The Day Aslan Died

I cried the day that Aslan died.
 
It was in Mrs. Tellex’s first grade class. I had slowly become engrossed in C.S. Lewis’ novel, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as she read us a chapter each day. I couldn’t wait to see what adventure each day’s chapter would take me on: discovering the snow-coated evergreens alongside a breathless Lucy; sampling Turkish Delight in the White Witch’s sumptuous sleigh with Edmund; or fighting alongside Peter as he slays the White Witch’s head wolf scout and is knighted by Aslan, the great lion.
 
Each adventure had been a sheer delight until the chapter when Aslan was bound and shaved and hoisted upon the sacrificial stone table. I listened in horror and disbelief as Mrs. Tellex read this chapter, waiting for the moment when the horror would end, when Aslan would defend himself and jump down from the stone table. I waited to wake from the nightmare. But I could not. The White Witch’s knife was brought high and Aslan was brought low.
 
Then, the unthinkable happened. Thick, hot tears began to dribble down my six-year-old cheeks. I remember burying my face in my crossed arms on my desk, unable to stop the small streams from streaking down my face, all the while praying that none of my classmates noticed.
 
But I was shocked, dumbfounded. It’s not true. Aslan can’t die . He was so kind and good and noble and heroic. He wouldn’t die. He was Narnia’s only hope; he was supposed to save them all. He couldn’t die.
 

He did die.

 
This nearly twenty-year-old memory struck me one day during Lent as I was preparing to leave work, hitting me like a dusty book diving from a high shelf to pummel me in the head. As a six-year old, I did not understand that Aslan served as a Christ figure in Lewis’ novel. But for a moment, that fictional tale had become my reality and I wept when its greatest hero fell. Now as an adult, I know the true reality: Christ takes my place at the stone table of the cross, sacrificing Himself to atone for every sin I’ve ever committed.
 

Do I weep?

 
Do I let in the reality of what my God has done for me? Do those same thick tears drip down my face when I hear the Passion recounted? Or do I reduce the Passion to a dusty crucifix; a series of fourteen oil paintings hanging in a church; a somber Good Friday of little food and a three o’clock church service? Far too often, it’s the latter.
 
This troubled me one night at Mass. That evening, the priest led the congregation in the Stabat Mater, the hymn recounting the Passion through the Blessed Mother’s eyes. I have always found this hymn hauntingly beautiful, and one particular verse struck me:
 
“Can the human heart refrain
from partaking in her pain
in that mother’s pain untold?”
 
In that moment, that question was posed to me: How can I possibly refuse to enter into that piercing agony that Christ and the Blessed Mother endured? The reality of the crucifixion eludes my mind and my heart when I shun both my horror at the nails pinning His hands and feet, and my guilt that my sins drove those nails though the wood of the cross. I once again become that six-year-old burying her head in her hands and murmuring, it’s not true.
 
But the pain of the crucifixion does not become real the moment I let guilt for my sins consume me. It becomes real when I allow my God to love me from the cross. Those nails spread His arms wide to embrace me with the greatest love I will ever know. It’s a love that whispers to me, even in my darkest sufferings, “I am with you. I have endured every suffering before you. I will never leave you.”
 
When the cross becomes the place where I am loved beyond my wildest imaginings, the place where I am never forgotten, the place where Someone understands my life’s every trial, I weep.
 
Mrs. Tellex read the next chapter the following day and relief flooded over me. The stone table cracked, death unwound itself, and Aslan lived. But this relief pales to the unadulterated joy I’ll feel outside an empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning when a man disguised as a lowly gardener speaks my name.