The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers;  for others, at none.  At all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life,’ can add to it.

~C.S. Lewis~

“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said”

Of Other Worlds

1966

Albert Einstein once said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” 

OK, fine, so fairy tales are good; Einstein said so. —But fairy tales are just for kids, right?

That may be; but I have always read fairy tales and fantasy writers, from childhood onward, writers such as C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and Madeleine L’Engle and, more recently, J.K. Rowling. It is not the only kind of reading I do…but I find myself unable to stop thinking about these writers the older I get, and especially lately because of a tattoo—I’ll get to that story in half a minute. As I reflect on my faith, I find, paradoxically, that these tales, often relegated to the domain of children, have done more to mature my faith than just about any other type of reading I have done.

What do tattoos have to do with faith?
It all started with a tattoo. I have been wanting a tattoo for quite some time, years. Tattoo? Why might a middle-aged schoolteacher with a horror of needles consider getting one of those? Art (if you can’t make art, be art, I’ve heard). Permanence. Visual learning. Vivid reminders. And plus, they’re just so wicked cool! 

In all honesty, I have been too chicken to get one thus far, but I have also been considering my permanent artwork very carefully. One does not want to commit to skin hastily. This desire to be cautious and significant sent me on a quest for my own personal symbolism, my iconography, my mythology. What is important enough to me to endure a needle for, to memorialize till death on my physical self?

The first stop on my quest is probably obvious. It seemed to me that I wanted a cross of some sort, a reminder that I cannot ever get away from that symbol and the truth of it. And there are some really beautiful crosses out there—Celtic crosses, Jerusalem crosses, Benedictine crosses. But which one to choose? How to narrow it down? And, of course, with my luck, I’d probably pick the one associated with the latest virulent hate group, or something like that. And then again, practically everyone I saw had a cross tattoo of some sort, and some of those wearers weren’t even terribly religious. This is not to trivialize the amazing importance of the symbol of the cross, or to denigrate those who have chosen to wear this vital symbol on their skin. Despite Solomon’s admonition that there is nothing new under the sun, I apparently harbor secret hopes that I might be unique somehow. So I continued questing.

Eventually it seemed to become clear that an animal might be desirable. I love animals; I love nature; I love God’s creation. A whale? A horse? They’re some of my favorite beasts. No. What would it mean? A lion, perhaps? A lion seemed more in line with what I both wanted and needed. I am a Leo, after all, which is the least of my significances, as I don’t really put much stock in the zodiac, but I do fit some of the stereotypes of the typical Leo and having a lion on my arm in plain view of myself would be a good reminder of my dominant and bossy tendencies, a reminder to back off, to ease up, to listen more, to control less. Lions in the Bible are of mixed symbolism—the lion of Judah is Jesus, which is good, but the devil prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, which is not so good. And yet the lion compels.

I have always loved C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Around the time I began this tattoo-slash-symbolism quest, Pauline Baynes, the original illustrator of Lewis’ books, died. I began looking anew at her illustrations of Narnia, and I was struck with how deeply the images were embedded in my mind’s eye. They stir up an odd feeling in me, a yearning nostalgia of some sort, nostalgia for something I have never had. In the Chronicles, Aslan the lion is a symbol and personage of God, of Jesus. He is a large and imposing lion—the largest—and yet little children love him and cavort with him. He is anticipated eagerly, served loyally. He corrects and reproves, but does not devour or bite off heads. He can be terrifying and terrible (in the original sense of the word—formidably great, that which excites awe), and yet one can take rest in the curve of his body, or in the cleft of his great paws. To be sure, Aslan is not all warm fuzzies; it is his long, sharp claws that must strip through the dragon skin, the greedy shell, the “old man” worn by the human who would convert, change, and be taken closer to his true, intended self—but they are claws wielded in love. And Aslan always knows exactly what a person needs in order to grow and develop to the next level of service and humanity. There is joy at his coming and sadness at parting from him, though the sadness is tempered by an understanding and surety that he is always watching and protecting somehow. He loves and is loved by all the animals, both the talking kind and those without speech. He awakens the trees, and the wind is his breath.

