Only With Claws
In his Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis tells the story of a young boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb who, through habitual self interest and a careless fixation with a dead dragon’s hoard of gold, becomes a dragon himself. When the dragon-boy encounters the Christ-figure of the novel, the great lion Aslan, Eustace is informed that in order to become ‘un-dragoned,’ he will have to wash off the dragon skin in a nearby well. Eustace sets to work, and begins to scrub layer after layer off of himself, diminishing his dragonish stature until he reaches one final, intractable layer of dragon-skin that scrubbing cannot remove. Aslan says to Eustace,
“Then the lion said — but I don’t know if it spoke — You will have to let me undress you. I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.
“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, 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. You know — if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.
“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on — and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again. . . .”
Anyone who seeks spiritual maturity can either recount or anticipate a moment like this. It is, however, nearly impossible for those of us living in a postmodern, neo-pagan, western culture to conceive of a spirituality free of the aspiration to self-sufficiency. Even for those who have deliberately turned away from such pretensions, tacit belief can endure which whispers that given enough time, and by being adequately informed, the problems of sin, corruption, and death are really problems that we can manage–that we do not really need too much help, and especially a help that might be profoundly unpleasant.
Insidiously, this tacit belief can persist alongside one’s profession of the Gospel. We might think, ‘of course, it is grace after all that provides us with the time and information we need to fix ourselves, and then the application of those graces is up to us. Grace, in this sense, is a source of power that can be accessed at will to do something we cannot accomplish on our own. It is the ultimate form of helpfulness. Lewis’ imagination, by contrast, provides us with a balanced perspective on how we are called to participate with grace. The well of water in the story stands as a baptismal image to represent the grace received in the sacrament to drive original sin into remission and to break our captivity to the kingdom of death. Those waters also reflect the continual return we must make to that well, being restored to baptismal washing as an image of the sacrament of confession, which restores us to the grace of our baptism. As Eustace sets to work under the watchful eyes of the Lion, here is a synergy and co-laboring observable in the image of divine grace that then calls us into the obedient and diligent at use of that grace.
Lewis also adeptly set an impasse in the progress of Eustace, one designed to pause that progress in order that a new experience of grace may emerge. There is something about Eustace that requires the direct hand of Aslan and the use of his fearsome claws. Admittedly, there will be pain involved in this ministry to the boy–not a pain of destruction, but rather of redemption. The fear of that pain calls upon Eustace’s courage and willingness to trust the Lion that has sustained his healing thus far. It is that experience that becomes the basis for Eustace to assent that Aslan knows what He is doing. For us, a similar moment is bound to emerge as we grow in the spiritual life, one that requires us to submit to a kind of incisive healing that exceeds the point that we would administer to ourselves. As T.S. Eliot wrote: “the wounded surgeon plies the steel that questions the distempered part; beneath the bleeding hands we feel the sharp compassion of the healer’s art.”
It is not at all uncommon in the spiritual life that a Christian who has been experiencing growth and progress will suddenly experience a plateau, or even a terrible sense of the absence of God, or a regression from their moral progress, even though they have not changed their fundamental rule of prayer or pattern of life. One temptation that can attend this moment is to listen to the inward voice of temporary frustration or the outward voices that constantly urge us to novelty, and with them to conclude that we are doing the wrong thing and that we need to try a new thing or many new things in order to get back on the track to which we had become accustomed. This is a temptation that can hobble discipleship because it turns us away from the point at which we are called further up and further into life in Christ by diverting us back to the impossible-to-retrieve beginning again, which ends up being a nostalgic imitation of our initial conversion that lacks the real power of that moment in our past.
As we face this temptation, Lewis helps us ask whether we might have reached a layer of ourselves that must only be removed with claws. If in the ways we are able to discern, we find that we have continued in our baptismal life, and have not deluded ourselves into overlooking some significant departure from it, then likely we have reached a place at which the Lord is wanting to lead us further and to perfect us more completely. Perfection, after all, is nothing short of the end He has in mind for us — to make us fit for the purpose for which we were made—and that perfect self is yet miles beneath even the most pristine and optimized selves we can imagine or toward which we are willing to strive. As a master sculptor can perceive the likeness, toward which they are shaping the clay or carving the marble, and so can carve without marring that image, so only Christ the Lion has claws that can cut in such a way that makes us more who we are.
Epiphany leads us inevitably to Lent. The revelation of the Son of God immediately reveals how all things must be redeemed and remade. For God to be with us means that we need to be made able to bear the sheer reality of His presence. Epiphany-tide illuminates the darkness of our hearts and the ways we cling to that darkness. Lent will come with its severe mercy to heal us and ready us to celebrate the resurrection-life of Easter. As we journey-on toward Aslan’s country, may each of us find ourselves in this time, face-to-face with the Lion who washes us in the well, and then in due season, springs us out of the last of our dragonish ways and into the fullness of the humanity that He has made new.