Chapter 6: The Adventures of Eustace

“The work had gone well so far and it was a merry meal. Only after the second helping of goat did Edmund say, “Where’s that blighter Eustace?”

As the curtains draw back on Chapter Six of our story, we see Caspian and the children celebrating work well done with a marvelous feast of roast goat and wine by the river. And yet, as the meal lingers on, we hear Edmund asking for the whereabouts of his difficult, sullen and unimaginative cousin, Eustace.

Where was Eustace? He has wandered off and found himself in a dragon’s lair -- and it’s a lair filled with mountains of treasure! Once the dragon who lives in the cave is officially dead, Eustace thinks his prospects are finally looking up. With this much wealth, he can live like a King in Narnia and finally stick it to those horrid cousins! Revenge! With treasures in his pockets and gold on his arm, Eustace falls asleep.

And here we see C.S. Lewis’ brilliant tableau of the deceptive human heart & God’s mercy so masterfully written....

“He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.”

Whenever I read this chapter, my heart is always deeply pricked by that sentence. I wish it was harder for me to relate to Eustace! He didn’t become a dragon overnight. Instead, when he awoke he was finally able to see his reflection in the water and was suddenly aware of what he already was...what he had been becoming for a very long time. A dragon. A greedy, hoarding, bully of a dragon. As it says in Proverbs (23:7)..”for what a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

Painfully, I can relate. I allow sinful, dragonish thoughts to grow. They begin as the tiniest seeds of lust, envy or fear, and instead of nipping them in the bud, I turn them over and over in my mind, admiring them like shiny gems. I listen to the lies and insecurities and suddenly I find myself far closer to a dragon than I ever thought possible!

But what awoke Eustace? A pain in his arm. The golden bracelet he had shoved on in his haste to snatch as much treasure as possible was suddenly biting and pinching into his now large, dragon foreleg.

It was the pain that woke him up.

It was pain that caused him to climb out of the dragon’s cave, wander to the river, see his reflection and face the reality of what he truly was.

C.S. Lewis, in his book “The Problem with Pain” says “...God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

Gentle admonitions hadn’t worked. Strong criticism hadn’t worked. Dramatic events hadn’t seemed to phase him. He had been in a bedroom, seen a painting come to life and been sucked into an ocean for goodness sake! No use. Like myself at times, Eustace was far too mired in pride and lies to hear the gentle nudging of the Holy Spirit. It took real, sharp pain to wake him up and offer him another chance to change. Can you relate Eustace, as I do?


Can you identify times in your life where God has used a painful experience (self-inflicted or otherwise) as a megaphone to your deaf ears?

How do you respond to these painful awakenings?

Chapter 5: The Storm and What Came of It

A wall of water hits the Dawn Treader, a storm rages on for days, Eustace continues his miserable journal, and finally the ship makes shore on a deserted island. Eustace wanders off and falls asleep. When he awakens he is lost.

Along one's spiritual journey there are storms. To the unseeing Eustaces' of our world these are nothing but miseries. But g-d means it use the storms in our lives. I didn't say 'for good' - like now our dark cloud can have it's silver lining - because the best result of a storm is "lostness." One has to think one is 'found' or 'oriented' to complain and be miserable about one's surroundings. But become LOST - and now there is only one singular sensation: "WHERE AM I?"

This is the question g-d wants us to ask each moment, each day, each season of our lives. "Where am I?" Only in disorientation are we shoved and pushed to the temple of g-d for directions.

We should pray for disorientation! We should pray for lostness! We should pray for our house of cards to be blown down, this sham life, our cheap artificial Christian life, our dime-store "God" who is no bigger than our mind's eye - to fall. After all, the God we imagine is only as big as we let it be. And the God we fabricate will never change us because it is not bigger than us. So something has to happen TO us (not come out of us). Then we change.

Get ready Eustace.

Chapter 4: What Caspian Did There

“I want to know why you have permitted this abominable and unnatural traffic of slaves to grow up here, contrary to the ancient custom and usage of our dominions.” This is Caspian’s question to Gumpas, the guy in charge of governing the island Felimath.

This question makes me itch. I believe Jesus asks this same question; why have you allowed this to happen? This is not how we (I and my followers) are supposed to live. I gave you all authority in heaven and on earth …

Oh sure, I don’t have slaves living in my house. But slavery does still exist, in our world, in our country, in our city. Why have we allowed this to happen?

The sad part is I don’t even know how much I personally profit from slave labor. Did slaves make my shirt before it was sold to Old Navy? Did slaves pick my dinner vegetables before being packaged and shipped to Price Chopper?

Here’s the response from Gumpas; “Necessary, unavoidable … an essential part of the economic development … I assure you. Our present burst of prosperity depends on it.”

Because I’d rather pay $9.99 for a pair of shoes made in (pick a country) instead of paying much more by being made in slave free trade, does this justify my frugality? Or because I desire ‘affordable’ fresh fruit grown in South America, does it justify the middleman to offer poverty wages to the farmer?

“Does your good majesty mean to beggar me?”

