Not Like Going, but Like Going Back
Not Like Going, but Like Going Back
Erika Veurink
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
— C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
I met C.S. Lewis on the afternoon of my Kindergarten graduation. His full color illustrated box set of the Chronicles of Narnia was a gift from my parents. It was a gift I anticipated receiving. I’d asked for it after spotting it at Barnes and Noble months earlier. It’s hard to know what drew me to it, resting atop a tall shelf. Maybe it was the way my mom’s eyes lifted in recognition, the utterly grown-up mossy green set behind a gold script? The glossy collectors’ box held seven books tight in a row, impossible to fit back in once they were out. I carried my unwrapped, sharp cornered mass of stories upstairs to my bedroom and shook the box until they spilled out. In the afternoon sun, buzzing from sheet cake, my blue paper cap still on my head, I wasted no time. I was careful to open the books from the edges to create no evidence of my visitation. I couldn’t read the words or make sense of the otherworldly animals in the tiny paintings, but the strangeness startled my young mind. That night, my mom started The Magician’s Nephew at the foot of my bunk bed. I watched the book’s spine crack, the pages bend, and felt the lightheadedness I now associate with infatuation. The damage had been done—the apple bitten into, the rock struck. I had become a citizen of C.S. Lewis’ imagination, indelibly.
There was the Bible and then there was Narnia. I couldn’t imagine needing anything else. By then, Bible stories had lost their luster. The giants felt small. The plagues had been tamed into a Sunday School choruses. I could turn to John 3:16 in my worn out NIV with my eyes closed. But Narnia invited me into a wilder world. And it’s true that the first stories are always the best stories. But Lewis’ really were—moth balls, crunchy snow, always winter, never Christmas, dragons out of the velvet sea, water to gold, weeklong feasts, birds that were really lions or birds that were really witches. There was more saturation than I could hardly stomach. My suburban ecosystem, of driveways and soybean fields and pledges to the Christian flag, was television fuzz in the light of its lucid color. To feel lost, swept up and swept in, was bliss.
A few years later, after many rounds of reading through the series, some on CDs blaring in the bumpy backseat of road trips, others under the quilted roof of a fort on a snow day, I protracted my inspiration outward. I adapted The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe into an hour-long play. I spoke the lines as I scribbled desperately into a leftover composition notebook from fourth grade. I cast neighbors, siblings, cousins, even a stranger I met at the park—Mr. Tumnus was a minor role, anyway. I crafted costumes from the dress up bin. I hung paint splattered sheets from the rafters of the freezing basement storage room. An orphaned door, leftover from a renovation, felt predestined for the production.
But then I let it go, slid the script under my bed, and called the whole thing off. There was no performance or applauding audience. It was the creation I was concerned with. The cement floor of the storage room stage was my own expanding universe. I felt there would be hundreds more plays to write, a thousand more shocks of inspiration. When I called it good, I felt like Lewis, or God looking at the created expanse of his imagination. I was the first artist to raise a brush to a canvas. I was the hovering waters and the crackling earth and there was only forward. And forward was homeward.
I copied, "I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else," from Mere Christianity into a leather-bound notebook all the way in California the summer before college. I attended a two week worldview summit, a sort of symposium on Christian belief. The sun that covered every inch of the college campus felt spiritual. We spent hours being lectured on old earth theories, the ramifications of free will, on slow truth and slippery slopes. At night, we gathered in small groups to rehash the day’s topics. Knowledge felt addictive. Knowledge felt like something I could own and amass. It took the place of my chief joy from creation quietly, through easy to remember mnemonics and arguments won.
I read Surprised by Joy during breaks on the manicured lawn in front of the lecture hall. Like Lewis, I lost a parent at a young age. My steadfast, shimmering comfort shrunk to the size of a sympathy card. The soft corners of belief felt indulgent in contrast to the sharpness of grief. I turned to dusty theologians, their symmetrical and hard-won understandings of God. Imagination was childish. Why entertain anything when I could own certainty? Nuance felt pointlessly indulgent, not stark enough to fix anything. Narnia felt shelved back into the decorative box it arrived in.
The mastering of grief became my obsession. I looked first to the man who taught me worldbuilding in an attempt to reassemble my own. I started with one of the three copies of A Grief Observed I’d been given after my dad’s funeral. I let the volume of passages like, “Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.’s death introduced into the problem of the universe,” drown out the beauty of quieter, less assertive moments in the book, like, “We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.”
Photo by Sarah Sinanis
When I moved to New York for college, my binder of lecture notes from just a few months prior, slid under my twin size dorm bed. I walked the steamy late-August streets in distrust at the sheer mass of the belief I felt. The willingness to try everything and the eagerness to love everyone felt at once unexpected and ancient. The world was mine to revel in. I got to decide what came with me from that binder, what truths and frameworks could begin to support the lush improbability of life after doctrine. Lewis wrote that an image of a faun carrying parcels in a snowy wood he had at sixteen was the inspiration for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which he began at forty. That’s what it felt like in New York, familiar, divinely inspired, and at long last.
This new feeling needed a new language. I wanted new teachers, ones who looked like me and ones who didn’t. I wanted a new vernacular, one that echoed the first expression which was never words but choruses of fantastic brightness. Lewis’s limited perspective felt in opposition to the bendy and encompassing expansion the city shuffled me into. I didn’t recognize him there. I wanted poets and neuroscientists and crossing guards to show me God. New York had no shortage of teachers. The bus system and its haphazard gusts of smoke, the flight patterns of pigeons, watching the sunrise when I hadn’t realized it had set. It all joined in a chorus louder, more moving than any lecture.
I didn’t even think to mourn the belief system of my childhood. It never crossed my mind to decide what of those weekend retreats and summer camp rituals I would bring with me. In letters of Lewis’, reading beyond his canon and into his more intimate exchanges, I hoped to find a side of a man I long revered. What I found was quieter, less brandish in its certainty than some of his most acclaimed commentaries. Life was expanding rapidly and constantly and worth being awoken to every day ten times over. This new understanding had to come at the cost of the old. The death of gods was simply an adverse effect. For life was nothing without death.
“For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.” (C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love)
Years later, it was in rereading Narnia to two boys I adore that I began to see Lewis like the first time. Not as a teacher or theologian, but as once a child himself. In youth, there was nothing to deem holy or otherwise. It all just was. There is a whimsy in “Jack’s” work, just under the surface, dancing about, quietly carrying. It’s easily missed in his later writing, stuffed under his English sensibility and pragmatic declarations. But in returning and imagining, as he deems all religion really is, he was there, playing. His reverence for myths, for the patterns they honored in the ever expanding imagination of God, never wavered. He even wrote, “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
I thought I wanted C.S. Lewis to be an oracle. I wanted his words to be infallible Gospel. What I realized was that I didn’t want that level of absolute from anyone, not really. The first sounds that set the world into motion had to have been questions. There was light and it danced. There was water and it expanded. There was dust and it calcified into a person, into nations, into thousands of traceable threads. At the very center of truth, there are no gatekeepers. There are wanderers and pilgrims and seekers. And they have their stories. There is life and death. There are dragons and false gods and cloudy stretches. But the dragons are really misunderstood boys, tempted by shimmering things. The false gods look sturdier the further away they stand; the weaker the closer you are. And the cloudy stretches, the charcoal smudge seasons of half dreams, are just the "unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination."
Erika Veurink
Writer & MFA Student
Photograph by Clay Banks
