Hello all! Today the guest poster for Where Homes Converge is Marigold Roe! She is a blogger, writer, friend, and fellow Narnia enthusiast. If you haven’t yet, check out her blog here! She’s got some neat things to say. 😄
All worlds draw to an end.
These are the words that Jewel the unicorn says to Jill Pole in the eighth chapter of The Last Battle in The Chronicles of Narnia. This quote has always been very important to me as a reader, because it symbolizes something we all go through every day.
Jewel and Jill (along with a few friends) are hiking through Narnia, trying to outrun invading Calormens. Jill is tired, so she strikes up a conversation with Jewel, who is right beside her.
She says, “Oh, Jewel, wouldn’t it be lovely if Narnia just went on and on-like what you said it has been?”
And Jewel, wise as he is, replies with, “Nay, sister, all worlds draw to an end, except Aslan’s own country.”
You might be thinking, “Well, that’s quite selfish of Jill to long for Narnia to go on forever, I mean, Marigold, they’re in the middle of a war, and romanticizing isn’t going to help.” But Jill’s not romanticizing; she’s yearning.
Did you know there’s a special word for Jill’s feeling called sehnsucht? It’s a German word that, when translated, means “longing or wistful yearning.”
I first learned about sehnsucht when Ella Em posted about the word on a writing forum we’re both in. We were reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a group and analyzing it. Ella Em came up with this magnificent question: “How did C.S Lewis use sehnsucht in his writing, and how can we apply it to ours?”
Narnia was my first safe haven. I remember grabbing The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe off of our living room bookshelf and approaching my mom with the question, “Can I read this?” When she said yes, I snuggled up in my bed with my stuffed kitten in the middle of the day. As I opened the book, a feeling of excitement ran through me.
By the time I reached the ending line: “And that is the very end of the adventure of the wardrobe. But if the Professor was right, it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia,” I felt different. I felt sadness for finishing the book, and a thrill when I realized: There’s a series! I can read the next one! But there had also been another feeling while I was reading the book, one I hadn’t been able to put into words.
When I read Ella Em’s question on the writing forum, the pieces started to fall into place. I had felt like I wanted to be with the characters, be with the Pevensies, be with the White Witch, and experience all the same things they did.
It was sehnsucht, I comprehended, as I reread Ella Em’s question. C.S Lewis knew how to apply it to his writing.
Yes, he did! Now, how could I do that?
I realized very early on in my journey as a writer that you have to be passionate about what you’re writing about. I’m working on an ongoing genealogy project. I never knew about my grandmother’s family, and I really wanted to. Sehnsucht for learning about my family history drove me to find out some pretty cool things, like that three of my ancestors served in the Civil War right after they immigrated from Norway.
C.S Lewis had multiple books that gave him inspiration, but it was also his 16-year-old imagination that gave him sehnsucht for his own world. I’m only a year younger than he was, and I already wish I could enter my own fictional world I’ve created.
It’s not just books or history or imaginations that give us sehnsucht—it could be people. Like this summer, I went on a three-day writing retreat to spend time with some friends. We had a hymn sing the last evening, and as we sang “the Doxology,” my mind was suddenly filled with: This time together is about to end.
Those were the most sehnsucht-filled moments I ever had in my life, the urge to never stop, the urge to stay with these people, the urge to never end.
I knew then, as I looked around at my teary friends, that sehnsucht was something greater. Something bigger than all of us. Sehnsucht comes not from small things that we do, but from the Creator himself.
Everything that has ever or will ever be created has sehnsucht in it. It could be books, music, us. It’s especially noticeable in the things we create, like a piece of art or a story.
Jill Pole wasn’t romanticizing about Narnia. She was feeling sehnsucht. She was feeling longing for the way Narnia used to be, longing to stay in Narnia forever and ever, longing to be with people she cared about.
The reason why the Pevensies and Eustace and Jill are so sehnsucht-filled is because they have a home. Narnia IS their home. It’s the home they always wanted, and not the home they have yet. They’re all going to have to go back to London at some point, and that makes them sad. It makes them feel sehnsucht.
We feel sehnsucht in the same way. Heaven is the home we always want, and not the home we have yet.
Sehnsucht is such a complex feeling, but I feel like it is important, because once we go to Heaven, like the everlasting heaven in The Last Battle, we won’t need sehnsucht anymore.
Just like the citizens of Narnia rejoice at their forever happiness and joy at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, so will we in Heaven.
“The dream is ended; this is the morning.”