How to Live Like a Narnian

Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed Podcast. We are still on hiatus, but I gave a talk recently at the Square Halo Returned Narnia conference. That I thought was worth sharing with you. The talk deals with rebooting our relationship with material reality. If you are interested in the kinds of things that the Ansom Society does, there's a pretty good chance.

Either that you were raised with an unusually good relationship with material reality and its connection to the spiritual world, or an unusually bad one, or perhaps I should say a usually bad one, where the things of this world don't matter Only the things of the next world and the next life matter. And therefore it's hard to justify your interests, your loves, your vocations if they don't get you into the elevator going up.

In this talk I attempted to not so much describe the source of the problem, but describe the problem, certainly, and then to explore a threefold way of fixing our relationship with material reality and by extension our vocations. Have a listen.

I'm sure most of you remember the moment in the silver chair when the Queen of Underland walks in on Jill and Eustace and Potoglum and Prince Rillian uh just as they're about to leave and look for Narnia. And she quietly throws some green powder on the fire and begins drumming this musical instrument, right? and everyone begins to feel drowsy and their senses dull and their ability to comprehend reality deadens. And they try to tell her they've seen things from Narnia.

And she laughs and tells them that they're just imagining pretend things based on things in her world. And the longer she talks, the deeper they fall under her enchantment. So I use that word enchantment, and I have to pause. For a moment and say something about that. Because there are when we try to articulate This idea of wanting to have a a Christian imagination, um, wanting to see our own lives and our own world in a more Christ-like way.

a way that does justice to deeper spiritual realities in a material world that we live in, we can we can do so in two ways that sound contradictory, okay? So the first is to talk about re enchantment. Um I do this a lot. Uh it's it's a way of articulating it that It says w we we live in we ha we we live as Christians but we have perhaps a a bit of a materialistic worldview or or a version of Christianity that doesn't seem like it has quite all of the

the the answers and we feel like we need to re enchant that. We need to get the bigger vision. Uh the second way is to talk about disenchantment or We're breaking the enchantment. We're concerned that perhaps the reason we have a materialistic worldview is uh that our eyes are actually blinded, so to speak, by something that's true truly there for us to see.

Right under our noses. I think there's value to both of these approaches, but uh depending on the context of the conversation, I'm going to take the second one. For today. We're going to dig into this moment from the silver chair. Because I believe that, like the characters in that moment, there is a great lie. There is a great evil enchantment of our age that prevents us. From seeing and living like Narnians. And this time, uh, I know I'm I'm sort of the last thing before uh dinner.

And that's always a risk. Like you're kinda you're you've listened to several things in a row, you're probably nodding off already. Um I I promise you there is a statistically good chance that I will offend you within the first five minutes and if I don't manage it by then I'll do it by the end. So first

First I'm going to do well I'm gonna do three things. First, I wanna show you what this enchantment is, what what I'm even what I'm talking about when I say this. I think you'll recognize it. Then I'm going to show you the reality. Behind the enchantment. And finally, I'll leave you with some thoughts on how we can live in light of that reality. Okay, so the great enchantment, the great lie. You ready for this?

The lie is this: there is no relationship between Narnia and Aslan's country. No relationship between our reality and God's, between matter and spirit. I'm sure you've encountered this in one frame or another. It plays out in slightly different ways in different Christian circles and different non-Christian circles. For a good while now, many Christian churches, I would say, have drunk at the well of the surrounding culture. And our culture the last few decades has been on this

Schizophrenic journey from materialism to anti-materialism. We can get into that in the QA if you want. But from basically from saying that. If it's if I can't see it and I can't touch it, it's not real. To saying my feelings trump what I can see and touch. So in a Christian context, Next, tell me if any of the following sound familiar. First, the world is bad. My body is bad. Stuff is bad. Things I enjoy are probably bad.

and I should feel guilty for enjoying them. I just need to fix my eyes upon Jesus. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. And I ought to be profoundly distrustful of things that give me pleasure. After all, Saint Paul says those who live according to the flesh

Set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. And St. John says, Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. So food, drink, sex.

