The Shortest Way Home (part 1)

I step out my front door and cool air mists my face, I shiver. Grey clouds charcoal the sky and I wonder if it will rain. I haven’t been far from my home for a month. As I walk, I’m acutely aware of my still aching body, slowly recovering from the sickness which has forced the world into a prolonged hibernation.

Apart from a few lone runners, I am alone in the University Parks, beneath canopies of baby green leaves whispering in a fragile wind. Ducklings with downy feathers dabble in the river water and daffodils along the river’s edge nod in the breeze. I want to see how far I can walk before my body begs me to return home.

Twenty Septembers ago, in a different home, in another country, I vanished.

I had been standing in my school uniform on the front doorstep as my mother wrestled my siblings into the car. When she turned around, I wasn’t. She called a few times impatiently and then began to panic when neither she nor my dad could find me.

I was hiding at the very back of their bedroom wardrobe, nestled amongst shoe boxes, quietly cocooned in the folds of my mother’s pink silk dressing gown, hugging my knees to my chest. But when a slant of light appeared in the darkness, it wasn’t the light of a lampost, but my mother’s anxious face peering in to see if I was there. I tumbled out, giggling, unaware of the consternation I had caused. She nearly sobbed with relief, wrapping me in a tight hug. I don’t know what compelled me to do that on that particular morning, perhaps it was the prevailing streak of mischief that has survived into adulthood; I probably thought it would be funny to hide.

I didn’t take this particular habit up again until visiting a furniture warehouse two years later, after becoming completely captivated with the story of “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.” As my parents wandered around looking for a new bed frame, I tiptoed covertly from wardrobe to wardrobe, my school shoes kicking up stray sawdust into the gloomy air, before settling on a promising one. After opening its doors and climbing in, I sat cross-legged, eyes shut, patiently waiting for the snow to begin falling and sprigs of fir trees to begin brushing my face until I heard my parents calling me to go and I emerged sheepishly from the magnificent mahogany closet.

I admit that I wept at the stone table long before I ever wept at the foot of the cross. The injustice of the majestic Aslan being cruelly maimed by forces of darkness made me close my eyes with horror and tears leaked out of their corners as I cried with Lucy and Susan.

If only I had looked a little further back, I would have seen that his sacrificial death and miraculous resurrection were only murmurs of another more beautiful and true story.

But, perhaps, just as when Aslan breathes on the stone lion trapped in the Witch’s castle and “all the heavy stone folds rippled into life,” the words of this book were some of the first gentle breaths of life rippling over my stony heart, to slowly turn it into a heart of flesh.

I weave my way through the deserted city centre, passing empty limestone libraries the colour of Aslan’s mane. Libraries have been dangerous places for thousands of years. Just a few streets away from here, you can see the Martyr’s Memorial for the men who once learned life-changing truths in those libraries. They were burned for choosing to hold fast to what they had learned. Now, rather than religious persecution, we face a pandemic. Covid-19 has achieved what the bombs of World War 2 could only threaten: for the first time in a thousand years, the libraries are empty, unmanned by any scholar or keeper of keys. The ten million books that the one hundred libraries in this city hold stand silent and sequestered on shelves, untouched, and gathering dust.

When I reach the edge of Radcliffe Square, I pass the fabled lamp-post they say was lifted straight out of this square in Oxford and planted in a snowy woods in Narnia. I walk to the end of the High Street and Magdalen College towers before me. Its gates are shut, its students have been scattered. In the 1930’s, a distinguished scholar of medieval literature lived, wrote and taught here. As I cross the bridge beyond Magdalen, I can just glimpse the path where his first cerebral assertion that there was indeed a God occured one moonlit night, when he became “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” I have traced that particular path on other spring days. The same man would go on to warn me and millions of others that no one can stand on a bridge when it comes to Jesus Christ. Who He was, he insisted, “is either of no importance or infinite importance.” Three options: Lord, lunatic or liar. Make your choice. The martyrs did and faced the flames.

….to be continued.