December 11, 2005
Gaudete Sunday (the third Sunday in Advent)

For more than ten years this was the official (floating) date of my Open House Extravaganza. But when a neighbor reported in 2003 that her college freshman son was disappointed that he couldn’t come because he’d be in the middle of finals in Georgia, I adjusted the tradition and opted for the fourth Sunday so that more of Lynn’s friends (and, beginning last year, Lynn herself) could be here.

So I was available today to accompany about 20 middle school- and high school-age youngsters from my church, along with several adults, to an afternoon showing of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the much-awaited big screen rendition of C.S. Lewis’s beloved 1950s novel for children.

C.S. Lewis is second only to Frederick Buechner in my pantheon of writers of devotional literature. I know best his Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, and A Grief Observed. I know his fantasy literature not at all.

See, fantasy is just not my genre. I have never read The Lord of the Rings, and I read only enough of the first Harry Potter book to know what I was talking about when counteracting accusations by ill-informed people that those works were designed to lead children to Satan. I saw the first Star Wars movie but none of the others, and was never a fan of Star Trek. Lynn has read some of those things, but she was an early independent reader and I never had to read aloud to her what she called “chapter books.”

I wasn’t always negative toward nor negligent of fantasy literature. The first great sin of my life, a crime actually, was the theft from my second grade classroom of a volume of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. I know many of the great myths and archetypes and I’ve studied the work of Joseph Campbell (particularly The Hero with a Thousand Faces, supposedly George Lucas’s inspiration for Star Wars). I am drawn to analyzing my dreams and searching them for personal direction, and I can find symbols in the way the cream swirls up in my coffee each morning. But these days my taste in imaginative literature runs to literary fiction set in the real, not the metaphysical, world.

So it might seem something of a surprise that I agreed to teach the senior high Sunday School class in January and February while their regular teacher adjusts to motherhood with her first child, due around New Year’s Day. The group had already chosen to study the Narnia works and the way they present Christian principles. The day my pastor called to ask me to do this happened to be the day I was debating whether to go to the high school choral concert, and I was feeling a little sad that I no longer had contact with that age group. Of my congregation’s high schoolers, the ones now in tenth grade were in fourth grade the year I took over their class when the regular teacher had to give it up, and I remain very fond of them.

Thus did I stand in the church kitchen this afternoon, directly after the service, eating pepperoni pizza around the work table (the fellowship hall was in use) and washing it down with orange juice. (I didn’t create the menu, obviously.) Then we convoyed to the octoplex theater on the hill near the high school, a venue I have only ever been a chauffeur to and from.

Not only do I not read fantasy literature, I don’t go to movies in theaters either. Not even for Big Important Movies that I’ve hungered to see. I did first experience Born on the Fourth of July that way, and The Prince of Tides, and the last Godfather installment. And I took Lynn to see Titanic and Beauty and the Beast and Alladin and certain other tween favorites of her era. But then Ron wired up our DVD player to send the audio out of his top-of-the-line surround sound speaker system, and not long ago we got a digital high definition system with a 32-inch flat LCD display. Why on earth would I want to go out to a theater to sit among people who are munching and crunching and burping and talking on their cell phones and hitting the back of my chair, seemingly incessantly, when I can sit in the comfort of my own home, start the movie when I feel like it, pause, rewind, go to the bathroom without missing a frame, or even go to bed when I’m sleepy and catch the end when I’m ready?

I know. I should get out more. All those disadvantages of being among a herd of strangers at a movie were in place this afternoon. And I quickly realized that I am no longer accustomed to being in the company of twitchy middle schoolers and pseudo-sophisticated high schoolers whose behavior in packs is quite different from their behavior in smaller groups or one-on-one.

But all the reluctance fell away when I walked through that wardrobe with Lucy. The theme of the stranger in the strange land runs through a lot of my fiction work. I was just Lucy’s age when I became enchanted by the Brothers Grimm, when I tiptoed into my grandmother’s bedroom at night to retrieve my glasses (which she’d taken to clean and polish) so I could sit on the edge of the bathtub and read by the glow of the nightlight. There was even a wardrobe in the room I shared with my sister. It was fitted with shelves and we kept our toys in there. I used to imagine that it opened and gathered me in. Like Lucy, I was a troubled child, a child coping with loss and loneliness who needed a fantasy world to escape to.

I won’t go into an analysis of the movie’s merits here except to say that I thought the battle scene went on too long. I will, however, say that the best part, perhaps the whole point of the film, occurs at the end. (I’d been warned by a friend to watch for this.) The credits begin to roll, and after all the stars are named, the scene returns to Lucy once again entering the room where the wardrobe stands. As she contemplates opening the door, the professor enters the room.

“You won’t get into Narnia again by that route,” he tells her. “You’ll get back to Narnia again some day. But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.”

To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)