Yes, dancing, smoking, music, movies, anything that might give me pleasure are deeply risky things to get into. And I have a great uh deal of trouble justifying them spiritually, uh when after all there's a Bible I ought to be reading. some good works that I ought to be performing. Not only is the material world bad, in the grand scheme of things, it's not even what's really real. Perhaps you've even absorbed the quote, which has become a prevalent meme.

Even though C.S. Lewis never said it, that you are a soul, you have a body. Bottom line: best case scenario. This material reality, best case scenario, it's like Bruno. We don't talk about it. Or maybe even counter this with more of a focus on time. Rather than space. This life doesn't matter, only the next one does. Only one life'twill soon be past, only what's done for Christ shall last. Right? Uh which is understood to mean only the things.

Focused on the next life shall last. Evangelism, for example. I'm supposed to view this world as a prison from which I will someday escape. This world is not our home. Maybe you've heard that phrase. So we seek God by transcending the here and now. Come Lord Jesus. Perhaps the focal point of the Christian faith as a whole.

is even framed as what happens after you die? Are you going up or down on the elevator? In the face of such eternal questions, How can I justify my vocation that apparently has nothing to do with getting somebody or me into the elevator one direction or the other? I mean I don't recall the last time I was in a church and I saw the pastor calling up the newly minted lawyers or construction workers for a special commissioning and blessing.

So why do so many Christians see the world this way? The here doesn't matter, and the now doesn't matter. We shrink from the here and we shrink from the now in an effort to avoid what we see as a grade A sin, which is to love the world, the stuff, the here and now, for its own sake. Which is to say To create an idol out of it. We humans have a tendency to zero in on the things that we are.

absolutely positive will make us happy. We absolutely cannot live without and tell God we're in charge of those you can't have those. Christians are so rightly afraid that, as John Calvin said, the human heart is the perpetual forge of idols, that we think the best way to avoid idolatry is to avoid the things we might make. into idols. After all, as Jonas said, those who pay regard to vain idols.

forsake their hope of steadfast love. So we look at our corporate worship, at how we pray, at our vocations, at our entertainment choices, at our daily lives and routines with the eye of a paring knife, seeking to fight our own temptation towards idolatry through cutting down to the essentials. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Right? We don't always succeed of course, but that's

That's kind of the mentality. To be good Christians, we have to be on this mission to shorten the list of things in our lives that might be spiritually unhelpful or distracting to the point where that list is often full of things most of our ancestors would have considered essential to Christian faith and practice. What's the result of this? What's its impact on me? I find myself in my proverbial prayer closet, beset on all sides.

By a material world that is my enemy, apparently, haunt hounded at every moment by the march of time that is running out. And I'm profoundly alienated at that point from every aspect of my existence. And I'm haunted by my constant failure. to truly access the eternal and the spiritual like I'm convinced I ought to. I can't live as I ought in the world because the accepted list of Christian activities

Is woefully short. And for everything else, I have no spiritual category between idolatry and indifference. Right? I'm so afraid of ascribing ultimate worth to something that I'm afraid to ascribe worth to it. So the vast majority of activities that make up my typical week I see as neutral or secular at best. I can't find a place for them in the kingdom of God. But my friends, this entire dynamic It's what the Lady of the Green Kurdle, the Queen of Underland, is after.

at the climax of the silver chair. Because it's really important to notice Because she doesn't just want the children and Puddoglum and Prince Rillian to believe there is no Narnia. She wants them to live in underland as if there is no Narnia. All while knowing that the way to Narnia is through her own land. Right there for them to find if they only seek.

As Lewis understood when he wrote The Silver Chair, the story of the Christian Bible is very, very, very different. From this dynamic of alienation, not valuing the here and not valuing the now. In my ten years of work toward a renaissance of the Christian imagination with my organization, the Anselm Society, there are are two consistent things that I've seen draw people to that mission. The first is the enjoyment of things like Narnia that give us that sense of of transcendence. Make us

See the world with those those, you know, in the other sense of the word enchantment, enchanted eyes. The second is the hope that we're supposed to. The idea that some of those things we love ought to be a part of the kingdom of God, even if we can't quite explain how. There is a reason that people have this hope. Whether they know it or not, and it's this.

