Narnia

May 06, 2024

“Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”

“Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

The Saturday family movie this week was The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I hadn’t seen the movie yet and my wife had never read the book.

There was a moment about halfway through when she realized that Aslan was an allegorical Jesus, and her eyes welled up and the rest of the movie was suddenly much better than a simple kids movie.

But even as a simple kids movie, it’s still brilliant. The simplicity is pure, the children are innocent, the bad guys are simply bad, and the good guys are really good - but not safe.

It’s the sort of movie that brings a feeling of shame. Why shame?

We like to think the world is very complicated, but sometimes the good guys are simply good.

Sometimes the bad guys are simply bad.

It’s fun to be a contrarian, but the contrarian is usually wrong.

And children really are sweeter and more pure than us. It’s not just that they do less bad things than us adults, it’s that they are mostly incapable of doing evil. Even when they’re bad, it’s not evil.

Tim Carney in his latest book said:

“When you look into your child’s eyes, you see yourself, but it’s a vision of you unstained.”

Every time I get over my skis and start insisting that things are more complicated and nuanced and wild than we sometimes realize, I get pulled back by some new rendering of virtue that’s the very definition of simplicity.

For a lot of Catholics my age, John Paul II was the personification of this. I still keep a picture of him on my desk. He’s my daily reminder that the world might be very complicated sometimes but that doesn’t change the order and power of love and virtue. When it’s hard to apply virtue properly it’s never because the virtue is faulty, it’s because our understanding of the world and the virtue are not faultless. JPII managed to get it right-er than nearly anyone.

The study of virtue lasts a lifetime.


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