TO BOLDLY GO

(This is my script for Pause For Thought on Owain Wyn Evans, BBC Radio 2, on September 8, 2023. The them for the week was To Go Boldly as I think today was Star Trek Day)

 

To Boldly Go. Obviously Star Trek. 

I am also thinking Dances With Wolves with Kevin Costner’s cavalry character saying that he wants to see the frontier before the frontier gone. 

Even more for me, CS Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles where these children find a whole new world through the fur coats in a wardrobe.

Well, actually the first children, Polly and Digory travel to Narnia with magic rings, through a stagnant pool.

A few years ago I was speaking at a Sunday Service in Campbell College, a boarding school in East Belfast and used Digory and Polly in my sermonette. 

After the event was over the headmaster Robert Robinson said to me, “Do you want to go and see the pool?” What? “The pool that CS Lewis based it on is down our back drive.”

Ten minutes later I was standing beside everything that I had imagined CS Lewis’s stagnant pool to be. The size, the darkness beneath the trees, the green algae across the top and even a rugby scrummage machine poking out of it. 

On its edge, I almost felt I was in Narnia. 

When Digory and Polly arrived out of this pool, Polly was a little fearful. She wanted to go back home where it was safe. Digory on the other hand said to her,“There's not much point in finding magic rings that let you into other worlds if you're afraid to look at them when you've got there.”

Following Jesus for me is a lot like that and can I say that I believe that that was Lewis’s intention. Narnia was a spiritual world.

Forgiveness. That’s Jesus territory. He was keen to forgive. He called us to forgive each other. 70 times 7 he said at one point. 

So often it seems to me the world is being driven by vengeance. Everybody wants to make right our wrongs.

That’s where Jesus territory comes in. To live a life of forgiveness. Where we are driven by restoring relationships, healing communities, reconciling nations. That’s a frontier I’d like to see. Another world I’d love to explore. That’s where I’d like to boldly go right now and on into the weekend.