Reality is very different from the Lady of the Green Kurtles account of it. In fact, I'm convinced that for us to live more like Narnians, we first have to understand how to see more like Narnians. We have to Fix this relationship with material reality. In the Chronicles, Louis That sounds like I stepped right out of a fantasy book. In the Chronicles. But Lewis gives us this fictional world that very clearly has meaning and magic just built right into it, right?

And the reason that appeals to us is that it is actually a reflection of our world as we're supposed to see it, even if we've forgotten. Scripture and the consistent teaching of the historic church give us a threefold way of understanding our world, an understanding that Lewis shared, that is utterly different from what I've been describing, and that many of you in this room probably did not grow up with. And it goes like this. First, the world is from God, which is to say, it is good.

Second, the world is of God, which is to say it is symbolic and it points to his character. And third, the world is for God, which is to say It is sacramental and participates in the life of heaven. When we unpack the significance of these three innocent sounding ideas what we find is a completely different relationship with this world.

including how to live in it. So let's take each of these in turn so that we can understand how to see like a Narnian. And after we've done that, we'll unpack the significance of each point for how to live like an Narnian. Okay, first, world is from God.

Okay, surface level, obvious, right? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and over and over and over we hear and God saw that it was good. And God saw that it was good. He gave us a world filled with beauty and truth and goodness, a world that could meet our needs and then some. Now the goodness of this creation does not consist in its ability to get us into someplace else. Or because it is useful to our ends. It's intrinsically good. It's beautiful.

I mean you're you're really off the deep end, right? If you see a rose or you go to the ocean and you're just like, well that won't get me into heaven. Why did we make this trip? Right? In fact, it's the opposite, right? There's something about following God that tends to draw us into creation. I'm I'm from Colorado and uh I've got I've got friends that haven't darkened the door in a of a church in a while, but they say, I feel God when I'm on a mountaintop.

And in the crucial moment in the silver chair, who is it that's best able to remember Narnia? It's Puddleglub, the one who has known it best and loved it longest. So if we're going to figure out how to figure out or how to live as God wants.

We're going to have to grapple with this good physicality of our existence. Lewis puts it this way in mere Christianity. He says there's no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That's why he uses material. material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not. He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

But do we really pause often to consider the wonder of this? Why did God, who is not made of matter, make a world of matter and make us of matter and put us into it? What does it mean to truly see the magic at every turn? Pausing to truly behold what he has made. I love the way Robert Farrar-Kapon puts it. He says one real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world. All the diagrams in the world.

He devotes an entire chapter actually of his his book, Supper of the Lamb, to meditating on the wonder that is an onion. I was teaching some high school students a few weeks ago. And I had them do this. I had them all bring a physical object that they had loved for a long time, and it could be like a keddie bear type physical object or it could be like a type of physical object like an onion.

And I I was gonna have them spend ten minutes each in groups of three just beholding their thing. You're not allowed to talk about what it what it teaches you about God yet. You're not allowed to talk about how this brings you closer to God, yet you can only behold the wonder that God has made. We're gonna spend ten minutes per person's thing on that and then get onto the what does it teach you about God? We never got there. We spent our whole ninety minute thing just beholding.

And we can spend our whole entire session just doing that, like just talking about that. And it would be time well spent because it's a lifetime's work, right? It's a lifetime's art to learn this. Uh in in my book, Why We Create, the book that I co-edited for Square Halo, Gracie Olmsted recounts this story from uh Dostoevsky. A character named Father Zosima tells the story of his brother Marco.

Who died as a teenager? As he became ill, Markle experienced a remarkable conversion to Christianity. Some of his last words are captured thus. Looking at the first birds of spring, he began suddenly begging their forgiveness. Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me, for I have sinned against you too. None of us could understand that at the time, but he shed cheer tears of joy. Yes, he said, there was such a glory of God all about me, birds, trees, meadows.

You take too many sins on yourself, mother used to say, weeping. Mother darling, it's it's for joy, not for grief I'm crying. Though I can't explain it to you, I like to humble myself before them, for I don't know how to love them enough. Markle gets the effect of the great enchantment. We are surrounded by God's glory, and amid that glory we have not loved enough.

