Happy Easter, Christ the King!
In The Last Battle, the final book of his Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis describes the experience of the main characters as they find themselves entering into the fullness of heavenly life in the New Narnia:
“It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste…The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can’t describe it any better than that: if you ever get there, you will know what I mean.
It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed and then cried: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!”
At this point in the Easter Season, I find myself reflecting a lot on that theme of living and entering the mystery of heavenly life and C.S. Lewis captures that splendid truth so beautifully in that phrase “Further up and further in!” Our season of Lent was an effort to deepen our Spiritual lives and prepare ourselves for celebrating the Paschal Mystery, so we went further up and further in. But then went even more further up and further in during our Holy Week and Triduum celebrations and arrived at the joy of Easter Sunday—but it still didn’t end there! We keep going further up and further in throughout this Easter Season and now we anticipate our Lord’s Ascension to the Father to be seated at His right hand in glory and we await the coming of the Holy Spirit as we remember Jesus had promised in our Gospel passage: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows him. But you know him, because he remains with you, and will be in you.” It’s the continual, undying offer of our risen life in Christ.
That is, I think, the beauty and wisdom of our Easter Season—it helps us prepare our souls for that reality of communion with the eternal mystery of God’s love that always draws us, paradoxically yet wonderfully, further up and further in. Or, as Lewis sums it up, “…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.”
Come, Holy Spirit! Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen!
In Christ, Our Risen King,
Fr. David
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