Back in the days before the instant gratification that cable and DVRs provided, movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz appeared on TV only once a year.
Even when I was little I knew that The Wizard of Oz always came in the spring. It may have been February or March or April, I don’t remember. All I knew was the movie came on TV in the spring and my birthday was also in the spring, thereby making that season my favorite.
While almost everyone has seen The Wizard of Oz, I’m guessing that few are aware of its movie sequel, Return to Oz.
The movie was released in 1985 and if you were a child of the 80s, you probably remember Return to Oz as one of the scariest movies ever made.
While The Wizard of Oz is a movie of wonder and joy with a villain that can do no worse than make our heroes fall asleep in a field of poppies, Return to Oz, billed as a children’s movie, sets a far darker tone.
From the very beginning where Dorothy, still longing for Oz and her friends there, is thought to be crazy and taken to a doctor to receive shock treatments, this movie is instantly more threatening than anything in the original movie.
For me the scariest part of Return to Oz is not the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion and Tin Man who have now lost any resemblance to anything human, but the headless witch, Mombi, who collects heads the way some women collect shoes, trading out her own head for another as the whim suits her.
Dorothy returns to Oz to find the yellow brick road broken and overgrown. The Emerald City is gray and dusty. Her friends have all been turned to stone. Oz is haunted, not by ghosts, but by memories of its better days.
As dark as Return to Oz seems, this theme of ruin is pervasive in children’s literature.
The Penvensie children return to Narnia and the ruins of Cair Paravel in Prince Caspian.
The four Alden children find an abandoned boxcar in the middle of the woods in The Boxcar Children.
And Mary Lennox finds a lost and forgotten garden in The Secret Garden.
But with ruin, always comes restoration.
Cair Paravel is restored. The Alden children make a home out of that boxcar and Mary finds that the plants and flowers in the garden are still wick, still alive and ready to flourish under proper care.
And at the end of Return to Oz, Dorothy uses the ruby slippers to restore Oz and its queen, Ozma.
Perhaps the greatest example of ruin and restoration, though, isn’t found in any children’s book.
It is instead found in the Bible.
Jesus is broken, beaten and dead, carried off to a tomb and left alone with the exception of Mary Magdalene who holds vigil over her lost Lord.
Like Mary Lennox, like Dorothy, Mary Magdalene cannot give up hope, cannot let go of the only goodness and light she has ever known.
And so she waits.
And her waiting is rewarded. When Jesus rises from the dead, he first visits Mary.
There will be times of ruin in our own lives, times when we feel alone, times when we feel broken.
But we have hope in Jesus Christ. For with him, all is restored.
“For all things are yours,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3:21-23. “… all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”
