Narnia Reading Program the Magician's Nephew
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NARNIA READING PROGRAM AUGUST 14 – OCTOBER 1, 2016 THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW THE MAGICIAN’S WEEK 7: 9/25-10/1 NEPHEW CHAPTERS 13-15 Introductory Paragraph Many would claim that the Achilles heel of humankind is pride. They’re probably right. But what is pride? Thinking better of oneself than one ought? Sure. But is that the real issue with pride? I don’t think so. The real trouble comes when we pretend we’re more capable than we really are. We are independent individuals, able to want… to seek… to grow… to learn… to know. But how far, on our own, can we get with this handful of power? The Witch thought she could get pretty far with hers. She treated Aslan less like a master teacher and more like a colleague – she seemed to respect him, some, out of fear. But she doubts him. How could his ideas and ways be as smart as hers? She’s got this history of dominating worlds, you see! And so she took the apple. But, at the taking, it became a cursed apple. The apple that Aslan gave Digory became an Apple of Youth. How much better off we would be if we we’d empty our palms of the handfuls of pride we’ve picked up and wait for God to deliver apples into our hands? I’ll let C.S. Lewis have the last word on the subject: “If we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present, we are on the outside of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which nature is only the first sketch.” – The Weight of Glory. No – Paul… Paul shall have the last word here: “May the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.” – I Thessalonians 5:23-24 Enjoy your contemplations this week, With Love, Tricia Wagner THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS / QUOTES / EXCERPTS SCRIPTURES WISDOM Responsibility “Our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; Psalm 63:1-8 Digory himself understood at once that the incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying others wouldn’t and couldn’t come in with out for Him who can untie things that are now him. He went forward to the gates alone. knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.” – The Four Loves. Obedience by technicality “Virtue is lovely, not merely obligatory; a celestial Luke 12:1-3 Could he be wrong to taste one? After all, mistress, not a categorical imperative.” – English he thought, the notice on the gate might Literature in the Sixteenth Century. not have been exactly an order, it might have been only a piece of advice – and who “Right actions done for the wrong reason do not help cares about advice? Or even if it were an to build the internal quality or character called a order, would he be disobeying it by eating “virtue,” and it is this quality or character that really an apple? He had already obeyed the part matters.” – Mere Christianity. about taking “for others.” Gimmicky power and promises “We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is Romans 12 “Eat it, Boy, eat it; and you and I will both perpetually concerned about his own dignity and live forever and be king and queen of this advancement, where everyone has a grievance and whole world – or of your world, if we where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of decide to go back.’ (The Witch) envy, self-importance, and resentment.” – The Screwtape Letters. Logical fallacies “Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be Proverbs 9;1-6 “What has the Lion ever done for you that the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can you should be his slave?” said the Witch. be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be “What could he do to you once you are back bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind in your own world? And what would your action when you are not feeling kind and when it Mother think if she knew that you could gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is have taken her pain away and given her right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply back her life and saved your father’s heart because cruelty is wrong – only because cruelty was from being broken, and that you wouldn’t – pleasant or useful to him. In other words, badness that you’d rather run messages for a wild cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in animal in a strange world that is no business which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, of yours?... Look how heartless he has made itself: badness is only spoiled goodness…. Evil is a you. That is what he does to everyone who parasite, not an original thing.” – Mere Christianity. listens to him. Cruel, pitiless boy! You would let your own mother die rather than –” God’s nature as testimony “To believe that God – at least this God – exists is to Deuteronomy 7:9 “I – I don’t think he is a wild animal,” said believe that you as a person now stand in the presence Digory in a dried-up sort of voice. “He is – I of God as a Person. What would, a moment before, don’t know –” have been variations in opinion, now become variations in your personal attitude to a person. You are no longer faced with an argument which demands Digory never spoke on the way back, and your assent, but with a Person who demands your the others were shy of speaking to him He confidence.” – The World’s Last Night and Other was very sad and he wasn’t even sure all the Essays. time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan’s eyes he became sure. “If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an “ideal” or a “value,” but an utterly concrete fact… We must beware, as Professor Whitehead says, of paying God ill-judged “metaphysical compliments.” We say that God is “infinite.” In the sense that His knowledge and power extend not to some things but to all, this is true. But if by using the word “infinite” we encourage ourselves to think of Him as a formless “everything” about whom nothing in particular and everything in general is true, then it would be better to drop that word altogether. Let us dare to say that God is a particular Thing. Once He was the only Thing: but He is creative, He made other things to be. He is not those other things. He is not “universal being”: if He were there would be no creatures, for a generality can make nothing. He is “absolute being” – or rather the Absolute Being – in the sense that He alone exists in His own right.” – Miracles. A Witch’s nature as testimony “The act of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion Psalm 27 That was where the witch made her fatal of fear is, in itself, no sin.” – The Screwtape Letters. mistake. Of course Digory knew that Polly could get away by her own ring as easily as [Senior devil Screwtape to junior devil Wormwood:] he could get away by his. But apparently Hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone the Witch didn’t know this. And the of all the vices, is purely painful – horrible to meanness of the suggestion that he should anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; leave Polly behind suddenly made all the Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the other things the Witch had been saying to compensation by which a frightened man reimburses him sound false and hollow. himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate.” – The Screwtape Letters. The simplicity of righteousness “What is Duty?” John 13:12-17 (Digory) walked up to Aslan, handed him “Well, I suppose, work.” – Boxen: The Imaginary the apple, and said: “I’ve brought you the World of the Young C.S. Lewis. apple you wanted, sir.” The acknowledgement of God “The sense that in this universe we are treated as Philippians 3:8 “Well done,” said Aslan in a voice that made strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet the earth shake. with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns Then Digory knew that all the Narnians had between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable heard those words and that the story of secret.