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 6: 9/18-9/24 NEPHEW CHAPTERS 11-12 Introductory Paragraph Might we have known God all along? We say we have not seen him. Have we not? The Cabby seemed to have known Aslan of old. So seemed his wife. And the plans Aslan has for them are bigger than the plans they’d cobbled. A Cabby? I think not. A king! A washerwoman? No. A queen. There is no shame in driving a cab or doing the washing – in fact, it’s by the labor they’ve done that they’ve accumulated the stuff that makes a king and queen. So what to do when we’re challenged to increase – to be greater, to do more, to dare mighty things? Anyone could understand Strawberry’s concern that, well, how could he be chosen. This nagging self-criticism is familiar to us all. He’s not so clever or special a horse, after all, he reminds Aslan. But Aslan silences the strangling doubt that would keep a creature small: “Be winged.” So might we hear that voice that shook the ground when we doubt whether we can be the creatures he intends for us to be. Be winged. Enjoy your contemplations this week, With Love, Tricia Wagner THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS / QUOTES / EXCERPTS SCRIPTURES WISDOM Confession “We must lay before him what is in us, not Psalm 32 “Son of Adam,” said the Lion. “There is an evil what ought to be in us.” – Letters to Malcolm: Witch abroad in my new land of Narnia. Tell Chiefly on Prayer. James 5:13-18 these good beasts how she came here.” A dozen different things that he might say flashed through Digory’s mind, but he had the sense to say nothing except the exact truth. The heart of the matter “We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity Joshua 23:6 ““I brought her, Aslan,” he answered in a low – like perfect charity – will not be attained by voice. any merely human efforts. You must ask for Psalm 51:1-17 “For what purpose?” God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, “I wanted to get her own world back into her or less help than you need, is being given. own. I thought I was taking her back to her Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, own place.” pick yourself up, and try again. Very often “How came she to be in your world, Son of what God first helps us towards is not the Adam?” virtue itself but just this power of always trying “By – by magic.” again. For however important chastity (or The Lion said nothing and Digory knew that he courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) had not told enough. may be, this process trains us in habits of the “It was my Uncle, Aslan,” he said. “He sent us soul which are more important still. It cures out of our own world by magic rings, at least I our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to had to go because he sent Polly first, and then depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, we met the Witch in a place called Charn and that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best she just held onto us when –“ moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are “You met the Witch?” said Aslan in a low voice forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down which had the threat of a growl in it. content with anything less that perfection.” – “She woke up,” said Digory wretchedly. And Mere Christianity. then, turning very white, “I mean, I woke her. Because I wanted to know what would happen if I struck a bell. Polly didn’t want to. It wasn’t her fault. I – I fought her. I know I shouldn’t have. I think I was a bit enchanted by the writing under the bell.” “Do you?” asked Aslan; still speaking very low and deep. “No,” said Digory. “I see now I wasn’t. I was only pretending.” A Love that Would Do Anything “Though our feelings come and go, His love for Psalm 5 “You see, friends,” (Aslan) said, “that before the us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our new, clean world I gave you is seven hours old, indifference; and, therefore, it is quite Psalm 36:5-10 relentless in its determination that we shall be a force of evil has already entered it; waked and brought hither by this Son of Adam.” cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at Titus 3:3-7 The Beasts, even Strawberry, all turned their whatever cost to Him.” – Mere Christianity. eyes on Digory till he felt that he wished the ground would swallow him up. “But be not cast down,” said Aslan, still speaking to the Beasts. “Evil will come of that evil, but it is still a long way off, and I will see to it that the worst falls upon myself.” Acquaintance with God “To believe that God – at least this God – exists Job 37 “Son,” said Aslan to the Cabby, “I have known is to believe that you as a person now stand in you long. Do you know me?” the presence of God as a person. What would, a Philippians 2:1-11 moment before, have been variations in “Well, no, sir,” said the Cabby. “Leastways not opinion, now become variations in your in an ordinary manner of speaking. Yet I feel John 1:1-14 somehow, if I may make so free, as ‘ow we’ve personal attitude to a Person. You are no met before.” longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands Matthew 26:26-28 “It is well,” said the Lion. “You know better your confidence. – The World’s Last Night and than you think you know, and you shall live to Other Essays. know me better yet.” John 20 “It is just the recognition of God’s positive and concrete reality which the religious imagery preserves. The crudest Old Testament picture of Jahweh thundering and lightning out of dense smoke, making mountains skip like rams, threatening, promising, pleasing, even changing His mind, transmits that sense of living Deity which evaporates in abstract thought…. Perhaps we may rightly reject much of the Old Testament imagery. But we must be clear why we are doing do: not because the images are too strong but because they are too weak. The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, more transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque.” – Miracles. “I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the greatest philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.” – God in the Dock. “For the dream of finding our end, the thing we were made for, in a Heaven of purely human love could not be true unless our whole Faith were wrong. We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.” – The Four Loves. The irresistible call “When you come to knowing God, the Psalm 42 Aslan threw up his shaggy head, opened his initiative lies on His side. If He does not show mouth, and uttered a long, single note; not very Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to Psalm 63 find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more loud, but full of power. Polly’s heart jumped in her body when she heard it. She felt sure that it of Himself to some people than to others – not Matthew 4:18-22 was a call, and that anyone who heard that call because he has favorites, but because it is would want to obey it and (what’s more) would impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the be able to obey it, however many worlds and wrong condition.