Through the Wardrobe

“Unless you turn and become like little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” — from Matthew 18

Ever since he was about sixteen, Jack had carried a picture in his head: a faun, half man and half goat, carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. When the London children came to the Kilns in 1939, he began a story about four children sent away from London who find their way into another world. Then he put it away.

Nearly ten years later, he took it out again and finished it. When he read it to Tolkien, Tolkien did not like it at all! But another friend, Roger Lancelyn Green, loved it. So Jack kept going.

In 1950 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published. Six more books followed, one each year. Together they are called The Chronicles of Narnia. In them is the great lion Aslan, who is good and strong and wonderful. Jack said he had imagined what the Son of God might be like if there were another world and he came into it. The last book won a famous prize for children’s books.

Children all over the world wrote to Jack, and he wrote back to them, by hand, with a pen dipped in ink, because he never learned to type. Once a child worried that he loved Aslan more than Jesus. Jack wrote back gently: the things you love about Aslan are the very things Jesus said and did. So really, you were loving Jesus all along!

All this time, Jack was still caring for Mrs Moore, who had grown old and ill. When she had to go into a nursing home, he visited her almost every day, until she died in 1951. He had kept his promise to Paddy to the very end.

Jack was one of the cleverest men in the world. But some of the most important things he wanted to say, he said in stories for children. Jesus loves children, and he says that everyone must come to him like a child.

Dear Jesus, thank you that you love children. Help me to come to you with a trusting heart, like a child. Amen.