Day 41: Children, Animals, Fools 3

There are an abundance of talking animals in this children's series, but I mainly want to mention one of my favorite storybook characters of all time, found in the Chronicles of Narnia. Her name is Lucy and she is a very little girl, the youngest in a family of four children. She responds with a believing, courageous, and gracious attitude when she is granted access to a peculiar and magical land before any of her other siblings.

I first met Lucy in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe when I was five or six, and I still vividly remember the introduction. I was in our fireplace family room in our house on Elm Street and I was sitting on the arm of the chair while my father read this book aloud to me on several different evenings. It was magical, and I was hooked when we got to chapters with such titles . . ."Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time", then "Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time" . . . . this story is one of the foundations of my fascination for literature, fantasy, fairy tale, and it influenced the choice of my all-time favorite recreational activity: entering into the creative world of an author who skillfully tells a story that is so satisfying that it must be true.

Lucy is in a challenging situation a couple times, first in the above book and they another Chronicles of Narnia book called Prince Caspian. In The L, W, and the W, she accidently discovers the entrance to a nearby but faraway world called Narnia while she is playing hide and seek, and when she tries to tell her older brothers and sisters about it they do not believe her, and rebuke her for being up to her silly imaginative games of pretend like little kids always are. Eventually they find out she was telling the truth and they apologize and she is very gracious to forgive them.

In Prince Caspian, a similar discovery happens, but it is more heartbreaking to her because her siblings should have learned to trust her perspective by now. They have been suddenly summoned back into Narnia by a call for help, and they are trying to make their way across the land to find the Prince who needs their help. They are having trouble navigating the terrain to find a safe and direct route to their destination, when all of the sudden, Lucy sees Narnia's lion-king, Aslan, in the distance, beckoning them to come back upstream, the opposite direction they are currently hiking. She is so excited and announces what she sees to the others, but for some reason, they are not given the eyes to see Aslan, and they do not believe her and they are annoyed that she seems to be up to her childish fantasies again during a situation that requires serious focus and discipline. They take a vote on whether to validate what Lucy sees, or continue their path downstream. The majority do not believe Lucy, and the chapter called "What Lucy Saw" ends with these words, a chapter ending which has always tugged at my heartstrings: "Down," said Peter after a long pause. "I know Lucy may be right after all, but I can't help it. We must do one or the other." So they set off to their right along the edge, downstream. And Lucy came last of the party, crying bitterly.

Lucy is granted recognition of their help and their leader, but she can't make the others see it. Later, when she finds Aslan in the middle of the night and speaks with him about how awful that was, she understands that he expected her to follow him anyway, even if it was by her lonely little self. She is told to wake up the travel party and insist again that she can see Aslan and that he wants her to follow him on the correct path. If they don't believe her this time, she'll just go without them. She wakes everyone up and tells them the plan, and her group grumblingly agrees to trust her since their downstream path yesterday turned out to be a dead end after all. In general they complain about why it is only she that can see Aslan. But as time goes on, Aslan's figure becomes recognizable to each member of the group one at a time and eventually they all can see him quite clearly. They apologize again to Lucy for hesitating to follow the littlest one among them, and she graciously forgives them once again.

There are so many stories of children who describe or experience reality in a way that is startling or impossible or unlikely or fantastical, and we older rational people might quickly discount their perspective as make-believe or silliness. What does it mean to let a little child lead us, and would we ever dare admit that they often receive the gift to recognize what is hidden from even the most educated and the most powerful among us?