Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I came late to the Chronicles of Narnia. I tried them as a child -- couldn't get into them. I didn't enjoy fantasy all that much, I suppose. The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, by Julie Edwards worked, as did L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Surely the the exceptions to prove the rule. But, something made me revisit them, and once I got started, I couldn't stop. I even broke my most sacred of all rules -- never tell anyone on an airplane what I do. The guy across the aisle when I was flying home for Christmas was carrying a Notre Dame back pack and reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. We had the best conversation I have had in a long while -- even walked to the baggage claim together, still talking.

But, I digress. I went to see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader this afternoon. Thoroughly enjoyed it, as well. I have to say, the whole idea of Aslan/God as a lion works much better cinematically for me than it does on the page. Maybe it has something to do with Liam Neeson's voice, as well. It is at once gentle and fierce -- a little volatile. Yet calming and assuring. Accessible and inaccessible all at once. Much like, I think, the way many encounter God. I could of course say more, but I want to shift gears.

I think one of the things I most appreciate about good children's literature, and young adult literature, for that matter, is the fact that it doesn't discount the fact that children and young people have very real problems and concerns. It doesn't sugarcoat the struggles, insisting on an idyllic fantasy. It's messy, and every bit as complex as the grown-up world -- whether most grown-ups will admit as much or not. I wonder if this is perhaps why I wasn't a bigger fan of fantasy as a child. I honestly don't know what I might have done with this story as a child. When Caspian tells Edmund and Aslan that he has been so busy looking for what had been taken from him, he forgot to be thankful for all he had been given... as a child whose father was taken from her entirely too soon, those words would have been very hard to take in. They still are. I get it, but they are still hard. And that's okay. The song that played through the credits -- I was sort of still transfixed, taking it all in -- speaks to the fact that we have been created for so much more than we know. Funny, but I think that we are much more aware of that as children than we are as we grow into who it is we think we are meant to be.