Faith, Grace, and Hope

In the C.S. Lewis classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children are sent away from London to a house in the country. More specifically, they are sent away to keep them safe(r) from the horrors and dangers of World War II. While in the country house, they discover a magical wardrobe that transports them to a different world: Narnia.    Lucy, the youngest Pevensie, is the first to enter Narnia. There she meets Mr. Tumnus, a gentle faun, who tells her some about this magical world. While Lucy marvels at the animals who speak and the reality of magical creatures, Mr. Tumnus explains to her that all is not well in Narnia. “It is winter in Narnia,” said Mr. Tumnus, “and has been for ever so long…always winter, but never Christmas.” This long-lasting winter goes on and on. For the creatures of Narnia, always winter  means a perpetual state of longing for spring and no end to the season of not-enough. Never Christmas means there is never a celebration of light and

Within the Christian faith, we have many tensions. A tension, in this use of the word, is when we hold more than one thing to be true at the same time. It is not a coincidence that Christianity has the Trinity- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- as a central tenet because we must learn early that binaries will never encompass the fullness of God and how Divine Love works in the world.     We have the tension of both discipline (law) and grace (gospel) to hold together, guiding us toward the range of God’s expectations and mercy. We have the pull between mystery and revelation- the ways that the Eternal Light has been made manifest and tangible on earth and the things that we still hold in faith to be true, without having seen any kind of proof.     We also have a time tension- a strain between understanding that God’s ways are not our ways. Neither God’s time nor God’s timing is like ours either. The pressure of this difference highlights one of the more difficult of the Christian tensions-