A bigger, better story

Looking around at the irrationality and destruction and rage tempts me to despair. But I drew some encouragement from C.S. Lewis this morning. It wasn’t current events that prompted me to pick up Miracles, but when I reread this passage I took heart:

Now there is no doubt that a great deal of the modern objection to miracles is based on the suspicion that they are marvels of the wrong sort; that a story of a certain kind (Nature) is arbitrarily interfered with, to get the characters out of a difficulty, by events that do not really belong to that kind of story. Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control.

The reader may set his mind at rest. If I thought miracles were like that, I should not believe in them. If they have occurred, they have occurred because they are the very thing this universal story is about. They are not exceptions (however rarely they occur) nor irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns. Death and Resurrection are what the story is about; and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables. If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worth pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what the story was really about? — that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were that main plot? And is it certain you were right?

There’s a larger, deeply hopeful story unfolding in this world, a pattern within which the current chaos — “atoms, and time and space and economics and politics” — is playing out. It’s a steadying thought. What role might the Author have in mind for us in this chapter?