The Deeper Magic

Years ago, the four of us girls (Ruth, Hannah, Cara-Anne, and I) would pretend that the closet was actually the wardrobe from C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. We had an old print of a map of Narnia, and we would all squeeze into the closet, map in hand, and climb onto the suitcases in the back. I always had some vague fantasy that someday we’d actually find something amazing back there. What I actually found was a rather bizarre backscratcher made of large wooden beads (don’t ask. My parents were hippies).

My days of closet climbing have long since passed, and with the loss of those days, we seem to lose our child-like fervor for the unexpected. I’m really not particularly certain what I’d do if the back of my closet suddenly revealed another world. I might take a peek at it, but I probably wouldn’t stay long. There are papers to grade, lessons to plan, emails to write. Who has time to become a queen in Narnia?

The amusing thing about God is that while we seem to grow content with a life of safe, expected routines, he doesn’t lose his penchant for the unexpected, the dangerous, and the transformational.

Take the Christmas story, for instance. It really should be called “The Interruption Story.” Think about it. Nearly every person in the narrative goes through some kind of “Really? You’re joking?” phase. Half of them also have to work through a bit of a “Well, this is inconvenient” phase. And, in fact, most of the Gospel story itself is full of people exclaiming, “Hey, this isn’t what we planned the whole Messiah deal to look like.”

 

The Christmas story reminds me a bit of what my students go through in my classes:

I assign a difficult project.

“Really? You’re joking?” they respond with.

The project is harder than they like. It pushes them. It isn’t easy.

“Well, this is inconvenient,” they groan.

Sometimes, learning is just plain painful.

“Hey, this isn’t what we planned on English class looking like!” they complain.

But then, sometimes, years later, they come back and say, “I really can write now”—or—“That class taught me a lot”—or—“Thank you.” And after all the unexpectedness of the class, after the lack of safety or the ability to earn the easy “A,” they are transformed.

But while transformation is the point of teaching, rarely does the student really grasp at the time what they are being transformed into.

That is also the essence of our perpetual struggle with the gospel—we don’t understand how it will change us. We don’t get why it has to be this way. We really would rather not change. Or at least, not very much. A little change would be nice, but a lot would be inconvenient.

At times, I find myself annoyed with the annual battle to protect Christmas—to call decorated trees Christmas trees instead of holiday trees (as though holiday isn’t derived from holy day), to keep nativities up in town squares. Look, I’ll be the first person to say I love Christmas trees and nativities and all the trappings of the season. But if Jesus came just so that we could decorate some trees and put up some statues, then Christmas isn’t really worth that much of my time.

Perhaps we want so badly to preserve our Christmas trees and our nativities because we want Christmas to stay safe. We want the same old holiday routine. Like my students in my English classes, we really don’t want to be transformed. We’d like just the traditions, please. We’d like Christmas to be easy.

But the point is not the traditions. The point is that Christ came in a way we didn’t expect, to do something we didn’t understand, to change us into something we could not imagine. The Messiah of Christmas didn’t arrive just to keep our traditions safe or to give us the political upper hand. Quite the contrary. The Kingdom of God did not come to be displayed in the halls of power, but to transform the hearts of the poor in spirit.

So this Christmas I think I’m going to try to be Lucy in the Wardrobe again—to push aside the fur coats in the closet and find a Lion who is not safe, but is good—to find the unexpected royalty that is offered not through “the magic of the Christmas season,” but through some other magic: the deeper magic from before the dawn of time.