Make Believe

It feels like being asked to disregard
the facts, the evidence, reality
itself and play a game of make-believe
where I deny the truth of what I see.
And like the dwarves, I can’t, I won’t, but yet—
why should I trust my judgement over yours
as if I were the more clear-sighted one
when I’ve been blinded by these bitter years?
So fair enough, I'll play your make-believe
at least a sonnet’s length or two, pretend
he sees my tears and doesn’t turn away
but whispers that he loves me, dream it ends
with me, bone-weary, being given rest—
yes, me, dirt-poor in spirit, being blessed. 

---

In The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle, there are two incidents which in my mind stick together. The first is Uncle Andrew, standing with the children watching and listening while Aslan sings the world into being. Uncle Andrew doesn’t believe it’s possible for a lion to sing, and so “… the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.”

The second is the dwarves, who refuse to believe the evidence of their eyes and ears and touch and taste that they are free and eating a feast and instead insist that they are trapped in a stable, eating whatever old bits of food are lying around. Aslan says this of them: “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

In both cases, what the narrator comments about Uncle Andrew applies: “… what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

It’s frightening, isn’t it? I may think I believe something based on objective evidence when instead I have allowed myself to become the sort of person who cannot see what is actually as plain as day to someone else. Perhaps I’m convinced that God isn’t good or that he doesn’t love me. I might feel like I’ve got all the evidence to prove it. But if someone I trust, someone wiser than I am, sees things from a different perspective, then maybe, just maybe, the problem is me. Perhaps, then, in trust and humility, I can engage my imagination and step into what feels like a fantasy to me, and discover (if I stay there long enough) that it was true all along.