Just Long Stories To Be Heard

Last week I read The Silver Chair, the sixth part in the Narnia series. I think it might be my favorite so far. I really like this part, when Eustace, Jill, and Puddleglum are in the Underland and the witch is trying to enchant them into forgetting about their world. Puddleglum is resisting the enchantment better than the others, and he goes into this speech:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

My world is looking increasingly like the depressingly surreal Underland. Sometimes it seems like when I think back to when times were better and I actually talked to people that it was really just a vision that didn't happen. But C.S. Lewis is actually alluding to the vast difference between the worldly realm and the heavenly realm. So many people disregard the Christian message as a bunch of rubbish, but I'd rather live with this hope that I've found than just be satisfied with the worldly realm. I think that it's much more than a childish game because I have researched extensively and think it makes way more sense than anything else I've found, including nothing at all. I suppose that the Narnians really knew that it was more than a childish game as well. It's just outsiders that can't make sense of any of it so they just label it something.

This comes nicely to a song lyric. Derek Webb sings, "Don’t be satisfied when someone sums you up with just one word...There’s no categories, just long stories waiting to be heard." I like him a lot. There's not too many people that sing with as much honest truth as he does.