A Year with Aslan: Daily Reflections from The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis Read Free Book Online

him,” said Mr. Beaver.
    “Is—is he a man?” asked Lucy.
    “Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion— the Lion, the great Lion.”
    “Ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
    “That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
    “Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
    “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
    —The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
    What does it mean for someone to be good but not safe? Why do we value safety so much in our society? How can an overemphasis on safety cause us to miss what is good?

 
    F EBRUARY 3
    A Star at Rest
    A ND ARE WE NEAR the World’s End now, Sir?” asked Caspian. “Have you any knowledge of the seas and lands further east than this?”
    “I saw them long ago,” said the Old Man, “but it was from a great height. I cannot tell you such things as sailors need to know.”
    “Do you mean you were flying in the air?” Eustace blurted out.
    “I was a long way above the air, my son,” replied the Old Man. “I am Ramandu. But I see that you stare at one another and have not heard this name. And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed.”
    “Golly,” said Edmund under his breath. “He’s a retired star.”
    “Aren’t you a star any longer?” asked Lucy.
    “I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu. “When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island. I am not so old now as I was then. Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth’s eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance.”
    “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
    “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”
    —The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    What is the distinction between what something is and what it is made of? In what ways do we often mix these two?

 
    F EBRUARY 4
    Puzzle and Shift
    I N THE LAST DAYS OF NARNIA , far up to the west beyond Lantern Waste and close beside the great waterfall, there lived an Ape. He was so old that no one could remember when he had first come to live in those parts, and he was the cleverest, ugliest, most wrinkled Ape you can imagine. He had a little house, built of wood and thatched with leaves, up in the fork of a great tree, and his name was Shift. There were very few Talking Beasts or Men or Dwarfs, or people of any sort, in that part of the wood, but Shift had one friend and neighbor who was a donkey called Puzzle. At least they both said they were friends, but from the way things went on you might have thought Puzzle was more like Shift’s servant than his friend. He did all the work. When they went together to the river, Shift filled the big skin bottles with water but it was Puzzle who carried them back. When they wanted anything from the towns further down the river it was Puzzle who went down with empty panniers on his back and came back with the panniers full and heavy. And all the nicest things that Puzzle brought back were eaten by Shift; for as Shift said, “You see, Puzzle, I can’t eat grass and thistles like you, so it’s only fair I should make it up in other ways.” And