The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Once upon a time, long before the founding of Hogwarts, before there were Star Treks or Wars, before Indiana Jones ever conceived of adventure, even before the discovery of Middle Earth, there was Narnia, a magical land of mythical beasts, talking animals and children's adventures. Immune to the appetites of the movie industry for many years, the third instalment of the 7 story series by C.S.Lewis has now been rendered into film.  Beginning in 2005 with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and continuing in 2008 with Prince Caspian (an amalgam of two original written works), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader finds the “franchise” in a new studio, as 20th Century Fox boldly goes where Disney Studios decided not to tread.

        In the interest of disclosing the bias in my writing, I confess that I was a fan of C.S.Lewis fantasy literature from about the age of 8. The only thing wrong with The Chronicles of Narnia was that they came to an end!  What was a boy to do to replace such a rich imaginal world?  Lewis’s space trilogy was a hallucinogenic enigma. His theological works were rife with a pietism that left me cold. Ever since, I have been pining ... for what? An equally engrossing fantasy? (Thank God for Guy Gavriel Kaye.) A lost childhood? The wonder and delight of those stories has never been equalled and among them, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader stood out as the pinnacle of Lewis’s oeuvre.

        What then to make of this translation from print to screen?  Bluntly, the book was better. Where the story as literature is a contemplation of the journey of faith, a pilgrimage to the edges of human self understanding, a Pilgrim’s Progress for kids, the movie is an uneven, poorly construed swashbuckler which is in thrall not to the muse of wonder and enlightenment but to the demands of the studio’s marketing department.  Therein lies the Achilles' heel of this piece of film. May God have mercy on the screen writers and editors who cobbled this together; even the cross of Christ was more elegantly constructed. Scenes come and go with little or no relation to each other: is this a story or a collage? Most glaringly, where Lewis weaves the problem of evil into his narrative as an intrinsic existential possibility, the director, Michael Apted, resorts to cheap gimmickry by representing the presence of the malign with a boiling green mist.  Shades of Cecil B. DeMille!  Will we ever be rid of this cinematic heresy?  Not, it seems, in my lifetime. And what about Aslan? Coming and going arbitrarily like an absentee landlord, the leonine One (voiced with great gravitas by Liam Neeson) becomes an oracle of moral observation with no particular investment in the course of the action. Although Lewis’s image of Holy transcendence is thus preserved, the vulnerability and compassion of his original is gone. Instead of a God who is radically free to the point of wildness, we’re left with a deus ex machina who exercises no power to save.

        The CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) is good - all the requisite images are clear and stylish, so impressive in fact that the mortal actors shrink by comparison, an ironic reversal of the original, where the development of the main characters occupies the centre of attention.  Here, the characters remain two dimensional throughout: Lucy (Georgia Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes) dutifully mouth their lines and while Eustace (Will Poulter) manages to be appropriately irritating, all are upstaged by the gallant Reepicheep (voiced by Simon Pegg), a mouse more human than any of his counterparts in the film or even his own literary manifestation as an upper class prig!

However, at the culmination of the journey, it’s left to Caspian (Ben Barnes) to deliver the coup de grace to the rich metaphor of Narnia as Lewis’s realized commonwealth of justice, compassion and humility.  With his leaden assertion, “I want to be a better king”, Caspian transforms the vision that Lewis articulated so eloquently - a world where righteousness and leadership are intricately woven - into an anachronism, an embarrassingly out of date image that has no pertinence to a post modern world.

        Consequently, this movie itself becomes a metaphor that encapsulates the dilemma of the church.  The circumstance of this story in the grip of this studio is an apt image for the situation of the Christian faith in hands of the Western world.  As we struggle to secure our place in the market of post modern inventions, as we bootstrap our story into the optics of the 21st century, how much do we sacrifice the integrity of our faith on the altar of entertainment and economic viability?  At what cost to the former is success in the latter?

        It’s been said that the revenues from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader were sufficient to justify the risk that 20th Century Fox took by investing in the project; the movie “performed” well enough to generate the possibility of a next episode.  The mind races to imagine what that might be.  Will they engage the rubrics of Creation (The Magicians Nephew)?  Perhaps Muslim/Christian relations (The Horse and his Boy)?  How about apocalypse (The Last Battle)?  Given the evidence of this film, I can wait.

Submitted by Murray Groom, SCN Network Chair

Let Your God Love You

Here we are in the midst of AGMs, budget struggles, and trying to plan this year's Lenten series. Didn't we just journey to Bethlehem? How can we be facing Jerusalem so quickly? Time flies, we race from one meeting to the next, from one crisis to the next and wonder if what we are doing makes any difference at all. We empty ourselves of all the grace and love that God has given us and our own souls gasp for even a sip of life-giving water. We long to reach for the robe of Jesus' hem, if we could just find it in the crowded days of our lives. And so I offer this poem, shared by a colleague, that invites you to "Let Your God Love You". Blessings on your journey.

