Narnia

When I was 8 years old, I went to a private Christian school. It was a bit too far to walk, and my mother hadn't arrived yet, so one day during free daycare after school, I watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (The Disney adaptation hadn't come out yet, so this was the old animated film from the 70s.) I was blown away by the fact that there was another story about a magical other world besides Alice in Wonderland, and positively giddy at the fact that there were six more books after that, just waiting to be read.

I was a gifted child, which in practice means "very good at academics, but not necessarily at anything else," and I had already read Alice in Wonderland. More to the point, I had already read Bulfinch's Mythology, which is not a book most people give to a 7-year-old, but my Aunt Lula was not most people. This colored the way that I read the Narnia series.

See, I was operating from the assumption that Aslan was an entirely other god, since he was in charge of an entirely different universe and sometimes stories have different make-believe gods for their make-believe universes. I thought Aslan was like that. It was patently obvious that he was a god, since most non-deities don't just come back from the dead, but I never thought it went any farther than that.

This meant that at the end of Dawn Treader, when Aslan appears as a lamb and later says, "I am also in your world. I want you to know me better there," I assumed this meant that he was going to come to England as a modern-day person and do Magic Miracle Stuff. At the end of The Silver Chair, when Aslan appears to the bullies at the school, I was mildly disappointed. And then, finally, I was reading The Last Battle, got to the final page, and thought, "Wait a minute. Aslan is Jesus?!"

Reader, it took me four years and seven books to finally reach the conclusion that C.S. Lewis had been beating me over the head with for the entire series. To me, as a kid, the Narnia books were first and foremost about a magical world full of talking animals and mythical beasts, that normal kids from our world got to go to. It was a place that, until the last book, I still sort of held out hope of being able to find a portal to if I just looked hard enough. (The fact that I was desperate to escape to another entire universe should have been a massive red flag, but nobody else seemed to notice, or else they thought I was just playing pretend.) Yes, there appeared to be a moral lesson to the books, but that was true of a lot of books I read as a kid, and I just sort of took it in stride.

To this day, despite the colonialism, the horrible sociopolitical views, and the heavy-handed religious symbolism, I still have a soft spot for the Narnia books. And to this day, I sometimes pick one up off the shelf, turn to a favorite passage, and remember the days when I longed to visit people like Mr. Tumnus, the Beavers, Trumpkin, and Puddleglum. It's just sort of funny, the kinds of books that stay with you.