Sarah Arthur Quotes

Story has staying power. We remember the illustrations from Sunday's sermon for months afterward, but by coffee hour we're already struggling to recite the pastor's three main points, despite various acronyms meant to help us.

While the Witch plays her pawn, the King sacrifices Himself, and to all appearances, the game is over. But the Lion has one last move ...

God sent His Prince, Jesus, into rebel territory to conquer evil and free us to be true citizens of the Kingdom again ... That's the essential story we find in the Bible, and it's the essential story at the heart of each of our lives. And that's what all good fantasy stories have at their core, whether or not it's a conscious theme.

If imagination, as we've said, is the "region of discovery," story is the wardrobe door, sending our young people "further in" and "still further in" to possibilities and ideas they've never dreamed.

Just because your faith is shaken doesn't mean the faith is shaken. The eternal truths of the Kingdom aren't altered or affected by the experience that shook your beliefs.

And that's what we're truly longing for. On those weekends when we're suddenly gripped with the urge to watch all three extended editions of The Lord of the Rings, what we really want, deep down inside (besides therapy), is the assurance that there is a realm someplace where evil has been conquered once and for all.

But at some point it becomes obvious that, ultimately, the adventure of faith is the most sensible thing to do, and in fact the only thing worth doing. As Sam says toward the end of The Two Towers, no one remembers the tales in which the characters give up and turn back. Great and heroic deeds remain undone if no one leaps into the dark to do them. That's true when it comes to faith, too. You can't play a meaningful role in the great story by playing it safe. Once you hit the road, there is no going back to life as it was before. When Jesus asks His disciples if they will leave him to, Peter says, "Lord to whom will we go?" (verse 68). It's either walk with Jesus, unsafe as it seems sometimes, or go home.

There's nothing more ridiculously juvenile than people thinking they have to be grown up and serious when it comes to living the Christian life.

Instinctively and empirically we know that stories have the power and the potential to capture hearts and imaginations - we're just not sure how or why this is so.

When was the last time you heard a long passage from a novel read aloud during Sunday school or worship? Or how about the last time a youth pastor subverted his or her "talk" through satire or parable rather than proof texting the six main points? Yet

The cure for competing narratives is nothing more or less than the Apostles' Creed. Yes, I'll say that again: the creed is our story, succinctly stated.

Are we genuinely prepared to say that working in an office building or shopping in a mall is real, while reading Tolstoy is not?

Even though universal metanarratives are largely absent, personal "I" narratives are everywhere. The popular imagination is saturated with self-obsessive stories in film, television, advertising, music, MySpace, and YouTube - but this is the equivalent of bingeing on junk food while dying for want of substance.

Somehow the church has forgotten what it knew for so long: story goes beyond simply illustrating some spiritual point or other; it gives form to content; it incarnates meaning.

We hunger for other worlds. We long to go beyond the streets we know, beyond our familiar woods and fields, and into the land of Faerie; to Middle-earth, Narnia, or Summerland; to the kingdom east of the sun and west of the moon. This longing isn't incidental.

imagination is the image-making faculty of the intellect that helps us discover, process, and creatively express coherent meaning.

You are small. Your foe is big. But your God is bigger still.

Youth in our Sunday school class can repeat almost verbatim some obscure parable we dramatized last year, and yet they forget the core doctrinal statement we taught last week. Why is this? Why does story stick with us for so long?

let's get our semantics straight. Story does not equal fiction, much less "lies." It's the world we Christians inhabit as "people of the Book." We are story people. All

For the story that shapes a child's universe also shapes the child - and by the child, the man thereafter. The memory of a burning fairy tale can govern behavior as truly as remembered fire will caution against fire forever. - WALTER WANGERIN

C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12

Funny how it all turns to theological babble the more we try to identify just exactly what we're talking about with this whole law business. No wonder C.S. Lewis wrote a story instead! Sure, he tackled the issue of moral law in Mere Christianity too. But nothing sticks in our imaginations quite so clearly as the sight of the White Witch, her bare arms raised above her head, standing over the willing, innocent, self-sacrificing Lion on the Stone Table.

Truth is the aim of story. And though we must take into account the human author's subjectivity and personal slant, the best authors are those who tap universal longings and make connections to our real, lived humanity.