Once Upon a Wardrobe(49)

Tollers and Dyson looked at each other with a knowing smile, for they admired their friend’s eccentricities. Tollers’s voice rose above the branches as he continued the conversation with Jack. “You, my friend, believe in the importance of myth, as do Hugo and I.”

Jack tapped his walking stick on the soft earth as a young couple floated by on an evening punt ride. “Believing in its importance and believing its facts are not the same. Myth conveys power. Myth gives import to the story. Myth guides us. Myths strike and strike deep. Myths have deep power over our human psyche. But that is not the same as being factually true. We all know that. We’ve all studied the Norse myths and the Celts and the Bible.”

This particular discussion among these gentlemen had been going on for quite some time. The men were debating the truth of Christ’s story, the actual story of Christianity. Jack was an atheist, as his teacher Mr. Kirkpatrick had been, and he argued with his two dear friends. Jack knew of their solid Catholic beliefs, but their friendship did not require his agreement with them.

When he first met Tollers, Jack was already immersed in the myths. Tollers had invited Jack to join the Coalbiters club, a private club that read Nordic texts in the original Old Icelandic language. Jack learned the Norse language just to join the group. Hugo was also a member of the Coalbiters. They, all three, were also part of the Inklings. So this discussion alongside the river, although started only an hour before, had been going on in different forms for years.

Tollers stopped short. “Jack, a myth can be true on more than one level.”

“Yes,” Jack said. “A myth tells a truth without the facts. You do not have to believe it is true to see the truth. In this, we agree, but myth is still myth. It is not something to believe in!”

They continued their walk as the trees turned blue in the shade of day’s end, and the birdsong quieted and the creaking sounds of night began: branches rubbing in the wind, wings flapping the air. Jack sensed a deep longing, a personal echo he’d heard all his life that told him truth waited somewhere near. He lifted higher the collar of his coat to guard from the wind.

“Myths show us the way the world should be, or could be, instead of how it is,” Tollers said, stopping to watch a squirrel scamper up the tree and disappear in the higher branches. “That is why we want more and more of them.”

Jack already knew this. “Yes,” he said, “that is their power.”

“Think of all the myths and origin stories,” said Hugo with his jowly smile, his rumpled tie loose. “Of all the gods who sacrifice their lives to save others.” He stopped and straightened his hat, eyeing Jack with a look both casual and intense.

Jack stopped. “In almost every tradition there is the dying god who rises again,” he said, turning to his friends. His eyes, always alert and warm, held their gaze. He was never tired of this conversation about myth and story, and yet this one seemed to be going in circles. “Yes. Balder. Adonis. Bacchus.” He named just a few gods from his favorite pagan myths. “And of course, Jesus Christ.”

“The difference,” said Tollers, “is that the story of Jesus Christ is true. It really happened. Christianity is not less than a myth, but more than one. The true one.”

“The only true myth,” added Hugo.

“The myth of the dying God . . . ,” Jack said, and the three friends continued their walk and talk.

Jack resisted.

He debated.

He listened.

They talked into the night, walking round about that river island until well into the early morning when Jack saw light—not of a rising sun, but of a spiritual conviction. He finally understood what his friends had wanted to show him, what he could see only in the middle of the night while the birch trees swayed in the wind alongside the river. All those years with the Knock, arguing logic, Jack had known that his intellect stood over his imagination, that the two hemispheres, as it were, of his mind were in sharp contrast. He realized that all he’d loved, he believed to be imaginary, and all he’d believed was real, he thought grim and meaningless.

Near dawn, Jack went home, and morning rose over the Kilns to see him a different man.

Something within him had shifted.

“Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”

*

George sits quietly and stares at his sister, who is still gazing at the notebook. There’s more, but she’s stopped.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

She looks to him with brimming tears. George hates when Megs cries because there is rarely anything he can do to fix it. “I don’t want this to end,” she says.

“I don’t either, but everything ends.”

“Honestly, George.” She shook her head and put down the notebook. “How do you know more than me when you are so much younger?”

“That’s silly. You can add numbers in your head. You can—”

“But in the things that matter, you know more.”

George thinks about this. Maybe it’s true he knows more than her about some things, but he doesn’t have the time to know about everything. He wants to know if it’s true that there’s something more when this something ends. Not whether there is a doorway in the back of his wardrobe; he knows that is just a way to tell a story about something more. But maybe in the back of his life there is a place he will go, a place they will all go.