But this is not a review. The main reason I loved this movie is that it reminded me why and how I fell in love with Narnia in the first place. The Pevensie kids, at the beginning, are shown in London, still trying to adjust to not being kings and queens in another world, and at the same time they ache to be there. The viewer (at least I did) feels the tingling excitement as the siblings catch glimpses of the Narnian coast on the other side of the subway. As the London underground was torn away and replaced by bright skies and blue seas, joy could be seen on the faces of the Pevensies. They were back in Narnia.
The beauty of that particular moment (along with the early scenes of Caspian fleeing under a full moon through a much wider Narnia than we saw in the first movie, the scenes with the children rediscovering their kingdom, and the desire of them all, including Lucy, to see and hear Aslan again) lies in a truth that spans all of Lewis' writings, namely the Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce. All of Lewis' fictional works are, as my high school teacher Mr. Schwartz might say, 'fraught with wonders'; in particular, they are full of incredible illustrations of theological and biblical truth. They are not merely object lessons, however. Rather, the truths illustrated are so powerful because of their context within story. But this particular truth runs through all of his work, as a kind of unifying theme. And as with anything worthwhile, it's a complex truth that is made up of a number of facets. The surface emotion is that desire to get back, to return to something that was beautiful, that gripped your heart. It reminded me of a passage in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which Lucy reads a passage from a magician's book. It contains a story that lifts her spirits, but by the time she finishes it, she can't remember much, other than that it was "about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill." Then later she asks Aslan:
"Shall I ever be able to, read that story again; the one I couldn't remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do, do, do."
To which he replies:"Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years."
In a way, it is like the feeling I get whenever I open one of the Chronicles again after not having read it for years. It's similar to the feeling I get when I return to Dublin and step into Abbey Pres' sanctuary once again. It's the feeling I had when we were traipsing through the glens and scaling peaks near Glencoe in Scotland and I just wanted to be the heather and the rock and the wind. And it's in this that I think the deeper part of the truth is seen. Lucy just wants to hear the story again; Aslan, like Christ, is telling the story and Lucy is part of it. Her desire to return to the freshness of the story is just part of what is pulling Lucy's heart towards something outside her world. As Lewis writes in Mere Christianity: "If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world." For Lewis, Heaven is not about people sitting on clouds with harps. It is so much grander than that. It is the fulfillment of everything, but not in an "ending" sort of way; it is the beginning. Nowhere are there better descriptions of it than in and Dawn Treader, The Last Battle, and The Great Divorce. Heaven is a rich place, and it is for that which we groan. There the colors are more pronounced, the mountains are higher, the sky is bluer, the smells are richer. But the beauty lies not in what is there, but who is there. It is Aslan's country.
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