Door Into Narnia

copyright 2006
by Malcolm B. Mathieson, Jr.

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Door Into Narnia

I read and loved “The Chronicles of Narnia” long before the current
movie version was produced. A bookseller once told me that, although
the Chronicles were written for children, more adults buy the
Chronicles for themselves than buy them for children. And I remember
reading, in the foreword to the Silver Anniversary Edition of “Lord of the
Rings”, Peter Beagle’s comment, “Lovers of Middle-Earth want to go
there. I would, like a shot.”

There are many of us, it seems, who long for...what? Magic? Dragons? A
pre-industrial world? All these and more, but mostly, I think, we want
the moral clarity, the certainty, and the hope found in some fantasy
tales. We want to believe not just in heroes, but in clean, morally pure
heroes. Heroes who are real, not spinmasters, who are gentle and
courteous when not in combat, not merely efficient killers or sly
politicians. We want the triumph of justice, mercy for the downtrodden.
We want honor, courage and righteousness to be unfettered by
bureaucracy, unrestricted by “criminals’ rights”. We want an unpolluted
world where hope is not dead. Or at least we want all these things
established by the end of the book. Alas, real life is not like that. And
there is no alternative world, no other hope remaining. We have seen all
dreams fail.

All except one. I tell you the truth, there is hope! Not certainty, no. But
hope, and powerful evidence for that hope. Not just a cleverly
constructed fantasy world, but a real hope that an intelligent, sober,
cautious, skeptical, world-wise adult can believe in, enough to bet his or
her life on. Those who have read about the life of C. S. Lewis, the author
of “The Chronicles of Narnia”, know that Lewis was a Christian. The
Chronicles were an allegory of the Christian faith, of pardon for sins and
salvation through faith in Jesus. It is the Christian faith that I believe
offers the only hope this groaning, battered world contains.

There are many reasons to believe in the hope of Christianity, but there
is one special reason I’d like to tell you about now: the occasion of the
passing away of two members of my family who had been life-long
believers in Jesus. Their passings were so much like the moments in
Lewis’ Chronicles when someone from our world simply stepped into
another world.
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My maternal grandfather, Marshall Meadows, was a pharmacist in a

small Alabama town. In cases of the doctor’s absence, he was often
called on to act as a doctor, in addition to working extremely long hours
in his pharmacy. Finally, due to heart problems, advanced age and
overwork, on doctor’s orders he was home in bed, seriously ill. One day
the housekeeper, a black lady named Lucy, walked in and found him
dressed and combing his hair in front of the mirror. She exclaimed, “Mr.
Marshall, what are you doing out of bed?” He replied, “Why, Lucy, don’t
you know? I’m going home today.” And that day he passed from this life
into the next.

My mother, in her early teens at the time, was already a believer in

Jesus, largely because of her father’s influence and teaching. She had
been taught, among other things, the verse which quotes Jesus as
saying, “If you ask anything in My name, I will do it.” (John 14:14) Yet
her prayer that her father would live was not answered. Why not? She
does not know to this day. She came to believe that some questions will
not be answered in this life. She chose to trust God in spite of her loss.

Many years later Marshall Meadows’ wife, Irene Meadows, joined him. I
had been out of the country, and my money had run out. I had returned
to America and moved in with my parents. “Miss Irene” was also living
with them. One afternoon not long after I returned, I heard Mother
calling my father in a very urgent tone. I investigated and found Miss
Irene sitting in her armchair, leaning back as if asleep. Mother was
stooping beside her, holding her wrist. As I came in, Mother said to me,
“She’s so cold!” I took Miss Irene’s other wrist and was shocked at her
coldness. The thought flashed unbidden into my mind, “This is death.”

It was. My father called 911 and the paramedics took Miss Irene’s body
to the emergency room, but she was no longer in it.

But something happened as Miss Irene left this life. Mother was passing
by Miss Irene’s room and her door was open. Mother was there at
exactly the right time to hear Miss Irene call the name of a sister who
had been dead for fifteen years. Mother looked in and saw Miss Irene sit
up, reach out her hand as if to touch someone, and immediately her
body slumped back into the chair. She was gone.
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It is my firm belief, based on my own spiritual or “supernatural”

experiences, that these two life-long believers in Jesus were met as they
stepped through the door we call “death”. I’m well aware that there are
other possible explanations, but I believe that they were given this kind
of passage to the next world so that we who were left behind would have
evidence of the reality of the next life, and of its character, of the fact
that death is not the end, and that the next life is what we have longed
for, one of joy and peace. These two believers were not afraid. They were
“going home”.

In “The Last Battle”, the last book of The Chronicles, the last king of
Narnia and his faithful followers find that the door they have been
trying to avoid leads them from a desolated Narnia into “Aslan’s
Country”, the Chronicles’ analogue of Heaven. They meet their loved
ones there, and as they journey on they find what looks like Narnia, and
what looks like the England that the English children had come from.
They realize that what they loved in their own countries was just a
shadow of the real Narnia and the real England, in Aslan’s Country.

I am firmly convinced that this is reality. I am confident that I will one

day meet my maternal grandfather, and be reunited with all of my
family who were believers in Jesus. That, after all, is what is promised
in the Bible. I fail to understand why this world has to suffer so much,
and suffer such horrible things. I can see no justification or excuse for
it. But this I know, that without the early and constant influence of my
faith in the God of the Bible and Jesus His Son, I would have become
what I wanted to be, a violent criminal. From early in my teen years I
struggled to restrain my criminal impulses because I was convinced of
the reality of God, and therefore of the certainty of eventual punishment
for evil conduct. As I grew older, I became changed by God’s presence in
my life and no longer had to struggle so hard to defeat these evil
impulses. I began to become a better person morally. I do not believe
that this battle will ever end in this life, for anyone, but with God’s help
it gets much easier as time passes.