I cringe at how Pug’s reply seems to mirror my own.

But Caspian pursues him, “You have lived on broken hearts all your life – and if you are beggared, it is better to be a beggar than a slave.”

In our world, where we now know how things are made and sold, where injustice is exposed, we are responsible. We are the wealthy. How many broken hearts have I/we lived on?

I leave you to wrestle with this … As kings and queens of Narnia, how should we live?

Chapter 3: The Lone Islands

I know there is kidnapping and adventure in chapter three, but my favorite line was, "There was a lark singing."

That simple statement felt out of place. The pause pointed me to read the entire paragraph again, and this time I actually connected with what I had already read: "barefoot on downy turf," "delightful," "warm," "pleasant."

How many times do we speed through life the way I sped through that paragraph, missing the beauty? Lucy was soaking up her world – every sense was tuned to the feel of downy turf, the smell of earth and grass, the sound of a lark singing. Her senses were heightened to squeeze every nuance out of every moment.

Notice that Lucy has been engaging the Narnian world all along:

• "…as Lucy and Edmund sipped [the spiced wine] they could feel the warmth going right down to their toes." (chapter 1)
• "When she had finished dressing she looked out of her window at the water rushing past and took a long deep breath. She felt quite sure they were in for a lovely time." (chapter 1)
• "…the smell in the cabin when she opened [her flask of cordial] was delicious." (chapter 2)
• "…when they turned aft to the cabin and supper, and saw the whole western sky lit up with an immense crimson sunset, and felt the quiver of the ship, and tasted the salt on their lips, and thought of unknown lands on the eastern rim of the world, Lucy felt that she was almost too happy to speak." (chapter 2)

And notice the contrast with Eustace’s responses to the same events:

• he spat out the spiced wine and began to cry;
• in his cabin we find him with a scowl and seasickness;
• he labeled the cordial "beastly stuff;"
• and at the time of the sunset, Eustace "would be pleased with nothing."

I think I can safely say he missed the lark singing.

Are you more like Lucy or more like Eustace?

I am reminded: I have five senses that I can too easily ignore as I go through my day. There is work, laundry, e-mail, shopping, mowing, cooking, repairing, and cleaning to be done. I can be overwhelmed with life and miss the lark singing. But sing he does…and when I take it in, I allow the bubble of my busyness (or crankiness) to be burst in order to enjoy the world God has put me in.

For me, the lark’s song looks like a hug from my daughter, my husband’s eyes as I welcome him home, a beautiful harmony I hear on the radio, the warmth of a cup of cocoa, my mom’s laughter on a phone call, the smell of a campfire, the sight of leaves dancing in the breeze, the kindness of one person to another.

"We tend to think of pleasure as oases of enjoyment in a desert of humdrum. But Narnia shows us that pleasure saturates all of life… All creation is infused with delight that tells us something of the love of the God who created us to experience pleasure. Just wake up your senses and enjoy." (Thomas Williams, The Heart of the Chronicles of Narnia, p. 28-29)

What does "a lark singing" look like in your world?
What do your senses enjoy that show you where God is throughout your day?

Chapter 2: On Board the Dawn Treader

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.”

Chapter 1: The Picture in the Bedroom

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

From the moment you read these first words of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader you know you are meeting the unlikeable character, if not the villain, of the story. What is it, we wonder, that makes Eustace Scrubb so deserving of such an unpleasant sounding name?

Why of course, he has no imagination.

That's it?

Indeed it is. Eustace has no imagination. His parents have no imagination, and for that, they emerge as the "bad guys" of our tale. Eustace can't dream of better things and so he is completely caught up in ordinary things. And the ordinary is so dreadfully ordinary that it leaves Eustace with nothing better to do than evil.

He can't imagine imaginary countries, and so he makes fun of others who do. He has no daring or sense of adventure, so he settles for criticizing. He has no hope to be great or heroic, so he must content himself with being practical. And complaining about things which are not practical occupies all of his time.

Much that is wrong with our lives as Christians springs from our lack of imagination. We don't read the scriptures because they cause us to think. Not wishing to think, we'd rather sit around and say, "I can't understand them. They aren't clear enough. I tried once and didn't get anything out of it." We don't pray because we cannot possibly imagine how it might profit us. We don't give generously because we see no potential for good in it (an anyway, was anything EVER less practical than giving money away?) Suffering for us is not "a part of every great adventure"; when you have no imagination suffering is simply something you use to prove there is no God. Small Groups? Who needs those silly people? Worship? I don't like singing--I doubt God likes it either. Serving? I have better (more practical) things to do with my time (like laundry). Compassion on the poor? They should get a job. Tell My Story of Faith? I haven't one to tell. Nothing special ever happened to me.

Erwin McManus tells us, "We all want miracles in our life, but then spend our life ignoring the places and avoiding the situations where miracles happen." [Seizing Your Divine Moment]

When did you last take a chance on Jesus with a fiery imagination?
What are the divine moments you passed over because you let Eustace Scrubb rule the day?