The Last Battle: Further Out and Further In

The Last Battle is the wrapping up of time and being in the Narnia we know. We watched its start in TMN, now we witness a conclusion. History having an end is a core Christian idea. In some ways that is a ‘history as we know it’ has an end (because maybe God will do something new after all this). It is also a daily prayed truth that we will face a final judgment, even if what final means in God’s time isn’t what gets contained in the telling of a particular story. In this final text of the Narnia series we are invited to consider many beautiful and difficult things.

To begin however let’s go back to the start, to the prayer that was shared as we entered the wardrobe:

You O God are the text-maker, text-giver, text-worker,

and we find ourselves addressed by your making, giving, working.

So now we ask you, re-text us by your Spirit.

Re-text us away from our shallow loves, into your overwhelming gracefulness.

Re-text us away from our thin angers, into your truth-telling freedom. Re-text us away from our lean hopes, into your deep promises.

Give us attentive eyes and ears, responsive hearts, receiving hands; re-text us to be your servant leaders in joy and obedience, in risk and gratitude.

Re-text us by your word become Breath.

These things we pray in the holy name of Christ our Lord, Amen.

Adapted from Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth by from Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann

As you pray that text, what moments from the whole Chronicles leapt to mind? How do they connect to the faith of the Church?

The Last Battle is full of theological issues of tremendous importance: such as finding oneself in God’s shadow rather than God’s light; universalism and pluralism; God’s time and human time; cruelty in God’s name; a cosmic vision of our place in the meaning of everything. This is just one of them, written about by Rowan Williams in A Lion’s World.

Lewis wrote many years ago now, and had an affection for things older than he. Yet it is hard to not think he had some pre-cognition about what was to come as we read about the terrible abuses of power and trust in TLB. Or perhaps he was simply astute to the human reality. This is a selection from a blog post at A Pilgrim In Narnia about the connections between TLB and the current state of American and UK politics and more, but it is of course quite partisan, so I only offer this image of the post.

Again and again one of the hardest parts for some readers, for a multitude of reasons, is Susan. Is there time beyond the book for her to make her way to the further out and further in? Was she slighted for just being human in a lost and demanding world? This article, especially in the second half, might be good for your reflections.

https://classicalteachersjournal.com/narnia-9-the-last-battle/

Perhaps you recall the discussion about Lewis’ interest in medieval cosmology. This article is certainly very academic, but maybe you will find some jems in it for thinking about both the dread and the delight of this last Narnian novel.

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/the-last-battle-revisited

Finally let us also return to the statement of former ABC Rowan Williams that we began this year long journey with.

Three Christian Themes that Narnian reading can bring into focus:

• Experience the transcendence of God
  • not as distance: but as the wildness of joy and power, and
  • an uncontainable truth, and
  • A highly dangerous stranger who we come to trust

• This experience of being part of the revolution
  • Is AGAINST WHAT WE HAVE MADE OF OURSELVES.
    • We have enslaved ourselves to what we thought we wanted or thought we were supposed to be to systems of domination and ‘winter without Christmas’
      • The change comes from beyond ourselves and through crisis’ that demand self examination
• Liberated from this occupation
  • what is ahead of us is an unending vivid and reliable yet challenging journey
  • in community and universe that is larger and deeper than we ever imagined

Does this final book dig into all of this?

How does a fictional exploration of these things feel different than reading a non-fiction book about the same?

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