Advent: The Morning Comes

Stealing the idea and the catchy name from my friend, author and historian Joseph Loconte, my wife and I host “Lewis and Linguini” nights for our Wyoming Catholic College students. The concept is simple: Students read some work by C. S. Lewis and arrive ready to discuss it over an Italian dinner. Before Christmas break, we’re reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, giving particular attention to why Father Christmas shows up in the story — and for that matter, why Christmas is celebrated in Narnia where Christ was never incarnate.

As part of my prep, I read Michael Ward’s The Narnia Code — and that got me thinking about not only the Narnia stories, but all the Lewis I’ve read over the years.

Then on the First Sunday of Advent, with my head full of Lewis, I read Romans 13:12, which says, “the night is far gone, the day is at hand.” Well, I thought, either Jesus will come again rather soon, or I will close my eyes one last time and go to Him. The night is far spent.

Contemplating Eternity

In The Silver Chair, the fourth book in the Narnia series, the characters journey underground where they see a sleeping giant. It’s Father Time — and as Ward points out, Lewis did not invent Father Time. He is a well-known figure who

carries a scythe because he cuts people down like wheat at harvest, bringing about their deaths. And he carries an hourglass to show that our lives last only for a limited period. When the sands of time run out, our days on earth will end.

Upon seeing the sleeping figure, the Narnia children are told that “he would awake on the day the world ended.” In the final Narnia book, The Last Battle, a wide-awake Father Time ends the world, squeezing the sun in his hand until the light is gone. By the time he finishes, Narnia, as the Narnians had known it, is a dead world.

With that image in mind, wouldn’t it have made more sense for the Apostle Paul to write, “The day is far gone, the night is at hand”? Regarding death, poet Dylan Thomas’s wrote to his dying father: “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Death is universally associated with the end of day, the end of light. As to the Second Coming and the end of our world, Jesus told us, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven” (Matthew 24:29a). There will be darkness and deep night, just as in Narnia.

Thinking Differently About Time

Yet in the Bible, beginning with Genesis 1, day was never understood the way we understand it. For us, despite midnight, the day begins at dawn, when we wake up. In Scripture, day begins at dusk –meaning that night always comes first, giving way to daylight at what we could call mid-day. Paul understood this, as did Lewis.

Yes, the Narnia created in The Magician’s Nephew comes to a bleak, black end in The Last Battle, but that’s hardly the end of the story. In fact, Lewis insists, that’s hardly the beginning of the story.

Once the door is closed on the dead world that was Narnia, the characters stand in a new Narnia. “‘There was a real railway accident,’ says Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are — as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands — dead.’” What does that mean? Aslan goes on, “‘The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is morning.’”

You and I live in the Shadow-Lands awaiting not night, but morning. The night is already far gone — whether it’s the night of this sad world or the night of our lives in this sad world. Morning is at hand, whether that means Jesus comes to us in the Second Coming or we go to Him in death. The point is that as Christians, we anticipate sunrise, not sunset.

Advent is mislabeled “The Christmas Season” or, even worse, “The Holiday Season.” It is, in fact the season of anticipation before Christmas and the ensuing twelve days of the Christmas Season. What do we anticipate? Certainly Christmas Day, the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord. But we also anticipate his Second Coming and, it seems to me, the reality of our own deaths — remembering that “the night is far gone, the day is at hand.” Christmas morning is coming.

Lewis famously ended the seven Narnia chronicles with these words:

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

So, “Come, let us worship the Lord, the King who is to come.” And whose coming brings the morning of a new, bright, endless day.

James Tonkowich is a freelance writer, speaker, and commentator on spirituality, religion, and public life. He is the author of The Liberty Threat: The Attack on Religious Freedom in America Today and Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life and serves as director of distance learning at Wyoming Catholic College. He also hosts the college’s weekly podcast, The After Dinner Scholar.