Edmund and Lucy responded to Eustace’s bad attitude in different ways. Edmund felt that they should leave Eustace alone in his sulkiness. According to Edmund, “It only makes him worse if you try to be nice to him.” Lucy, however, felt guilty enough to postpone the tour of the Dawn Treader in order to check on him. Lucy even used a drop of her precious cordial to cure Eustace’s seasickness. (Later, she also took care of Eustace’s hand after his run-in with Reepicheep.) Why did they react so differently? Was it just a difference in their personalities, or did their parents raise them differently, even in the same household? More importantly, which response to Eustace will help him overcome his sour disposition? Or will both help him in unique ways?
Apparently, Eustace did not feel very grateful for Lucy’s help in curing his seasickness. In his diary, Eustace wrote, “it’s a good thing I’m not seasick.” Either he was lying and boasting, claiming he never had been sick, or he was stating the present facts, without mentioning Lucy’s selflessness. Whichever was the case, he forgot about his weakness and neediness the moment that he felt better. In my own life, there’s nothing like a case of the stomach flu to remind me that I am utterly dependent on God. There’s something about being tethered to the toilet that makes me beg for his help. Yet, once I feel better, it’s not long before I fall back into the illusion of my own strength.
Perhaps no one got on Eustace’s nerves quite like Reepicheep. Maybe it was because Reepicheep’s dreams so far out measured his own small stature. Of all the heroic figures on board the Dawn Treader, it was a mouse who dared to think they could find the actual country from which Aslan came. Even more ridiculous to a naysayer like Eustace, Reepicheep based his goal on a poem that a Dryad told him as a baby. He said, “I do not know what it means. But the spell of it has been on me all of my life.” C. S. Lewis knew what it was like in his own life to be ‘haunted’ by something beautiful, mysterious, and just out of one’s grasp. Lewis called it “northernness.” In that word he tried to sum up the delicious longing he felt when he read Norse mythology. What haunts you? Perhaps a song, a movie, or a painting hints at it, but you can never quite look at it full on. Don’t give up. As Lewis said in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
