself, can make it untrue to say that He is everything. Miracles. Genesis 1:16 Psalm 8 Nehemiah 9:6 James 1:17 The business of Heaven Laugh and fear not, creatures. Now that you are no longer dumb and witless, you need not always be grave. For jokes as well as justice come with speech. The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest Psalm 4:7-8 Proverbs 31:25 John 15:11

4 our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. The Problem of Pain. In this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. Perspective from character It had not made at all the same impression on (Uncle Andrew) as on the Cabby and the children. For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible. The Abolition of Man. Matthew 7:7 Matt. 15:18, Lk 6:45 Pr. 4:23, Prov 27:19 Denial Of course it can t really have been singing, (Uncle Andrew) thought, I must have imagined it. I ve been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing? And the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. The Weight of Glory. Psalm 63 Job 19:23-27 Luke 16:27 All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. Perelandra. Cruelty Uncle Andrew stood trembling and swaying this way and that. He had never liked animals at the best of times, being usually rather afraid of them; and of course years of doing cruel experiments on animals had made him hate and fear them far more. In justifying cruelty towards animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice. God in the Dock. Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, Genesis 2:19 Isaiah 11:6-9 Isaiah 65:25 Hosea 2:18

5 criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons. God in the Dock.