C.S. Lewis was one of the great evangelists. He used story to draw people to the faith, stories that showed the spine-tingling presence of God in a way that pulls us in like moths to the flame.
As I said in a previous blog post, his prayer for his readers was that “they will fall in love with Aslan, and when they later hear of Jesus, they will recognize him.”
My question today is, how exactly can we 21st century writers do this to create spine-tingling spiritual moments in our stories?
Let’s take some clues from Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkien.
Lewis. Here’s the first glimpse of Lewis’s Aslan in the first Narnia book: “But as for Aslan himself, the Beavers and the children didn’t know what to do when they saw him. People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan’s face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they couldn’t look at him and went all trembly.”
We see:
- a sliver of description
- a whole lot of inner thoughts and emotions
- some physical reaction (couldn’t look, going all trembly).
Tolkien. For Tolkien the key spiritual experience for his readers was the heart of Lothlorien. Here’s his description of Frodo’s first experience of it: “The others cast themselves down on the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was on it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had first been conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured forever.
“He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lorien there was no stain.”
Tolkien, writing in a wordier, more Victorian style, is using a similar formula:
- heavier on the description,
- a whole lot of inner thoughts and emotions
- a bit of physical reaction (standing awhile lost in wonder).
What do we want to take from these?
It seems to me that current-day writers who want to write a scene shining with spiritual presence would want to combine
- some description that touches on other-worldliness
- inner thoughts and emotions for the point-of-view character
- physical reaction.
Try experimenting with how much of these three elements to include, to get the right mix for this key scene so that it does convey the beautiful strangeness of it all.
Vocabulary hint: this beautiful other-worldly strangeness has a name, “numinous.”