From "The Horse and His Boy"

In honor of C.S. Lewis who died forty-eight years ago today, November 22, 1963,  . . . here are a couple of water references from The Chronicles of Narnia.

In The Horse and His Boy, Shasta is travelling across a desert at night. He is thirsty, hungry, tired and lost. . . and feeling very sorry for himself. Suddenly he discovers that someone or something is walking beside him. In his fear he tries to ignore it, but finally whispers, “Who are you?” The unwelcome fellow traveler replies, “One who has waited long for you to speak.”


What follows is a fascinating conversation in the dark between Shasta and the Thing, who turns out to be Aslan, the great lion. Eventually the mists of the night open into an epiphany of light that overwhelms Shasta and melts his fear. As Shasta looks right into Aslan's eyes, Lewis says, “no one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful.”

The experience was so profound Shasta wondered if it was a dream. But in the sunlight, he saw in the grass “the deep, large print of the Lion's front right paw. It took one's breath away to think of the weight that could make a footprint like that. But there was something more remarkable than the size about it. As he looked at it, water had already filled the bottom of it. Soon it was full to the brim, and then overflowing, and a little stream was running downhill, past him, over the grass. “

“Shasta stooped and drank - a very long drink - and then dipped his face in and splashed his head. It was extremely cold, and clear as glass, and refreshed him very much."  Chapter 12, The Horse and His Boy.

Lewis tells another story of similarly refreshing water near the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The ship is sailing across an immense calm sea, bathed in sunlight. Reepicheep the mouse discovers that the sea is not salt but sweet.

“That’s real water, that” declared the king Caspian, as he takes a long deep drink. Lucy samples it and declares it, “the loveliest thing I’ve ever tasted.” They drew buckets of dazzling water from the sea and drank deep draughts of it, finding it “stronger than wine and somehow wetter, more liquid than ordinary water”. Some of the older sailors who drank it “began to grow younger every day and everyone on board was filled with joy and excitement.

This is Lewis' Narnian metaphor for the water of life that Jesus spoke about - and that this blog celebrates.
Drink Deep, my friends!

If you enjoyed these, read last year's post for this same date and the next.