Bypassing the Watchful Dragons

To read a story is to take a risk. As if your life is not complicated enough, you enter a different world, encountering people and situations wildly different from your own. You may encounter murder, dysfunctional families, travel to another planet, isolation among wolves, sexual abuse, and a million other situations. And you will come out the other end changed. The way you see the world will never be quite the same. So is that really what you want? 

When King David committed adultery with Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, David undoubtedly told himself a story about what he had done: “She was deliberately trying to get my attention”; “She wasn’t happy with Uriah”; “I’m the king: I can have any woman I want.”  

Then Nathan the prophet was given the unenviable job of confronting the king. He could have taken the direct approach: “Your Majesty, you have sinned against God, against a husband and wife, and against the welfare of your kingdom. You need to repent.” God only knows how that would have been received—but probably not with rapturous enthusiasm. 

Instead, Nathan tells a simple story: A poor man has a single lamb, whom he cares for as his own child. A rich neighbour receives guests and steals the poor man’s lamb in order to serve it up to his guests. The volatile David reacts passionately, not realizing the trap: “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!” Then, in one of the most dramatic confrontations in all of literature, Nathan points at David: “You are the man!” And David immediately crumbles: “I have sinned against the Lord.”  Nathan must have heaved a sigh of relief: it worked! And it was a story that did it—by appealing to David’s conscience indirectly, by way of his imagination.  

C.S. Lewis understood the power of stories. When he wrote his first fiction book, Out of the Silent Planet, he was amazed that so few critics picked up on the underlying Christian content. That helped him realize the power of story to circumvent what he called “the watchful dragons—the reaction that many people have to talk about God or faith or religion. The watchful dragons breathe out fire that says, “Back off! I have no interest in discussing such things.”  

This conviction led ultimately to the creation of the Narnia stories. As every Christian reader recognizes, there is deep spiritual significance to almost everything that happens in these stories. Lewis is trying to work around the watchful dragons, teaching us what it means to encounter Aslan, the lion who is the Christ figure, without sounding religious or churchy.  

There is one occasion, at the end of The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, where Lewis comes close to tipping his hand about the Christian content of Narnia. The children are about to return from Narnia to our world, and Lucy cries because they will not see Aslan again. Aslan replies that he is present in our world too. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name.” Lewis (rightly) doesn’t spell out what he means, and it is left to the reader to figure it out.  

But there is another way that story can connect to the real world. You may remember the movie, The Never-Ending Story. In it, the boy Bastian is reading a book called The Never-Ending Story. In the story, the Kingdom of Fantastica is in danger, and only a child from our world can save it. As Bastian reads, he slowly pieces together various hints that he himself is that child! But what can he do? He has to choose to step into the story and play the part that only he can play. Bastian is scared, but when he finally finds the courage to do so, Fantastica is saved. 

Christian faith is similarly a story which invites us to step into it. It is a story of a good world made by a loving Creator, a world messed up by the human creatures God has put there to steward it, and a world into which the Creator himself has stepped in order to initiate the redemption of this world that he still loves.  

But as we read the story, we discovered that the hero of the story says disturbing things like, “Come to me! Follow me!” which mysteriously resonate across the centuries and invite us to step into the story and play our part. This year, the Oscars are finally giving an award to the best Casting Director, an award I think is overdue because, when you think about it, the Casting Director can make or break a movie. So what if we thought of Jesus as the Casting Director for the story that God is writing about the human race? To become part of the story, we need to come to Jesus, the Casting Director, and say, “Lord, here I am. Cast me in whatever role you know suits me best, and help me play my part in your story.” What adventures might follow!