By LaDonna Friesen
My husband and I spent one day this May in Belfast, Ireland. We could have visited the Titanic Museum, but we were in the city where C.S. Lewis lived as a child! Having read and taught his books, I wanted a Belfast-Lewis experience. We could not tour Little Lea, Lewis’s childhood home, because it is privately owned, so my husband sorted through the bus routes to C.S. Lewis Square, not far from St. Marks church where Lewis was christened.
Knowing how doors are a motif in Lewis’s work, going through a narrow space into a much larger experience, the glass door to the visitor’s center referenced “Come further up and further in!” from The Last Battle. Beyond the center is like walking through the wardrobe into a pathway between trees where bronze sculptures of Narnian creatures (even the wolf Maugrim!) are partially hidden in the leaves. Mr. and Mrs. Beaver open their arms like they are inviting us to tea. Mr. Tumnus looks like he is dancing (so like a faun). On a cliff-like rock is Aslan, towering above all the creatures, including the White Witch. Even an adult feels small (about the height of his leg), and children could run underneath and between his paws, romping like Lucy and Susan.
Further up and further in is a sculpture called “The Searcher,” depicting Digory Kirke who made the wardrobe from a Narnian apple tree in The Magician’s Nephew. He is standing with his hand on the wardrobe door, just slightly open.
On the back of the wardrobe is a lion’s head and several quotes. Under “Wardrobes,” the engraved text reads, “C.S. Lewis did not just hang clothes in a wardrobe, he hung ideas—great ideas of redemption, victory, and freedom for the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve—Set within the commonplace, revelation within something that looks ordinary on the outside—revelation through investigation. We should not stop looking, some of the greatest things can be found in the most ordinary places, like a wardrobe” (Ross Williams, creator of the sculpture).
The wardrobe invites us to be searchers ourselves, as Lewis was in his journey to Christ. A quote by him on the wardrobe connects Christianity with the artist who made the sculpture. Lewis says “This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”
Lewis knew the breath that changes sculpture to living being. The words chiseled at his feet say, “Born 1898, Reborn 1931.”
Not far away, children in the square were riding scooters, throwing balls, pretending in their imagined world. When Lewis was a child, he was not far from the shipyard where the Titanic was built, so it is not surprising he would write about Aslan as the great Emperor-Beyond-the Sea, and the Dawn Treader voyaging into adventurous waters.
We visited C.S. Lewis Square on The Day of Pentecost. Thinking of Christ’s resurrection opening the door to a much greater experience of the Spirit, we read the ending of The Last Battle, where the children went through the little stable door and into Aslan’s eternal, life-giving country: “Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which everything is better than the one before.”
LaDonna Friesen
Associate Professor of English