Thoughts on Susan and Edmund

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I’ve always felt a bit of an affinity with Susan in the Narnia chronicles. I’ve played her in an amdram performance on the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I’ve seen myself in her. I was always the bossy overly perfect older sister, always desperate to please everyone, desperate to fit in. I’m always chilled when I reach the end of the Last Battle and she’s not there, and I ask myself what went wrong. The new Prince Caspian movie raised some interesting ideas for where it all went wrong for Susan. She is torn between love of Narnia, where she cannot stay, and desire to love the world, to be normal, to be content. We all know the depression that follows standing on the mountaintop with God; when we descend into the valley of normalcy, unanswered prayer and temptation; where the tangible presence of God is but a memory which has become bittersweet because of its absence. The valley is where our faith can be made or broken.

John Ortberg talks about the need to actively seek God in those times, to search for him, to listen for his voice as a whisper. God is no less present but it is part of the journey for us to seek him. Aslan gives this challenge to the children at the end of Prince Caspian, where he tells them that he is in their world too. Susan is the sad warning that it is easy to fail. She didn’t want to live in the knowledge of Narnia, it was too hard.

Where Susan fails Edmund succeeds. Edmund is my favourite character, for Narnia wasn’t just an amazing experience for him, it was a life changing one. Meeting Aslan changed Edmund forever, and this was a transformation that went beyond the world of Narnia and into his life in the Shadowlands. His life was actual proof of the existence of Narnia. His humility is also a real challenge. He has known failure and sin, and lives each day with the knowledge that Aslan died for him. This leads him to act differently to the others. When Lucy tries to lead them apparently over a cliff after a vision of Aslan, he is the only one of the others prepared to follow her, despite not seeing Aslan himself. His title is King Edmund the Just, which I never really understood as a child. Now I think he was just because he knew what it was to fail.

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