The Beast and Aslan

‘Aslan is on the move,’ said Hector Morrison, Principal of the Highland Theological College. He was stirred by the sight of students from across Scotland packed into the conference room at the college last week, come to study and grow in faith.

The quotation is from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first-published of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles. The land of Narnia is in the frozen grip of the White Witch’s winter, but when Beaver tells the children that ‘Aslan is on the move’ – the first mention of the great Lion – there seems to be in that name a sweet magic. ‘The moment the Beaver had said these words, everyone felt quite different.’

Another place. The ravaged land of Syria.  Last year, The Times’ perceptive war correspondent Anthony Loyd was kidnapped and wounded by Syrian rebels before ultimately being released. Recently, he was back in Syria, reporting from the front line.

We see the conflict through his sensitive eyes. ‘Sometimes it is a struggle even to describe the killing there as part of “war”. Certainly true is that a dark, consuming force has been unleashed, invading not just places but men themselves; extinguishing goodness, exalting in cruelty. Evil is a word best held back. But it sits well in Syria, with godliness in such abatement and the souls of men so lost to the night.’

It seems that in Syria, Aslan is not on the move. ‘Does the devil ride out on Syrian sands?’ Loyd muses.

He visits a church to interview refugees, a safe, unthreatening place, he reckons. Then he is shocked when a pro-regime Christian combatant produces a photograph of comrades with the severed heads of ISIS fighters. This beheading was ‘not a good thing’ the combatant said. But ‘we are taking our revenge.’

Loyd remembers standing in a village church in England, exactly eight years previously exchanging wedding vows with his wife, a place symbolising goodness and truth, love and hope. And then he looks again the photo of severed heads and lifeless eyes and ‘the triumph in the face of the head-holder.’

‘A nauseous sense of intrusion assailed me,’ he confesses. ‘Sanctuary was compromised: the beast was over the wire.’

It does indeed seem from the extreme and horrific cruelty in Syria and elsewhere that a beast is on the loose. We manage, most of times to keep our minds off this anguish in safe, secure Scotland, until we’re arrested by a poignant image or an intense eyewitness account.

Yet we are no strangers to the destructive darkness of cruelty, despair, addiction, broken relationships, callousness, tears – even sometimes in our churches. We cannot say that the beast which is ravaging Syria is powerless in our midst.

But, said Hector, ‘Aslan is on the move.’ Aslan whose breath melted the Narnian ice, restoring light and joy and hope. Aslan, who symbolises Jesus Christ.

Aslan on the move? Some of us don’t believe it. ‘Aslan only lives as long as he is believed in, and belief is dying,’ we protest, mistaken on both counts.

Aslan is on the move. It’s estimated that 80,000 people become his followers every day, 34,000 of them in Africa. More than half the Christians who have ever lived are alive today. There are more Christians in China than there are members of the Communist Party. There are many similar statistics.

How can we, in sophisticated, intellectual Europe, be so sure we are right, so blind to our need of God? The beast is rampant, but Aslan is in the move. I often hear of Scottish people, liberated and uplifted as they choose Aslan’s way of light and life: blessed, inspired, transformed, challenged, empowered.

I hear of Christ working sometimes dramatically, often more gently. My friend Iain Macritchie shared this last Sunday:

‘The places where I am bowled over by God's activity are in the unspeakable ordinariness of a cirrus cloud on the evening sky, or the dark, ripe brambles in the hedgerows, or the sound of my son speaking in character voices.  And it's in all the things I can't actually say - in the wordless wonder which, if I tried to articulate, would renders it out of my hands by the very act of trying to hold it.  Tender, broken, beckoning, compassionate vignettes whisper of God's activity.’

Aslan is on the move. The beast will not, in the end, triumph. The power of light and love – and all light and love is God’s light and live, embodied in Jesus Christ – will, we are convinced, set our Narnian world free from the icy grip of death.

Our great Aslan invites us to find sanctuary in his love. ‘Oh Aslan, be on the move in and through my life, and Scotland’s life today and forever.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 17th September 2015)