It seems strange to say "things," because more than anything else it's the people that roped me back in after I gave up on God when I was about ten years old, but in the quiet moments when I felt most alone there were always voices calling me back. Voices that didn't come from corporeal people in my life, but instead from books and music.
The person who's had the biggest effect on my faith is no longer alive. I don't remember the first time I read "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C. S. Lewis, or how old I was when I finally made it through "The Last Battle," but those books whispered to me. I came for the grand stories of adventure and magic, and I stayed for the truth that runs throughout the series like water underneath a frozen river. I reacted to Aslan in a way I'd never felt about God, and the lion imagery in the Bible still hits me harder than any other personification.
Of all the Narnia books, the one that spoke to me most was "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." It was a security blanket, for some reason, and I remember taking it to camp with me and reading it slowly, word by word, to make it through my first panic attacks. The two moments that still stand out to me are these:
Eustace, who is new to Narnia and a pretty greedy and selfish sort of guy, gets turned into a dragon because he tries to steal dragon's treasure. No one can figure out how to turn him back, and so he becomes miserable, but finally quiet and humble, and the other children begin to make friends with him. Then, one night, he's visited by Aslan. Aslan takes him up into some mountains to a pool of water and says that to turn human again he must undress and bathe in the pool. Eustace figures that dragons are like snakes, so Aslan must mean that he has to shed his skin. He tries, and eventually takes off several layers of skin, but it's no good.
"I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? So I scratched away for a third time and got off a third skin, just like the others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good. Then the lion said 'You will have to let me undress you.' I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty near desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back and let him do it. The first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart, and when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off... Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off--just as I thought I'd done the other three times, only they hadn't hurt--and there it was lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker and darker and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch, and smaller than I had been. The he caught hold of me--I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on--and threw me into the water. I smarted like anything, but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone. I'd turned into a boy again."It was a story that's stuck with me; the story of a boy who couldn't save himself.
The other bit that I loved was when Aslan tells the two youngest children, Edmund and Lucy, that they can't come back to Narnia anymore.
"'You are too old, children,' said Aslan, 'and you must begin to come close to your own world now.'And I think that's why "Dawn Treader" was my favorite book. Because it made clear what I'd always felt about the nature of God.
'It isn't Narnia, you know,' sobbed Lucy. 'It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?'
'But you shall meet me, dear one,' said Aslan.
'Are--are you there too, Sir?' said Edmund.
'I am,' said Aslan. 'But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.'
When I was in my sophomore year of college and thinking about getting baptized, I remembered how much Lewis had done in helping me understand things as a kid, and I turned to him again. I read through "The Screwtape Letters" several times, and once again I found answers. The way Lewis writes makes sense in my head and in my heart, and it resonates inside me long after I've put the book down.
Without his writing allowing me to feel the presence and nature of a loving God in my childhood, and without his explanations of the world and human nature in my teens, I'm not sure I would have come back to Christianity. Or if I did, it would have been much later, and as a very different person. And I like to think that this is something that would give him a bit of the joy he wrote about so passionately.