Sometimes I hear the suggestion that viewing the world this way is to denigrate the value of the sacred by saying everything is sacred. And I acknowledge like this is a thing that we can do. I see pseudo-Christian social media influencers who talk about how everything is sacred, who will also say that the the space of say a church or a graveyard uh has no special significance. Church is not a building, they like to say.

What they've done is essentially downgraded everything, right? Like in the Incredibles. Everything's special, so nothing is. That's the opposite of what I'm proposing, okay? One way to think about this is that we're not saying ordinary things are sacred, we're saying there are no ordinary things.

The things we think are ordinary are more holy than we've dared imagine, charged with the grandeur of God. And yet the hierarchy of the holy goes higher still. The not so ordinary things are just the beginning. We'll get to that in a moment. Now maybe you're thinking that's all very well, but the world is Fallen. Yes, there is sin in the world. But I think we tend to overestimate the enemy. He is not an evil opposite to God. Okay? He is not everywhere all at once. Ізна омнішень, і знамніпотент.

He's a finite creature. And while he convinced us to sicken or dirty what God had made, he does not have the power to change its nature. That's why God himself so often uses the language of washing clean, not replacing. I can't remember who said this, but somebody said God's making all things new, not all new things.

Okay, now there's probably a third group of you though that's listening to all this and thinking I'm wasting a great deal of time saying something incredibly obvious. But the great enchantment of our age is predicated on skipping this crucial truth. I cannot tell you how rare it is for me to meet someone who tells me they were raised in a church that emphasized the creation part of the Christian meta-narrative.

They th they were raised usually with a sense that Christianity is a two-chapter story, sin and salvation. And it's not. Um and for my evidence I suggest you open your Bible. It begins with creation and it ends with consummation. Saying that sin and salvation are the story is is I mean to put it in heroes' journey terms, it's like saying the inciting incident and the climax are the story. but they're not they're not the beginning and they're not the end

If our story is only is only one about sin and salvation, we will of course struggle to know what to do with a great deal of things, including how we spend the vast majority of our time. But if we understand what we were created for, there's hope. that we can understand what we were redeemed for, how to live like an arnian. Okay, so I've proposed the first part.

of this threefold understanding of reality, this elevated sense of the goodness of things. But I've suggested it's just the beginning of a ladder.

Let's go further up and further in and discover the second piece. The world is of God. It doesn't just bear the fact. fingerprints of God in a superficial sense. It actively reflects his nature at every turn. We don't often think about this, but theologian James Jordan puts it this way. Could have a God who made us directly depend on Him for life, so we didn't need food. He we could have had a God who gave us eternal energy so that we wouldn't need rest. We could have a God that

Put us on a flat, pristine earth with no rocks or mountains or valleys so that we wouldn't trip or get distracted. But we don't. We worship a God who gave us hunger and food. Tiredness and sleep, lungs and oxygen, trees and flowers and gemstones and all the things that make up the physical world as we know it. And under the great enchantment, when was the last time you stopped to wonder? Why do we worship the sort of God who made trees? And what do these things tell us about him?

Let's take one example. Um Christian self help writers and Instagram quote graphics and posters at Hobby Lobby are only too happy to remind us from the psalmist that the heavens declare the glory of God. And they stop there. As if the phrase only means the heavens remind us God is pretty. But that's not what glory means in Scripture. The glory of something is its nature, its character, its deepest essence. If I tell you I know the glory of something, your next question ought to be

Ooh, what is it? And sure enough, Psalm 19 says the heavens are telling us something about God. Listen to this: the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pray. Pour forth speech. Night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words, no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out. into all of the earth.

Their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of its chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other and nothing is deprived of its warmth. The Christian tradition sees the world as full of meaning, full of signs pointing beyond themselves. Fourth century theologian Ephraim of Syria wrote, In every place you look, Christ's

symbol is there. And wherever you read, you will find his types, his symbols. For in him all creatures were created, and he traced his symbols on his property. Or Saint Paul in his letter to the Roman Church, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature glory, have been clearly seen, being understood from what he has made so that people are without explaining.