This is important: if God were not real, my belief in Him would have
eventually faded away due to the influence of evil in the world. However,
at several crucial points in my life, God was there. He acted to protect
me, to warn me, to remind me of His existence...and if He were not
good, His influence on me would not have been toward righteousness.
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I find this righteous influence on my character to be another, and
very good, reason to believe in the goodness and the love of God, in spite
of other evidence to the contrary. I have not been perfect, but I have
avoided doing evil, on a couple of occasions only because God
immediately and specifically intervened and gave me the strength to
refrain from doing evil that I would otherwise have chosen to do. Do you
hear what I’m saying? I am acknowledging the truth of the Bible verses
which declare that no human being is truly good. (See Psalms 53:3,
Romans 3:12, Mark 10:19, among many others.) This is not pleasant to
admit, but I believe that a painful truth is infinitely more useful and
helpful than a beautiful lie.

And the most important truth is this: if the Bible is the truth about God
and about Jesus, then these things are also true:

“I don’t want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have

fallen asleep. I don’t want you to suffer intense grief and despair, like
those who have no hope. Because if we believe that Jesus died and rose
again, then we can believe that God will also raise with Jesus those who
died believing in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord,
that we who are alive at the return of the Lord will by no means precede
those who are dead. For the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with
a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of the
Lord. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and
remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the
Lord in the air. And thus we will always be with the Lord. Therefore
comfort one another with these words.” (1st Thessalonians 4:13-18)

“This I tell you, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the
Kingdom of God...Pay attention! I am revealing to you what was a
mystery: we will not all die, but we will all be changed, in an atom of
time, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will
sound, and when it sounds the dead will be raised immortal, undecaying,
incorruptible. and then we who are still alive will also be changed. For
this corruption, this decay, must put on incorruption, undecayableness,
and this mortality must put on immortality. When this has happened,
then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, ‘Death is
swallowed up in victory. Oh death, where is your sting? Oh grave, where
is your victory?’ The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the
law. But thanks be to God, Who gives us the victory through our Lord
Jesus Christ.” (1st Corinthians 15:50-57)
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“Do not cast away your confidence, which carries with it a gigantic
reward. You have need of patience, so that after you have done the will
of God, you may receive the promise:
‘Just a little while, and He who is coming will come, and when He
does, He will come swiftly. Now the justified will live by faith, but if
anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in him.’
But we are not of those who draw back to destruction, but those who
believe to the saving of the soul.” (Hebrews 10:35-39)

I’m fifty-six years old at this writing. I have a B.S. in Business and
Economics, have traveled the United States extensively, spent six
months in Brazil, held many different kinds of jobs, dabbled very mildly
in politics, read extensively on many topics...I’ve been there and done
that, and I have seen no other possible source of hope than the
resurrected Christ, even for happiness in this life, let alone for pardon
for sins or for hope of a joyous immortality.

I don’t understand why this life has to be so filled with pain, grief, evil,
bitterness, bloodshed, and despair. The God of the Bible is presented as
all-powerful, loving, and able to see the future in infinite scope and
detail. I fail to understand why such a God would create us such that
we would choose to be evil, or why He would create Lucifer such that
Lucifer would become Satan. Nevertheless, I have the foregoing as well
as other powerful evidence that there is hope in Jesus. I will not throw
away that hope in the face of the positive evidence I have, and especially
in light of the fact that there is no other hope.

And God continues to encourage me and strengthen me, even though I

am still experiencing, shall we say, significantly less than maximum
happiness. Just two weeks ago God showed me the answer to a
question that has troubled me for more than twenty years. Because God
has continued to guide me and help me in many ways, my faith has
gotten stronger over the decades. I urge those who feel pain to consider
these things. I urge you to ask God for peace of mind, for comfort, for
evidence of your own that He is real and that He loves you. If you ask
for the purpose of following truth wherever it leads you, God will
answer.

There is an old hymn that says, “We’re marching to Zion…” Not me. I’m
going to Narnia! And there’s plenty of room for more “Old Narnians”! In
fact, there is an open invitation from the Prince of Peace Himself:
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“...there is no way I will reject anyone who comes to Me.” (John 6:37)

“In My Father’s house are many rooms. I go to prepare a place for you,
and I will come back for you, that where I am you may be also. If this
were not true, I would have told you.” (John 14:2-3)

For those who doubt God’s love because of the evil that surrounds us
and daily grows worse, I have this suggestion: get a copy of the New
Testament in a translation you can easily understand and read what
the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have to say about
Jesus. The authors of the New Testament claimed, in the words of one
of them, “We have not followed cleverly devised fables. We told you what
our eyes have seen, what our ears have heard, what our hands have
touched. We were eyewitnesses of His glory…” (2nd Peter 1:16)

Read what the eyewitnesses wrote about Jesus, because Jesus said, “He
that has seen Me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) I can’t explain our
present circumstances, but Jesus’ love for people and His honor shine
bright. That shining love and honor plus His resurrection are the
foundation for the best, the last, the only hope for every one of us.

Join us in Narnia!