Seeing Life as Story

Writing to his friend and fellow writer, Roger Lancelyn Green, about the return of his wife Joy's cancer, C. S. Lewis said, "It is like being recaptured by the giant when you have passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle." Collected Letters, Volume III, p. 1101

C. S. Lewis saw life in epic proportions. And I imagine that seeing his own suffering as part of a larger story helped Lewis to cope. The return of Joy's cancer and her eventual death was a dreadful part of Jack's own life narrative. However, he also realized, in the midst of his very honest wrestling with grief, that this was not the end of the story. Significantly Lewis ended his chronicle of loss, A Grief Observed, with a quote from Dante: "And she turned to the eternal fountain."

Lewis realized that the end of every tale was only the beginning of a new one. As he wrote at the end of The Last Battle: "And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

A significant part of human growth and development is learning our own story. To learn it truly and well we need someone outside of ourselves to help us discern our own life tale and its meaning. In short, we need Aslan. We need to focus with him on learning our own life narrative--not being distracted by curiosity with the whys and wherefores of other people's stories. As Aslan says to Shasta: "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no-one any story but his own."

It is through reading her own story to the judge, her complaint against the gods, that Orual (in Lewis's Till We Have Faces) finds her own, real voice. She comes to realize that the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer, until that real voice, that real word can be dug out of us. We cannot meet God face to face, until we have a face, until we see our own image, and speak our own story clearly.

"I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?" (Till We Have Faces, the end of the last chapter). It is through meeting the Lord that we begin to understand our story and where it fits in his larger story.

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