I REFLECTED recently on my visit to a C. S. Lewis conference in Romania (28 November), and on the wonderful story of how an illicit translation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, passed from hand to hand, became part of the renewed hope in that benighted country for an end to the icy grip on power of the Communist regime under Nicolae Ceausescu. It seemed to many of those suffering the endless food shortages and power cuts that it was, indeed, in Lewis’s famous phrase, “always winter and never Christmas”. Ceausescu’s aggressive secularism had come close to banning Christmas. It was, therefore, with a kind of ironic justice that, on Christmas Day in 1989, he and his tyrannical wife were executed by their own apparatchiks.

We in the West suffered no such tyranny, and our own Christmas was more in danger of being subverted from within by commercial exploitation than suppressed from without by ideologues. And, yet, aggressive secularism in the West was, in its own way, working against the Christmas story, against faith, against tradition, against the distinctive, particular claim, that, as Betjeman put it, “God was Man in Palestine And lives today in bread and wine.”

When I first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a child, the glad advent of Father Christmas into that story was a sheer joy to me, and I revelled in his proclamation: “She tried to keep me out, but I have got through at last.”

But, as I entered my teenage years, I began to doubt everything. My teachers all parroted the secular-humanist narrative that religion belonged to the childhood of mankind and was even now withering on the vine. By the time I came up to university in the late ’70s, I had bought into that narrative and consigned the Christmas story itself to the same category as Father Christmas, in the file labelled “Comforting fairy tales of one’s childhood, which turn out, in the light of scientific analysis, not to be true”.

And then, at last, there came a thaw. I began to be a little sceptical of my own scepticism. I began to examine the real claims of Christianity, the claims of both Christmas and Easter: that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself”; that there was something more to us than the random concatenation of atoms in the skull, the blind unwinding of enzymes; that there might really be a meaning behind all things, a reason for our sense of exile, and the promise of an end to that exile.

And, in the course of that new appraisal of everything, I decided, in the summer of 1979, to sit down and read the Gospels right the way through, and also, on what seemed a mere impulse, to re-read the Narnia stories. To say that these two courses of reading began to make sense of each other, and to make sense of my experience of life itself, would be something of an understatement. That reading, together with many other undeserved graces, brought me back to faith, and, in December that year, a decade before the Romanians recovered their Christmas, I recovered mine. Aslan was on the move. The following spring, I was confirmed at a university confirmation service.

This Christmas, I have been invited to read poetry at a Christmas concert in Belfast, Lewis’s birthplace. For the 75th anniversary of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I have composed a poem for that occasion, which picks up on something of the story that I have been telling here.

When Christmas Came to Narnia

When Christmas came to Narnia,
It came to me as well,
My heart was dark and wintry too
And under the same spell.

My own world too was cursed and cold
The Christ-child frozen out,
His Father God pronounced as dead,
His saints and angels all had fled,
For the cold logic of the head
Had silenced the warm heart.

But somehow through a wardrobe door
I found another land.
Frozen as mine it seemed at first
Like mine beneath an ancient curse
But with this difference from the first
That hope was close at hand.

And Father Christmas met me there
So big, so glad, so real
“I have got in at last!” he said
“The witch’s curse will fail.”

With his glad advent all things changed:
That world began to thaw,
And a cruel kingdom based on fear
Was changed to joy and awe.

And when the Lion came leaping in
How my low spirits soared!
I met his golden goodness there
And longed to find it everywhere
And then He came and found me here
One morning in a house of prayer
I recognised my Lord.

“The spring is coming here as well”
He whispered in my ear,
“The curse of unbelief will break
Everywhere hearts and souls will wake.
I came to Narnia for your sake
And I am coming here.”

So Come Lord Jesus, come to us
Come soon and take our part
Come Christmas Child, come home at last
And melt each frozen heart.