This week, we read The Four Loves, which discusses four types of love: Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity.  I found it really interesting to think about how all of these types of love work together and complement each other in a relationship.  For example, you can’t have a romantic relationship solely based off of lust, yet you need more than mere friendship.  The four loves work in harmony with each other.

        In the introduction, Lewis also discussed two larger categories of love: Need-love and Gift-love.  The ideal exemplar of Gift-love would be our Heavenly Father—He gives all He has to us, and is the embodiment of love itself.  There is nothing He stands in need of, but pours out blessings upon us.  We, on the other hand, exemplify Need-love.  There is nothing we can ever do to be able to begin to pay back God, and we do not need to.  Our love is a different kind of love, one of dependence and gratitude, like a child to its mother.  We not only have an innate need for God, but for love from those around us.  Beyond our constant physical needs, we need companionship, empathy, self-assurance, and intellectual stimulation.  We need comfort from those around us, and we need to feel important, we need to fulfill others’ needs in some way.  The list goes on and on, and it’s interesting to see how those four loves all revolve around the needs that innate to human nature.  The way we interact and form meaningful relationships with one another is through meeting one another’s needs.  And through recognizing others’ needs, we begin to learn about Gift-love—though we will never fully exemplify Gift-love in this life, I think we can come closer by learning how God loves us.

       This week, we read excerpts from The Problem of Pain, which answers an important question in Christianity: why must we suffer?  Lewis begins by pointing out that people who are stuck in their sins often need pain to come to the realization that everything is not well in their life.  They will later realize that their life is not their own, and the false happiness and pleasure that they have experienced in their sins are contrary to God’s will and in fact preventing them from experiencing true joy.  It is often those that achieve worldly success, not the poor and downtrodden, that reject or forget God because they don’t need Him, and we are quick to forget that He was the one who granted us our success.

       He also asserts that although many associate pain with the negative things of the world—violence, depression, and immorality—it is more common that pain brings out the best in people.  Pain is like the refiner’s fire—it’s not enjoyable, but you come out of it purer and humbler than before, more submissive to God.  When we can overcome the concept of being a “self”, we can let God into our lives and follow His guidance, which will ultimately lead us to real happiness and joy.

       This past week in class we read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is the story of Edmund, Lucy, and their cousin Eustace going to Narnia and journeying to the “utter East”, which is the edge of the Narnian world and the beginning of Aslan’s world.  The symbolism throughout this book was interesting—the journey itself represented the journey that we all take through mortality, towards Christ.  There were countless temptations and dangers along the way, but Aslan was always there as a comfort and a reminder to stay on the right course.  And within almost all of the characters you could see a transformation brought about through the mercy and love of Aslan.

       What really stood out to me throughout the book was the personal relationship Aslan had with each of the main characters, shown at various points in the story.  Eustace was the first to experience the change that came through his love—when he accidentally turned himself into a dragon, the process of “undragoning” was only possible through Aslan.  He could not peel back the layers of skin on his own, Aslan had to do it for him.  Furthermore, he was in a sense “baptized” in the healing waters after being stripped of his sinful disposition.  Lucy also had a personal experience with Aslan as he helped her resist the temptation to make herself beautiful by magic.  He also lovingly makes her aware of her mistake in spying on her friends, but forgives her and welcomes her back into his arms.  Caspian and Edmund were at the brink of a fight over the goldwater, but Aslan appeared in the distance as a reminder to not fall into that trap, and later Aslan appeared to Caspian when he wanted to abandon his country.  He appeared to the entire crew as a white albatross when they were lost in the mists of darkness—very symbolic of sin and despair.  And at the edge of Narnia, he appeared to Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace as a lamb who fed them fish, clearly symbolic of the “lamb of God”.

       He also told them that they would know him in their own world by a different name, which we know to be Jesus Christ.  This applies to the characters in the book, but I think also to readers of the Narnie series.  By coming to know Aslan’s character in the book and learning to love Aslan, we learn how to love our Savior Jesus Christ.  While he is not an exact representation of him, reading of the power, mercy, and love he embodies in the book can bring us closer to Christ.