That phrase doesn't just mean we have no excuse knowing right and wrong or knowing that God exists. It's in the words of the text, he's saying more than that. Remember that quote from Calvin? Human heart, perpetual forge of idols? He goes on, this is in Book Eleven of his Institutes, to explain that he doesn't mean we create idols out of nature. but that we look for meaning by looking within to our own desires. And so we create for ourselves gods who are smaller than we are.

When in fact we ought to be looking for meaning outside ourselves to the world and the God that are bigger than we are. It's not just that there are signs in nature, but that all nature is itself a sign, pointing beyond itself in patterns within patterns within patterns. Trinitarian meaning and reflections of heaven are everywhere, so that we who are not ready to comprehend the full mystery of God.

are being prepared minute by minute through interactions with refractions of his character. Scripture itself assumes that if you are reading it, if you are reading God's Second book, if you will, you have already read the first book. And so it speaks of God by talking of rocks and trees and wine and lambs and fire and wind and countless other things. It's assuming you've been paying attention. They're not just metaphors, made up connections that we impose on reality. They are reality.

We live in a symbolic world. Okay, I'll show you. Given enough knowledge of theology and biology, we could do this with absolutely anything in creation. Let's stick with what's right in front of us and do Psalm 19. It says, In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It's like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber. The first thing we learn in Genesis about the sun is that it and the moon and the stars govern time, and that they are what?

signs and symbols. And throughout the great tradition, the teachers of the church have seen in the Sun an image of Christ, who is also referred to as the bridegroom. As one who has come to pitch his tent among his people. This is all in Psalm nineteen. Whose restoration, like the sun's warmth, will reach to the ends of the earth. Lewis himself said that he believed in God or believed in the

God, like he believed in the sunrise, not just because he saw it, but because by it he saw everything else. Not done yet. Jonathan Edwards and others argue that the moon is a symbol, among other things, of the church. It bears no light of its own. Only that of the sun. It lives in the darkness.

Serving as the only reminder that the light will come again. It waxes and wanes, going through times of fullness and times of near extinction, times of obedience and times of disobedience, but never losing the sun's light. It's not that God lives in the sky like in a cartoon, but there is a real relationship between heaven and the heavens.

And you can go further, you can get more into the sun, you can get more into the stars. They all add up to a picture of just one picture, not the whole picture, but a picture. We can look at the sun, the moon, and the stars and learn something of who God is even when times are dark. And guess what? When all is darkest in the silver chair, what is it that Puddleglum is able to remember and shout that he has seen?

I've seen the sky full of I've seen the sun coming up out of the sea of a morning and sinking behind the mountains at night. And I've seen him up in the midday sky when I couldn't look at him for brightness. It is not an accident that Lewis, who is well versed in the symbolism and cosmology of Christianity, wrote those lines. And the psalmist, writing Psalm 19, in full awareness of the words of Genesis and the frequent uses of sun, moon, and stars in the Torah, is begging you.

to pay attention to the silent voices of the heavens in order to know God. Better. Yet we share his first line, the heavens declare the glory of God, like it's a meme. And we ask no further questions, even of his own song. Almost as if we were under an enchantment. But we live in a world whose biological patterns are Full of microcosms of justice and mercy, authority and submission, unity and diversity, sublime and beautiful.

Trinity and Resurrection, the very patterns and paradoxes of the life of heaven, a world that's calling out to us, come and see, come and see. And we sit gloomily on our front porch and wish that the world were more magical. You know, like in the great stories.

But I'm not even to the best part yet. There's a third level of meaning in our world. We've seen how the world is from God. It is good. It's a beautiful gift. There are no ordinary things in it. First level. We've seen how the world is of God, a symbolic chorus. Singing of the one who made it, and crying for us to go deeper and deeper into the knowledge of who He is, second level. But third, the world is for God, which is to say it is sacramental and participates in the life of heaven.