My own personal default conception of God, I am sorry to report, looks nothing like Aslan, except maybe for the claws. My God has always been a God to be feared, and I don’t just mean revered…I mean as in “be afraid, be very afraid.” I don’t think it’s what my parents had in mind, but it’s the God I internalized nonetheless. Growing up as I did in a conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical tradition, I found the Bible belt to be constricting and confusing and frustrating. Yeah, God is love and stuff. But He uses suffering to teach people lessons. And to punish people for their sins. Sort of a God who lies in wait for us, who, in His infinite wisdom, plays didactic tricks on us.

Intellectually I know this is not God, but my heart has long believed differently. “God is love,” but “I thy God am a jealous God,” and “vengeance is mine, I will repay” (I John 4:8, Exodus 20:5, Romans 12:19). I didn’t want to give myself to service of that God. I wanted to want to; but I didn’t want to. Amy Grant singing about the love and protection of God—“like a child who’s held throughout a storm; You keep me warm in Your arms of love”—seems so foreign to me. I feel God as a cosmic giant somewhere up above my head, in the heavens, looking down and watching, waiting for me to slip up again, to sin mightily, in response to which he will smite me or send me some tribulation or travail or test to punish me for my wayward ways. I came to think, if that’s God, then screw it; I’ll never match up to his standards, so why even try? How can people talk so fervently, so devotedly, so lovingly about that God? The point I needed to learn is that they don’t talk that way about that God because that is not God.

I still fear God. Why do I have such a hard time believing in the loving part of God? In the forgiving part of God? I hope desperately in those loving and forgiving aspects of God, and yet to accede fully both intellectually and emotionally to them is so very difficult. Why am I so stuck in childhood? I read in C.S. Lewis this morning that the “doctrines that God is Love and that He delights in men, are positive doctrines, not limiting doctrines.” This actually surprises me—not that they are positive and not-limiting, but that they are doctrines at all surprises me. I think my doctrines have been that “God is Testing and that He punishes men.”  God is love, and He delights in us. I need this reminder. I need to tattoo this on my other arm (I hear tattoos are addictive), so that I can recall daily that God actually likes us, likes me, created me and somehow finds something to delight in.

When I look in the mirror, I usually only see the many ways that I fail, that I fall short. I hate what I see in the mirror most days. And I have to remind myself—regularly, daily, hourly—that I am looking into a distorted mirror, seeing through the glass darkly. I need to curl up in Aslan’s fuzzy huge paws for a little while. I know his claws and teeth pretty well, or I think I do; but I could use the warmth, the heartbeat, the hot sweet breath, the tongue-lick, the steady rise and fall of his inhalations.

In one sense, being stuck in childhood isn’t so bad. If I can remain childlike enough to love and continue reading fantasy, with my grown-up experiences, I can still learn the lessons I should have internalized a long time ago and unlearn the ones I should have relinquished much, much earlier.

Misapprehensions and Another Name
Madeleine L’Engle, most famous for her works of young adult fantasy, cites Russian theologian Nicholas Berdyaev, who indicates that the West’s “gravest problem” is that it takes a “forensic view of God,” the notion that God is “an angry judge who assumes that we are guilty unless we can placate divine ire and establish our innocence.” Madeleine calls this “a gloomy and unscriptural misapprehension.” The “God of Scripture…over and over again shows love for us imperfect creatures [and] does not demand that we be good or virtuous before we can be loved.” And fantasy—Madeleine’s, Lewis’, Tolkien’s, Rowling’s—continues to play the pivotal role in teaching me over and over again to unlearn my misapprehensions about God.

To hark back to the opening quote, by commenting through fantasy on the reality of the person of God, Lewis has added to my life. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund that he is in their world, too, “but there 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.” In Narnia he is Aslan; here He is God, the three persons of the trinity. In Narnia he seems so clear; here He is obscured by our frequent misinterpretations, misuses, and misapprehensions. But my own journeys with Aslan in Narnia have become my signposts, my guides to right thinking, my reminders of what God really is like here in this world.

I know that I cannot get away from God; because of Aslan, I no longer want to get away as often as I used to. I need those reminders of Aslan. I still hate needles, but maybe I need a more permanent reminder to look at on those days when the habits of fear and the mirror are too much for me. Maybe I’ll be getting that lion tattoo after all.