Palm Sunday, C.S. Lewis, and The White Stag
Currently listening to The Lord’s my shepherd by the Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford
I grew up in a Protestant tradition that observed few Christian holidays outside of Christmas and Easter — I didn’t even know what Lent was until I my Catholic friends in middle school came to school with ashen crosses on their foreheads, complaining about what they’d elected to give up for forty days. As such, as an adult the traditions around Lent and Holy Week have taken on a peculiar significance. As though I’m making up for lost time — for all those Easter Sundays when I was more focused on the sugary contents of the basket my mother left outside my bedroom door than the startling claim of Christ’s resurrection.
This year’s Holy Week is unlike any other in living memory. In effort to slow the plague of COVID-19, we have to attend Holy Week services online. The removal of regular weekly rhythms like church attendance has caused time to blur. I find it difficult to orient myself in the stages of the Passion story. So instead, I’m spending my Palm Sunday of 2020 remembering Holy Week 2019.
Last year, my friend Suzanne and I spent a week sightseeing in London and Oxford. Despite the mid-April chill, the weather was mostly beautiful and we took our time marveling at the glories of Spring. The impossibly green grass. The thousands of tulips, daffodils, bluebells, snowdrops, and pink magnolias overspilling ancient stone walls.
On Palm Sunday, we attended services at St. Aldgate’s in Oxford. The reverend offered a brief and lighthearted sermon aimed at appeasing the rows of squirming children who were waiting for the real show to begin: a live donkey that ambled the perimeter of the sanctuary.
Interior of St. Aldgate’s on April 14, 2019 - Palm Sunday. Donkey not pictured.
After the service ended, Suzanne and I made our way to Magdalen College. This was a special place for both of us because it was where C.S. Lewis taught and wrote so many of the works of literature that helped to shape our ideas about faith. After touring the chapel and grounds, we strolled Addison’s Walk beside the River Cherwell. The path was a favorite getaway for Lewis, who often wandered along it while he prayed or pieced together fragments of thought. A plaque along the Addison’s Walk wall commemorates a poem that Lewis set there: “What the Bird Said Early in the Year.”
I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.
Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.
This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.
This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.
This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.
Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.
The Gospel Coalition provides an interesting backstory to this poem, explaining it was written several years after Lewis and his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson spent time together on Addison’s Walk discussing the nature of myth and religion. The men mused on how Christ’s resurrection echoes other stories of death and rebirth in pagan mythologies. Recalling their conversations in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis observed:
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.
For me, what is at work in Lewis’s poem and letter is longing. An intense desire for the “spell” — death — to be broken. For the verdant beauty of Spring to become eternal; that “this year the summer will come true.” Longing is what we truly commemorate on Palm Sunday. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the Jews threw palm fronds onto the ground before him in hopes that he was the King prophesied to end five hundred years of foreign rule. Jesus’s choice of Passover to reveal himself as the Messiah adds another layer of meaning. Passover commemorates when the spirit of God spared the Jews in Egyptian captivity from the tenth plague — the death of the firstborn.
This mythical longing to escape death captured Lewis’s imagination for years to come, finding exploration in his most famous work, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the novel, the Pevensie children stumble into a Narnia locked in a brutal enchantment where it is “always winter but never Christmas.” The death and rebirth of the lion Aslan, a Christ figure, defeats the wintry influence of the White Witch and see the Pevensies installed as kings and queens of Narnia. At the end of the novel, the children (who have grown into adults during their time in Narnia) are drawn back through the wardrobe into our world by a curious quest: a hunt for a white stag.
And one year it fell out that Tumnus (who was a middle-aged Faun by now and beginning to be stout) came down river and brought them news that the White Stag had once more appeared in his parts — the White Stag who would give you wishes if you caught him.
The white stag is never captured, and instead the Pevensies are brought back full-circle to their lives in our world. In fact, no time has passed at all and they are children once more. On one level, this image offers up a universal truth about story as a time travel device. How many of us have been engrossed in a book, game, or television show, and looked up at the clock startled to see that an entire day has passed?
On another level, the white stag serves as a symbol of spiritual questing. The spell in Narnia might be broken, but the Pevensies have other adventures to pursue.
—
Addison’s Walk tangents the Magdalen College deer park. Suzanne and I drew close to the fence to watch the deer. On the far side of the enclosure, I noticed a couple peering through a long camera lens. Then a flash of white caught my attention. A stag with a pure white coat and six-point antlers stepped from behind a tree. There were other bucks in the enclosure, but he was the largest. His fur was luminous against the lush green of the early Spring grass. Suzanne and I leaned against the fence and watched him for a long time.
Magdalen College deer park.
After an enjoyable but tiring day of touring the colleges of Oxford, Suzanne and I went to the Eagle and Child, the pub where Lewis, Tolkien, and the other fellows of the Inklings used to gather. On the wall of the Eagle and Child, a plaque declares that “conversations that have taken place here have profoundly influenced the development of 20th century English literature.”
Warming my tired feet by a wood stove and sipping cider, I remember thinking about the idea of pilgrimage. Countless works written by the creative minds who used to occupy those same chairs contain this idea of hoping for a different world. Palm Sunday 2019 was an apotheosis of sorts — the culmination of a series of memories and influences. My mother reading the Chronicles of Narnia to me as a young child. Me devouring the Lord of the Rings and other works of English literature as a teenager. The beauty of travel is that you spend months researching and imagining a place, and upon arrival it all becomes Real. Up until that point, it could all have been a beautiful lie someone told you. But here you are. Finally seeing it with your own eyes.
Looking through my photos from last year stirs an ache that I imagine many who are also locked down are currently experiencing. So many of us have cancelled long-awaited plans and vacations. Others have lost their jobs and don’t know how they are going to make ends meet. The isolation itself is heavy. You don’t know how much you crave human touch until it becomes taboo, dangerous even. Many memes have been shared making light of the situation — little did we know that Lent 2020 would cost us more than we had planned to sacrifice.
The forty days of Lent correspond to a symbolic time period of deprivation in the Bible. Forty days in the ark. Forty years wandering the Sinai desert. The prophet Elijah fasting for forty days at Mount Horeb. Jesus’s fast in the desert and subsequent temptation in his weakened physical state.
As of this writing, we have been sheltering-in-place for twenty-one days. If restrictions are lifted on April 30, it will have lasted a total of forty-seven days. I don’t know how long we will be restricted from gathering with friends and family, or how long it will be until we can feel safe getting on an airplane again. However long we have left, I will recall this year’s Palm Sunday as one that brought a new and poignant dimension to idea of yearning for resurrection.
We all, like the ancient Hebrews, are praying for the pall of death to pass over us. We all are experiencing the desire that, This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell, / We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.
Overhearing the choir of Merton College, Oxford rehearsing for Holy Week services.