Gonna get really nerdy for a sec. Then I'll zoom back out and explain why it matters. A sacrament, capital S. is a visible sign of an invisible grace. It's not just a reminder of something else. It actually participates in the something else. There are two formal sacraments instituted by Christ in the church, and they are a reminder of the larger

Sacramental nature of reality. Lewis puts it like this in The Great Divorce. Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be, in the end, a very distinct place. I think Earth, if chosen in Instead of heaven, idolatry, will turn out to have been all along only a region in hell, and earth if put second to heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of heaven itself. Remember how the heroes in the silver chair try to convince the th the green lady that the sun is real by

Saying it's kind of like the lamp but bigger. We often do this when we try to imagine heaven sometimes, right? Must be full of the things we like but better. We'll finally have a pony. The beer will be better in heaven. But the reality is the opposite. The things of heaven are the real things, the primary things, and the things we love on earth are a shadow of those things.

And I don't mean a shadow of those things in a derogatory sense. The material things aren't just Stuff like Romandu tells Eustace in the voyage of the Dawn Treader. A star isn't just a flaming ball of gas. That's only what a star is made of. Earth and heaven do in fact have a relationship, one that Lewis called sacramental. It's one of the few times actually where Lewis

uses a uh a a word picture and analogy that just doesn't do it for me at all. Um he tries to do this thing with the relationship between a painting and the visual world that it's a larger part of and I've read it fifteen times and it still doesn't help me. Because sacraments are hard. But bottom line, God didn't

He put us in a material world to keep us from him. He put us here to bring us close to him. This is the final piece of the puzzle. He doesn't just want us to know about him, he wants us to know him here. In our alienated world we have forgotten that in more than their physical senses, breathing can be communion with God. Eating can be to receive life from God. What is singing? Why do we sing in church?

Singing is to receive God's breath. And if you're singing something like the Psalms, God's words, and offer them back to Him. The gifts of God are opportunities to be pulled deeper into his life. If you're like me with Lewis and his painting analogy, you're probably still struggling to wrap your head around this.

Third point right now. Because it's so different than what we're used to. We're not used to looking at our own world like it's magical. But it gets a bit simpler if we use the most obvious example that God himself gave us. God wanted so badly to lavish his grace on us through material reality that he himself became it. He didn't become a ghost. He didn't become a vision. He didn't become an avatar. He became an actual man. Anytime theologians have tried to dodge that part,

ventured into heresy. Anytime they've tried to de-emphasize the physicality of it, same story. Christ was fully God and fully man. The creation was itself the means of recreation. And we remember this every time we take communion. Most Protestants have picked up this mythology that it is a Protestant thing to insist that the bread and the wine are just stuff. But the reformers were actually adamant that Christ literally met and infused his people.

with his presence through communion. Their disagreements both with the Catholic Church and with each other were not about whether Christ was there. And in communion, we don't just look back, remember in the sense of just calling to mind. We look forward to the day when God Presence will fill not just the bread and the wine but the whole earth. In the meantime, wheat, his body, are his instruments doing the work.

of Christ in making the world commune more fully with him. Think about what that means for our vocations, our hobbies, and our communities. It's a very different picture, isn't it, than the one in which you're only concerned with getting in the elevator going up and if the thing that you love most has nothing to do with that, then well it just doesn't really matter. Enjoy your hobby.

It's not it. In ways that we don't fully understand, what we do with the things that appear to decay echoes in eternal. So the world is good in itself, but not just good in itself. It's symbolic, but it's not just symbolic. If it were either, I mean that would be cause enough to rejoice and give thanks to God. But it is good, symbolic, and sacramental.

It's a cosmic tapestry full of the life of heaven and taking part in the story of heaven. Our role is to accept it in its spiritual, not just physical dimensions, and join with Christ in the life of heaven. I haven't taught my children to close their eyes when they pray. Not because it can't be helpful in focusing. I'm already kind of waffling on that one with my daughter. But Because it trains them to think that to seek God they must shut out the world he put them.

To look past it and to look around it rather than to look through it. But the future of stuff isn't for it to fade away. it's for it to become fully imbued with the larger heavenly realities of which it's a small part. That's why our hope that our world ought to be a little more like Narnia is so reasonable.

