Faith

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The taunting White Queen sneered at the tormented, captured Mr. Tumnus moments before she turned him into an anguished, lifeless statue. Motioning the faun to look at Edmund she drove home the searing point, “You're here because he turned you in for sweeties.”

In an earlier scene in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe Edmund, disdainful of family, truth and life, cozied up to the evil witch as he stuffed his face with the Turkish delight that captivated his senses but never fully satisfied.

Was it worth the damage he caused – the loss of life, the further fragmentation of the family, the playing-out of the curse that made it always winter but never Christmas? Of course not. Temptation always promises, but never delivers. It attracts and binds but never provides.

Edmund is not a mere Judas, a personification of evil whom we can hold off as if in an other-worldly existence. Rather, he is the troubled boy who lives in our neighborhood, perhaps in our own skin. He is the one who eats gluttonously denying that his clogged heart will ever fail him. He enters the drug scene vainly trusting he will be the first to find a way out. He cheats on his wife believing he will never get caught. He sleeps around knowing that he will defy the consequences. He gossips and lies believing that his words will never come back to haunt him.

Thus, the insidious workings of temptation: the incomprehensible notion that in spite of the facts all will work out and all that really matters is a scrumptious mouthful of Turkish delight.

The fact is, human nature is often faulted with knowing the truth but not doing it. This embarrassing flaw, where the public side is governed by moral truisms but the private side abandons these truisms when the senses call loudly enough, is generally kept hidden from our neighbor if we find it in ourselves. After all, who would want to be known as one who abandoned his moral compass for a tray of sweeties?

It is here that the hard sciences cease to be helpful and those seeking resolve for the New Year must turn to spiritual truths. What is it about ourselves that is so broken that we are willing to throw away sensibilities for our senses? Why is it, after we have filled our heads with volumes of knowledge, experience, and self-improvements, that we still find ourselves full circle facing the dilemma of sin?

Perhaps this honest appraisal leads us to discover that the solution is not within ourselves. Whispered among the broken is the anticipation of the true King: the expectation of one who is not safe or tame, who cannot be handily put into our religious boxes – but he is good. The perfect meeting of justice and mercy, wrath and forgiveness is found in the one who can set things right in our winter-cursed world as well as in our own contradictory hearts.

Christianity has never been a faith for the self-righteous. Nor has it ever been spiritual for those who want to entertain themselves with spirituality for spirituality’s sake. Rather, it is for who, in time of reckoning and repentance, reflect upon their broken and inconsistent lives and in that moment hears this whisper of hope that turns them from flawed vessels to noble subjects: Aslan is on the move.

Dave Sable may be reached at [email protected].

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