In CS Lewis’ novel, The Magician’s Nephew, there is a description of a dying world towards the start of the book.
It is a land – Charn – which was once a great civilisation, but now is dead. As events unfold for the two children in the story, Polly and Digory, a terrible, tolling bell starts to chime, sounding over and over again, until ‘the air… was throbbing with it and they could feel the stone floor trembling under their feet…’ and the building around them begins to collapse.
In the sky, there is a great, tired, red sun, ‘a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world.’ The great edifices of the city – temples, towers, palaces, pyramids – ‘cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun…’
We might well feel, given current news, and also events of the last few years, that Lewis’ pictorial description of a civilisation in decay is one which fits well our own world, now. To adapt very slightly a poem of WH Auden, ‘Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright /And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the November night.’
Whether it is the demonic, antisemitic terrorist murder of 1,400 Israelis by Hamas – and the fact that so many in the West seem to have forgotten it already, or lurched into blatant antisemitism; or the destruction in Gaza and the reactive calls in the UK for ‘jihad’... Or the identity politics, polarisation, moral decadence, individualism, consumerism and cancel culture of the West… Or the implosion of the C of E… there is the smell of decay in the air (see also Josh Moody's Letter from America).
Yet it is in the context of ‘nation rising against nation’ and famine, earthquakes, and persecution that Jesus says: ‘See to it that you are not alarmed,’ (Matthew 24v6). Our civilisation may be decaying, but that is not the final word…
In his book, True Word for Tough Times, based on talks given to the Evangelical Movement of Wales, Dale Ralph Davies reminds us that Jeremiah ministered in times perhaps similar to ours. And maybe it is true for us, like him, that we are called, in our own way, and in our own day, to keep on holding out ‘the word of life’ again and again to a culture which will not listen, to a world which seems detached from reality, and in an age ‘when,’ as Davies puts it with succinct finality, ‘the time of our own land comes.’
