A few years ago famed pop-up book artist Robert Sabuda released his version of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Each book in the series was given its own pop-up spread and Sabuda worked hard to distill each book down into one iconic image.
For The Magician’s Nephew, Sabuda recreated the lion Aslan leaping from the pages as he sang the world into existence. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reveals the snowy woods and lamppost that greeted Lucy the first time she walked through the wardrobe. The Horse and His Boy shows Shasta and Bree fleeing across the desert.
Prince Caspian shows Caspian atop Miraz’s castle. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader includes a beautiful rendition of the ship itself as well as a side panel of the bold mouse, Reepicheep. The Silver Chair has Eustace and Jill riding the owls as they begin their quest.
And the very last book included, The Last Battle, shows all our favorites leaving Narnia for Aslan’s Country.
I was thinking the other day about images and what images stand out for me when I think of The Chronicles of Narnia. If I were Robert Sabuda, would I have recreated the same things he did and the answer is in some places yes and in others no.
For example, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the image that stands out the most to me contains neither the ship nor any of the characters that we love, not Reepicheep, not Edmund and Lucy.
No the image that has always meant the most to me is the image of Eustace, the boy turned dragon, facing Aslan at a spring on top of a mountain.
At some point Eustace realizes that Aslan means him to bathe in the spring and he knows that he needs to undress, but he’s a dragon and not a boy and has no clothes to take off, so instead Eustace uses his great dragon claws and starts peeling off his dragon hide. But each time he does, he finds that the dragon skin underneath is just as ugly and horrid as what he just discarded.
The lion then tells Eustace that he must be allowed to undress him, and then he begins to dig his own claws into Eustace's dragon skin. The rest of the passage reads as follows:
“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone into my heart … it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.”
Aslan finishes and tosses Eustace into the water. Eustace turns into a boy again and after splashing around for a while, he emerges to find Aslan still there. This time, Aslan dresses him, finishing Eustace’s transformation.
This scene is included in the most recent movie version of the novel, but in the movie, Aslan merely paws at the sand and the claw marks then magically appear on Eustace’s dragon hide.
I think that here the movie completely misses the point of Eustace’s transformation. First of all, we cannot change without God. Secondly, we must allow God to make the changes He needs to. And third, when God changes us, when we begin to make our transformation, it will be incredibly painful and yet, like Eustace, we will feel an underlying pleasure of having the old, flawed us removed as we are reborn.
Becoming who God intends us to be is never an easy thing. It takes surrender. It takes an admission that we cannot do things alone.
Eustace hated being a dragon. He was desperate to be a boy again, but no matter how hard he tried, he simply could not tear away the dragon to get to the boy inside. He needed Aslan.
But Aslan didn’t snap his claws or twitch his whiskers and turn Eustace into a boy again, Aslan dug his claws into Eustace and ripped off all that was old and ugly and bitter and dragon-y about Eustace.
It was not painless.
It hurt … worse than anything, Eustace says.
In the end, he was a boy again, reborn.
Whenever we embark on a journey in life, whenever we decide to give over to God all that is dragon-y in our own hearts, we must know that change will not be easy. It will be horribly painful.
But if we can hold on and let God do what needs to be done, the rewards are beyond imagining.
And chief among those rewards is … freedom.
After all, carrying around the weight of a dragon can be soul crushing.
