“‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is over: this is the morning.’”
The Last Battle (The Chronicles of Narnia), C.S. Lewis
Shadowland
Credit: Harry Koopman
We walk through Shadowlands. On darkened streets, though exposed to Light ablaze, we see but a fraction of who we are. Messages ring from phone, whistle out of television and uttered by radio: inadequate, broken, hurting, ugly, ineffective, unloveable …
In front of mirrors, obscured by webs of doubt, we stand reflecting paralysis. Inaction feels safer, apathy more secure with truth suppressed. With vacant stare we avoid the likeness of who we truly are from illuminating the vista of shades in which we walk.
Stability’s Semblance
Credit: Richard Manley-Tannis
To our buildings we cling, as memories hold us fast and create a tense illusion of stability’s semblance. We hear – imagine – the crying voices of those who have gone before. Fearful of change, they describe opaque portraits of what was, though never has been. Rather than peering further upon those shoulders on which we stand, we fixate with downward gaze into closets, filing cabinets, bookshelves and registers now cold. Though the Beacon beckons and longs for us to step outward, we know these dusty parlours, foyers, hallways and narthex with an intimacy of a tooth long once maimed.
In Shadowlands, we repeat words that fall hollow to ground. Though part longs to lift them up, brush them off, feel them enliven and share them, we acquiesce to the mirage of what we think we know, rather than embrace the Dawn of something new, something awful, something wonder-formed.
Yet even here, in byways and highways of rote, where dusk dresses cobalt in clothed dimness, the Lamp greets us from beyond the Bushel. When stories of what might have been remind of what can be, eyes long slumbering awaken to what is. Around us, embracing us, beyond this self-imposed dimness is a Creation that cries with joy, weeps with ecstasy and knows we are star-stuff.
We walk through Shadowlands, yet even in a single moment of awareness, we realise we are meant to shine, to blaze bright, to gleam long, to hold aloft a signal of Hope that no darkness can swallow. Whether this journey is inspired as the Poet writes each of us as a letter forming words and soliloquy or we are emboldened by one Anointed who models fearful compassion and vulnerable courage, we bear the gift to mutual healing. In choices – within darkness’ midst – we each carry a particular blessing to offer. With arms upheld, with humility offered, that which vision cloaks reveals the Divine reflected in my eyes back to yours … and together the world begins to spin upon an axis new …
Your reflections are most welcome!