September 2019

In C.S. Lewis’s book The Magician’s Nephew, several people from our world, including two children, witness the creation of Narnia. An excerpt follows:

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing… the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it… Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out… If you had seen and heard it..., you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing…

The Voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter… Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn gray. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing… The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose… The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else.

It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright it stood facing the risen sun. Its mouth was wide open in song and it was about three hundred yards away… And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave… Soon there were other things besides grass. The slopes grew dark with heather… And when he burst into a rapid series of lighter notes she was not surprised to see primroses suddenly appearing in every direction… But now the song had once more changed. It was more like what we should call a tune, but it was also far wilder. It made you want to run and jump and climb… Showers of birds came out of the trees. Butterflies fluttered. Bees got to work on the flowers as if they hadn’t a second to lose… And now you could hardly hear the song of the Lion; there was so much cawing, cooing, crowing, braying, neighing, baying, barking, lowing, bleating, and trumpeting… Then there came a swift flash like a fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: ‘Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.’¹

Let us rejoice in God’s creation and thank Him for our salvation in Jesus Christ.

“yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”

1 CORINTHIANS 8:6 (NIV)

¹  C.S Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: HarperTrophy, 1983), chapters 8-9. The latter part of the excerpt follows the editing in C.S. Lewis, A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C.S. Lewis, edited by Clyde S. Kilby (New York: HarperOne, 1968, pp. 242-243).