When we read great stories or hear transcendent music or walk into a cathedral or onto a mountaintop, something that makes us instinctively whisper, you've ever had that that moment, you're feeling a reality. That we were made for the fullness of the real, and it's just there on the other side of the thinnest veil. And if that still feels a tad abstract to you, a tad rhetorical to you

It's partly because we're trying to wrap our minds around something heavenly, okay, fair enough. But it's also partly because in a way you don't understand sacramentality by looking. You understand it by entering into it. So hang on, we'll dig deeper in a moment. But first

First, it's important to notice something at this point. If everything I've been saying is true, the picture of the world as worthless stuff from which we must escape. starts to make a lot more sense. Okay? Imagine I am the enemy and I am trying to do my nefarious work in this particular age. I know the world of time and space is good. I know it's one great big hymn to God.

Singing of who he is, and I know the role of humans within it is to make that hymn louder and stronger and more beautiful. Wouldn't I be heavily invested in messing with that whole arrangement? I would want all of you alienated from the rest of creation, unsure. How to use such tools for the glory of heaven. Perhaps even falling over yourself to teach your children that it's all gonna burn.

I'd want you alienated from your own bodies, hating what you see in the mirror and only too glad to escape it via gender identity or surgery or rapture. I'd want you alienated from each other. Male from female above all, ensuring that you never notice how the image of God is made to work by putting differences together.

And if I couldn't manage all that, at the very least, I would want you to worship some aspect of that physicality, following your ancestors, Adam and Eve, and claiming it for yourselves and telling God you cannot live without it. One way or another, I can't have you seeing things as they truly are. Because I know the less interested you are in looking closely at what God has made, the less clearly you will see the grandeur of God bursting forth from every atom of it.

And the less powerfully you will seek to enter into the Christ imbued life that it promises. So what if we want to mess with the enemy's plans? What if we want to do more than learn to see the world sacramentally? What if we want to live like Narnians? Precisely where and when the enemy doesn't want us to? We're not like Denarnians in The Lion the Witch in the Wardrobe, just waiting for the good green world to reappear and wondering if Aslan will ever return. We're more like Puddleglum.

And the story from the silver chair. We know Aslan is real. We know there's a greater dimension to the world. And we must live. accordingly. Padoglum feels this reality so deeply that he says, I shall live like a narnia, and even if there isn't any Narnia, he's more willing to lose an apologetics argument then give up the way he knows he's supposed to live.

What kind of habits could be that important? I love the way Alexander Schmeman explains it. Constantly into communion with God. In whom is all life. Man was to be the priest of a Eucharist, a thanksgiving, offering the world to God, and in this offering he was to receive the gift of life. We are both bodies and souls. Straddling two worlds, able to see more than the animals of what God sees of both of them.

And partially aware that our eternal destiny lies in the greater things rather than just in the shadows of them. So why I said the sacramental dimension of reality was easy to understand. Easier to understand through participation than through seeing. Sacraments participate in the life of the greater reality, and we're called into that. Every time the terms like body of Christ are used in Scripture, it's always something we're being called to live into, isn't it? It's not just a descriptor.

But we struggle to wrap our minds around how to connect corporate worship on a Sunday morning with the idea that all life is supposed to be worshiped because we're alienated from the theology in which all life matters. With the result that we devalue both normal life. And the thing we call Sunday worship. But if we regain this thing, this understanding of the world as good, as symbolic.

and as sacramental, we can begin to recover the Eucharistic life, the life of thanksgiving that ought to characterize the Redeemed Imago Day. Nowhere is this more clear than in communion itself. If we look at the dynamic at play in communion, we can see how it models for us the dynamic of living like a Narnian in the rest of life. It starts with Thanksgiving. We present bread and wine at a feast.

Recognizing the goodness of God's gifts. This reminds us that out of everyone, Christians ought to take the most delight. In the good and the true and the beautiful things. We avoid both idolatry and indifference by seeing something for what it truly is. We look at both dimensions of the sacrament. We look at the apparently ordinary bread and wine and the extraordinary gift of God's body and blood, Christ's body and blood, and we proclaim. Look what God has done.

