Sacramental Water
Boy, do I feel like a stranger! Between buying and renovating a new house, and moving, and the holidays (and moving during the holidays), and a hard drive failure, and work, I feel like I've been an absentee member. But I hope to rectify that during days to come, though life is still mighty hectic. I think I'll start by making some posts about The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
.
I ended up going through Dawn Treader
just recently, primarily because I picked up Caspian
and found myself swept into the saga once more. (Also, I have a beautiful collectors-edition paperback of Treader
with all the Baynes illustrations which I can't resist reading at every opportunity.) But this time I read it more slowly, and tried to notice things that I usually just blow past, or take for granted as part of the story I've read so many times. I noticed a few things this round, and wanted to open a discussion on one of them.
One of the difficulties of considering the
Voyage of the Dawn Treader is that it doesn't have a compelling central narrative like the other books. You don't have a mission to rescue a lost prince, or a dangerous flight from slavery to freedom, or a struggle to liberate a land from a tyrannical witch. You just have a bunch of people sailing east, to whom various thing happen along the way. Personally, I think
Dawn Treader to be one of the most mature of the
Chronicles, the work in which Lewis truly "turned the corner" from children's stories to serious mythological fiction, so I think there's a lot of significance in every one of the vignettes. However, some of the most significant meaning can be found not in the "action" - i.e. the events which happen - but in the circumstance in which the voyagers find themselves. These are the backdrop of the story, the canvas on which it is painted. Too often I've been guilty of simply reading about these circumstances, thinking "that's nice", and taking for granted that that's just what happened next. I haven't pondered the significance of the circumstance, and what it might mean.
Here's an example: the sweet water. Sailing east from Ramandu's Island, the voyagers get to a point where the water isn't salt any more, but "sweet" - i.e. not bitter. Reepicheep is naturally excited by this because it confirms the dryad's rhyme: that they are approaching the easternmost end of the world.
But to me, the most significant thing about the water isn't that it's potable, but the effect it has upon those who drink it. In Narnia, where one can truly sail "to the sunrise", the heavenly attributes such as light are actually more powerful as one draws near them. That power seems to somehow convey itself into the Narnian world. Consider this exchange:
The King took the bucket in both hands, raised it to his lips, sipped, and then drank deeply and raised his head. His face was changed. Not only his eyes but everything about him seemed to be brighter.
"Yes," he said, "it is sweet. That's real water, that. I'm not sure that it isn't going to kill me. But it is the death I would have chosen - if I'd known about it till now."
"What do you mean?" asked Edmund.
"It - it's more like light than anything else," said Caspian.
"That is what it is," said Reepicheep. "Drinkable light. We must be very near the end of the world now."
Lewis goes out of his way to elaborate on how drinking the water affects the crew. Here's a summary:
- They stop needing to eat common food
- They can bear the much greater intensity of the light
- They became bright themselves
- The older ones became a bit younger, or at least lost some of their "old age"
- They were filled with joy and excitement, but it was a "quiet" joy - they talked less
It seems to me that the sweet water of the eastern Narnian seas was sacramental. It wasn't just water without salt, it was water infused with light. Furthermore, it had the power to convey that light to those who drank it. They became more and more like what they consumed. I noticed another interesting parallel with
lembas in Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings - the more the travellers depended upon them and them alone, the more sustaining they were. Likewise with the sweet water: it not only sustained those who drank it, but displaced common food. (In fact, imagine the disappointment that the sailors must have had sailing back westward when then passed back into the common water and had to once again eat ship's rations!)
This is precisely how the Christian Church has classically understood sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. As we feed upon Christ, eating His Body and drinking His Blood, we become more like Him. We come into union with Him, even as the Narnians came more into union with the light as they drank the water which conveyed it.
Did anyone else notice this? I wish I could say I'd noticed it sooner - I've lived my whole life knowing about the sweet waters but have only just recently put together the significance. I think it interesting that Lewis' imaginative vision saw this aspect of the Narnian world. There are other examples of this sacramental outlook, even within
Dawn Treader, but this is the one that really jumped out at me. Any thoughts?