A door into Aslan’s Country: In the beginning of C. S. Lewis’ book The Silver Chair Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole go through a door in a wall in order to escape bully-students who are out to get them. The door in the wall ends up being a door into Alan’s Country.
I’m particularly fond of that part of the book. We find Jill crying because of the oppression she’s feeling at this dismal school. I found an immediate affinity with Jill. The school I attended in my early teens had more than it’s share of bullies – in fact it was notorious for it. I had to learn to fight. Even so, these were the years when I suffered from insomnia at the dread of facing another school day.
A newly transformed Eustace begins to comfort her. Jill notes his changed behavior – for the better it seems – since the last term. So he almost reluctantly and awkwardly mentions why he’s changed. Eustace’s Narnian adventures with his cousins are covered in Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Jill and Eustace decide to try to get to Narnia by performing a ritual to summon Aslan. They’re interrupted when they hear the school bullies almost upon then. They head for a door in the wall which leads to the moor on the other side. When the door is opened, instead of finding a grey, autumn moor, a blaze of sunshine meets them. Lewis writes:
…the sunlight was coming from what certainly did look like a different world – what they could see of it. They saw smooth turf, smoother and brighter than Jill had ever seen before, and blue sky and, darting to and fro, things so bright that they might have been jewels or butterflies…Although she had been longing for something like this, Jill felt frightened. She looked at Scrubb’s face and saw that he was frightened too.
Saints of the past have often been granted glimpses heavenly reality which at first frightens them. During an argument with Jill, Eustace falls off a cliff and is blown into Narnia by the lion Aslan. After despairing of Eustace’s apparent demise, Jill finds herself incredibly thirsty. The only stream available is guarded by the lion. Aslan makes no promises regarding her immediate safety but advises her that if she doesn’t drink, she will die.
Aslan also corrects Jill’s assumption that the appearance of the Open Door was because they had called him. He tells her: “You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you.”
Likewise, Christ called us long before we responded. And He is the Only Stream which provides Eternal Life. Later in the book, an aged King Caspian lies dead in the same stream which Jill needed to drink in. Aslan tells Eustace to find a thorn and prick the pad of his paw. The blood splashes into the stream over Caspian’s body, restoring him to life and youthfulness.
I love Lewis’ concept of the Open Door into Aslan’s Country. Commenting on Rev 4:1, one writer says:
The image of a door between this world and the world to come is simple yet arresting. In this life, heaven seems far away. We can’t see it or touch it. We can’t hear the saints and angels on the other side. Yet in reality, it’s as if there’s an invisible door connecting our world to the world to come. A door that becomes visible at the moment of death.
Of course, some see Rev 4:1 as a type of the Rapture. Tony Garland makes some worthy observations regarding this in his commentary on Revelation, A Testimony of Jesus Christ.
We tend to consider the incomprehensible size of this universe and how far away heaven and God must be. However I think Christians have an Open Door to heaven through prayer and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to wait for death or the rapture.
Like Eustace and Jill, we live in a dismal, rebellious world which often bullies and persecutes Christians. We long for heaven, and the Lord to come for us. Yet we all need to remind ourselves that God and heaven are closer to us than even our own heartbeats.
I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. John 14:16-18
Maranatha!
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