To live like a Narnian in this first respect is to celebrate. There are moments for asceticism, there are moments for fasting. But they're always there for the purpose of feasting better. We practice the discipline of thanksgiving because it teaches us to truly pay attention. And to learn to explain.

accept the marvelous goodness of all the not ordinary things. We can't sweep them aside and say, I only need Jesus, because that's not what he himself commanded. And we can't guilt trip ourselves into a closer walk with him. Hating ourselves for not trying harder when all he's longing for us to do is stop. And accept the free gift. So that first step was thanksgiving. Second, we offer the gifts to him.

We ask him to use them for his purposes, and we don't hold back a crumb. In this we acknowledge the symbolic reality that the gifts of our world are ultimately for his world, that they're not merely bread and wine, but symbols of something more. We offer him our bodies and souls as a living sacrifice because we recognize. that only when we love earth as a part of heaven. Do we invite God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven?

And we remember that when we hold nothing back, he will transform our gifts into more than we could possibly have made on our own, and that it has always been so. Finally, we ask him to do the real sacramental work. The tension that is so hard in our age. That we don't get to the body and blood part by looking past the bread and wine. The only way forward is Notice, I love this. Notice what it is that we offer him in communion. He does not say, this wheat is my body, this grape is my blood.

He meets us in bread and wine, beautiful things discovered by human minds and made with human hands. In this most sacred moment he He honors the role he's given us in his creative and redemptive process. And in doing so, he reminds us that not only that our creative work. in this world matters, but that as we go about his business. Of renewing the world, he goes about his business transforming us.

What a picture this this model gives us for the rest of life. Thanksgiving, offering, and transformation. Quite a bit more of us than our defaults of consumption and incoherent busyness do. It asks us to live generatively in order to offer our little patch of the world to God. We have to have an insatiable desire to go further up and further in, plumbing the depths of the mysteries of God, which Solomon tells us are the glory of kings to seek out.

And we accept the mantle of stewardship to master our crafts in cultivating our piece of the earth for heaven. And yet in the end that quest is only an offering, right? It's Christ who does the real work, and it is in his work that we participate, in which we find that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. We are the moon. Shouting to the universe when everything is dark, that there is such a sun. Because it is his light that we reflect.

And yes, it is dark. Literally at the moment. The sins Sickened material world does appear pitted against us, constantly hiding or perverting the symbols of God we want so. badly to see. People, including us, Struggle to relate to God because they had a bad relationship with their father. They struggle to trust in his love because their body has not given them the child they desire.

They struggle to imagine heaven because their lives are conducted in the banal ugliness of asphalt and strip malls and cubicles. They struggle to remember their place in the great city. because their streaming feeds are filled with nihilistic plots and narcissistic characters and no promise of redemption. They struggle to comprehend eternity because so often their backbreaking work yields only dead crops and they must start again. But we are here to stand against all that.

We are the moon. We give thanks for the light. We reflect its glory on the earth. And we participate in its life amid the darkness. Like Puddle Glum in Underworld, we respond to the mirage of the ordinary by living like people from above. This is how to live like an Arney animal.

We live as if the world is from God, good. By giving thanks in the face of everything and still learning to see nothing as ordinary. That means learning how to feast and practice hospitality, how to tell stories. Stories, and above all, to truly stop and pay attention and behold what he has made. We live as if the world is of God, symbolic, training our eyes to see him through his creations, not in spite of them.

Seeing them as prisms for glimpsing the deeper magic. That means learning to see the great feelings. story running through everything and how to reflect it in our own stories, our own families, and our own churches. And we live as if the world is for God. Sacramental. Meeting him in his work. offering all of his creation back to him as his priests. That requires learning mastery of crafts, taking time to understand what he has made and shaping it to his for further glory.

I love Jesus' line about how if we don't praise him the rocks will. As the church became more established and it wasn't hiding in huts and catacombs, what was one of the first things we started doing? Making rocks cly out cry out his glory as cathedrals. Thank you. This means giving up everything, trusting that when we hold nothing back, he will not only transform it, he will transform us. Like Puddleglump said, to the enemy, we might just look like babies playing a game.

But by the grace of God, babies playing a game can make a play world which licks the enchanted world hollow.