Here Comes the Sun

When I first read The Chronicles of Narnia fifty years ago, most of my friends who were fellow fans of the series called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader their favorite of the seven books. I didn’t understand; it was my least favorite. People sailing around finding weird islands with no thematic connection? My 16-year-old self wasn’t having it. (The 2010 film’s attempt to provide an overarching plot with its green mist and seven swords didn’t work and, while it presumed to save Narnia the land, brought about the tragic downfall of Narnia the movie franchise.)

During my most recent rereading of the book, though, I kept thinking that I couldn’t see how I had missed its now very obvious meanings and messages. Even without Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia theory, couldn’t I have seen the unifying warp thread of Knowledge (with its inevitable woof of Ignorance) running through the whole web? Making maps of unknown lands is almost the cardinal symbol for learning and knowledge. But I was as blind to it as Lucy was to the Dufflepuds at first. Oh yeah! Seeing what was invisible before: that is actually the leading metaphor for learning and knowledge! Ah! Now I see!

Ward associates this third volume of the series with the Sun (one of the classical “planets,” a word which referred to the bodies that moved with respect to the stars), and surely no one can argue with that claim. The sun shines on the gold in the lake; it disappears in the sea of darkness that drives people mad by making all their dreams come true (ALL their dreams); and its rays edify, encourage, and guide Lucy when she stands in them. If you haven’t read Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” and you’re the kind of person who would read this post (as I suppose you are!), you should read it. It’s available online. You can probably even listen to it on YouTube, unless the publishers find it and take it down.

OK, you’re back. In that essay, as you know since you just read it, Lewis talks about the difference between seeing a beam of light coming through a crack in the door and then looking along the beam of light at the world outside. He takes the analogy in various directions, but they all have to do with types of knowledge based on how we see things. And Lucy looking along the beam of the Sun is surely Jack Lewis in that toolshed.

The main symbol of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the Sun, the Sun gives light, and light is a metaphor for knowledge. So what is it that Lucy knows in a new way while standing in the beam of sunlight? Among the things she sees is an albatross that looks like a cross, so even my teenage mind could have figured out that Lucy was learning to know Jesus better. And where ultimately are they all sailing? To Aslan’s land. Every Christian reading this book should also be on a voyage to Aslan’s land where, after seeing in a mirror dimly for so long, we will finally see Him face to face. “Thou hast said, ‘Seek ye my face.’ Thy face, LORD, do I seek.” If thinking about the symbology in the book didn’t get me to understand that the voyage is one of getting to know God better and better, I could have learned it when Aslan explains it in plain English near the end: “There [i.e. in our non-Narnian world] I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

I think I probably just needed to live more of my own voyage to understand what Lewis had to say through the Dawn Treader’s voyage about getting to know Aslan better. There is a time and place for everything, a time for Narnia to be at war, and a time for Narnia’s prince to enjoy peace and seek knowledge. But the journey to know God better in this life has been traveled before. In the book the trailblazers are Lord Octesian and Lord Rhoop and . . . oh, I can’t remember them any better than Caspian can. In our world they are the saints, whether that means people whose names get on calendars or family members and mentors who inspire us. Along the way, Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, Reepicheep, and Eustace find some of their forerunners, who have been distracted from pursuing their journeys to the glorious end; but surely we can learn as much from the errors of those who go before us as we do by their successes. And, thank God!, we can also learn from our own errors. On that journey we have times of darkness. We encounter Dufflepudlian mysteries that become clear only slowly. We sometimes have to peel off layers of dragon skin. But with all the wanderings, the overall trajectory is still one of becoming closer to God by knowing Him better and better.

The subtitle of my blog is “one Christian’s journey through literature.” So really my reading plan and my blog are also voyages of the Dawn Treader. See? How did I miss it before?