Warning: Some spoilers for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Jane Eyre included.
In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Susan and Lucy witness Aslan’s sacrificial death at the hands of the White Witch. They spend a sleepless night of anguish watching over his dead body. In the morning, Lewis gives one of the most powerful descriptions of atmosphere that I have ever read:
I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been — if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you — you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again. At any rate that was how it felt to these two. Hours and hours seemed to go by in this dead calm, and they hardly noticed that they were getting colder and colder.
I was seven years old when I blazed through the Chronicles of Narnia, and I have never forgotten my sense of awe at how deeply I identified with this. I have never watched someone die, as these characters did, or gone through this level of overnight trauma, but I knew what that gray dawn and quiet despair felt like, bone-deep. Every child knows the exhausted stillness you feel after a full-blown storm of crying. Every child knows what it’s like to wait in the silence, worn out, for something to happen.
In high school, my family watched the 2006 Masterpiece Theater version of Jane Eye. There’s a sinister, mysterious, and very gothic scene in which Jane tends to a wounded man at night, in secret. The morning after, Jane and a character she’s becoming very close to wait in the gray dawn as the wounded man’s carriage drives away. It’s a moment of many unanswered questions. Jane doesn’t know how the man was wounded or the full story of what’s going on at the house. But the film beautifully conveys her relief after being so close to an unknown terror, the growing closeness between Jane and this other character, and the stillness of dawn after darkness. A different gray dawn, but the same feeling as that scene from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: hushed stillness. Waiting. Expectancy. Liminality.
Those gray dawns make me think of Easter: the morning of the Resurrection. The disciples were left grieving, shocked and ashamed about abandoning their Shepherd. All who loved Jesus were somewhere between numbness, shock, sadness, and bewildered, especially after His Triumphal Entry the week before. And then — the voice in the garden. The man in the room. The figure on the shore. The traveler on the road. The Sun of Righteousness with healing on his wings (Malachi 4:2, referenced in Luke 1:78) bursting from the gray quiet with a new, contagious, everlasting life. Blazing joy and wonder: silence becoming song, gray turning old, and grief becoming glory.
Easter has such a different atmosphere than Christmas. Christmas is a delightful combination of merriment, wonder, coziness, awe, mystery, beauty, and festivity. Easter has a pain in it that transforms into an even greater splendor: great grief and great joy, darkness and light, horror and beauty, pain and victory. The scandal of Christmas is the divine becoming flesh, God sending His Son as a tiny baby instead of a warrior-king. The scandal of Easter is that humble king laying down his life, choosing humiliation, torture, and death, and turning them into a victory over death itself.
March was a gray and cold month after a long, bitterly cold winter. We were stuck under frozen snow for a long time, battered by winds, chilled by temperatures that stayed under 10 degrees longer than they usually do in New England. As we were just climbing out of the worst of it, I drove down to the Square Halo conference in Lancaster, PA, the first faith-and-arts conference I’ve been to in four years. It was beautiful. I attended lectures about Biblical images woven into music, the history of “a Christian worldview,” and legacies of hospitality and friendship. I talked with writers and artists whose story ideas, current projects, and perspectives deeply encouraged me.
At the end, Jon Guerra and his team gave a beautiful concert. They led us in singing a new song with a chorus that is still echoing in my head: “our sorrows, our sorrows, will turn into joy.” Eventually, all our gray dawns will give way to golden mornings — even better, to a Day that will never end. That promise was bought for us with blood.
Easter, the sunrise and springtime of the world, will never grow old.
Stories of Yearning 