Let Your God Love You

Be silent.
Be still.
Alone.
Empty
Before your God.
Say nothing.
Ask nothing.
Be silent.
Be still.
Let your God look upon you.
That is all.
God knows.
God understands.
God loves you
With an enormous love,
And only wants
To look upon you
With that love.
Quiet.
Still.
Be.

Let your God—
Love you.

~ Edwina Gateley

Shalom,

Ivy

Count your blessings

Last October, a number of us gathered to participate in the 'Sowing Promise, Growing Leaders' event.  It was an amazing time under the leadership of Peter Short.  Some of what we shared has appeared in this blog already... most notably the poem Litany by Billy Collins.  We all enjoyed reminding ourselves that 'we are not the pine scented air'!  But another of the little gems that Peter offered is the commissioning that he offers at the end of most worship services:

Count your blessings

Practice your faith

Never look down on a struggle for life

Remember that nowhere you go on God’s green earth is bereft of the spirit

A simple list and a helpful reminder in the midst of our busy lives.

Angels

I have never really paid much attention to angels, or really believed in them.  I guess I have always slotted them into the category of ‘New Age’ flakiness- until recently I read this from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

God had made what we can see and manage and what we can’t see and can never manage, a universe some of which we can get a grasp of and some of which we can’t.  This isn’t a recommendation not to try to understand, but simply a reminder that not everything is going to be made sense of from our point of view.  We don’t get to the end of being baffled and amazed.  I sometimes think that this is the importance of talking about angels in Christian teaching.  Odd as it may sound, thinking about these mysterious agents of God’s purpose, who belong to a different order of being, can be at least a powerful symbol for all those dimensions of the universe about which we have no real idea.  Round the corner of our vision things are going on in the universe, glorious and wonderful things, of which we know nothing.  We’re so used to sentimentalizing and trivializing angels- they are often reduced to Christmas decorations…,But in the Bible angels are often rather terrifying beings occasionally sweeping across the field of our vision; they do God strange services that we don’t fully see; they provide a steady backdrop in the universe of praise and worship.  They are great ‘beasts’, ‘living creatures’, flying serpents burning with flames, carrying the chariot of God, filling the Temple in Jerusalem with bellows of adoration, echoing to one another like whales in the ocean.  These are …anything but Christmas card material.  And sometimes a human form appears to give a message from God and something in the event tells the people involved that this is a moment of terror and truth, and they recognized that they have met an angel in disguise.

            Now whether or not you feel inclined to believe literally in angels- and a lot of modern Christians have a few problems with them- it’s worth thinking of them as at the very least a sort of shorthand description of everything that’s ‘round the corner’ of our perception and understanding in the universe- including the universal song of praise that surrounds us always.  If we try and rationalize all this away, we miss out on something vital to do with the exuberance and extravagance of the work of God, who has made this universe not just as a theatre for you and me to develop our agenda, but as an overwhelming abundance of variety and strangeness.

-from Tokens of Trust, Westminster John Knox Press, 2007, p. 51.

So now I wonder about the angels that are ‘round the corner’ and take comfort in their strangeness and the services they do for God and in the universal song of praise that they sing on behalf of us and on behalf of all of the creation that we can’t imagine and know nothing about.  On this Valentine’s Day I trust that Cupid, the angel of Love, is round the corner, in the service of God, lavishing acts of love on this world in fierce and strange and mysterious ways.  And I hope that we will notice when he comes sweeping across our field of vision.

Blessings on this day,

Lori Megley-Best

The Way It Is

                             William Strafford

There is a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what things you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread,

but it’s hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and grow old.

Nothing you do can stop times unfolding.

But you don’t ever let go of the thread.

A friend included this poem in a collection of favorites given as a gift, and I love it.  It reads to me like a dropped pebble sinking into a calm pool of water, the words going deeper and deeper to a quiet place.  And the reminder to us all of what really matters: don’t ever let go of the thread.

Our lives are woven together by people and experiences and so, naturally, we write about our thread-bare lives.   Dropped Threads, a book in celebration of Canadian authors, is a reminder of how we do, actually, sometimes drop even the most important connections that weave us together and, when dropped, leave us frayed at the edges.  Not at all perfect.

I also remember coming across a poem in seminary written by the great African American minister, preacher and author, Howard Thurman.  In this poem/prayer, Thurman reflects on all the threads in his life that he holds in his hand, threads of relationships, roles and responsibilities.  Some of these threads get dropped in spite of our best efforts, leaving us more ragged and sad.  Some of the threads are like lifelines of energy and hope.  But there’s one thread that holds him, and that is the thread of God.  

Of all the threads that weave together your life, what is the thread that you must never let go of?

Dan Chambers