The Faith of A Marshwiggle

Steadfastness from an unlikely source

by Selah Bell

As a young Christian homeschooler, my friends and I all lived and breathed The Chronicles of Narnia. Nowadays, when I run into someone and discover that they were also homeschooled, I can simply ask them about their favorite Narnia book as a way to break the ice. It works about 90% of the time.

My favorite is and almost always has been The Horse and His Boy. I loved getting to hear about Tashbaan, loved Aravis, loved the way Lewis used this book in particular to further flesh out Edmund’s redemption arc, and so on and so forth. If you read the books in the order Lewis wrote them, this absolute masterpiece is followed by my least favorite book in the series, The Silver Chair.

Please don’t be mad at me, I know it’s a great book; I know that it was technically published before The Horse and His Boy; I know a lot of people have very strong opinions about which order you should read specific books in; but even more so, I know that in some ways this book felt like a bit of a letdown after reading my personal favorite.

One of the best things a good author can do is observe the world, understand what they are seeing, and then use a story to show the rest of us what they’ve seen and why it’s so important. In Andrew Peterson’s book Adorning the Dark, he explains that truly good stories don’t just give us an escape from the real world, they illuminate and enhance it, enabling us to see the reality of our lives with fresh vision and understanding.

Though The Silver Chair as a whole is one of my least favorite in the series, it contains one scene that I think about more than almost any other, this being when The Lady of the Green Kirtle uses her magic to try and convince Jill, Eustace, Puddleglum, and Prince Rilian that Narnia isn’t real.

Everything I said above about a good author illuminating the truth, even through a fictional setting, is probably the thing that Lewis is best known for. Regardless of whether or not the specific term allegory should be applied to Lewis’s fiction, it is clearly and deeply symbolic. From Aslan’s sacrifice to Eustace’s transformation from boy to dragon to boy again, Lewis covers so much of what it is to be a Christian. As a child, I knew what these scenes signified, but not having lived very much, I didn’t feel in them the weight that I do now. This is particularly true of my favorite scene from The Silver Chair.

The first time I remember actively wrestling with my faith was when I was about nine years old. Before then, I had just believed in God because that’s what my parents taught me, but as I got older and started learning about other religions, I started to wonder about them. Specifically, I began to wonder why I believed they were wrong and mine was right. As I got even older, my thoughts weren’t limited to other religions, I started wondering whether there was any God at all.

Like the characters in Narnia, I know what it is to live in a secular world and what it’s like to contemplate whether this might actually be the only world. My experiences are by no means unique. I know for a fact that most of my friends have asked the same universal questions in secret, not knowing that others were doing the same. Fiction isn’t reality, but to know that something is such a universal experience that it makes its way into children’s books has given me so much comfort over the years.

I’ll admit that sometimes fictional representations of human flaws and struggles can seem gratuitous. However, Lewis’s great skill is not merely in depicting all the hardest parts of being human, but also in showing us the possibility and means of triumph. So, when this witch of Underland claims that both Narnia and Aslan are too good to be true, that they are simply exaggerated versions of the real (and dull by comparison) world, it is only right that the least fit should be the one to fight her lies.

Of course, in this case, the least fit is Puddleglum—a character who is very intentionally the least hopeful of his companions. Although in this scene, he himself isn’t entirely sure what is or isn’t true, he manages to say, “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Not to be dramatic, but in all my years of reading, I have yet to discover a metaphor for faith that even begins to compare.

September 24, 2025 - Release of The Song of the Stone Tiger, a middle grade fantasy novel by Glenn McCarty
November 2025 - Release of Joe the Fourth and the King’s Crown, a lower middle-grade novel by Mary Barrows
November 2025 - Release of I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry, our illustrated children’s poetry anthology edited by Rachel S. Donahue - Preorder on the Kickstarter Platform

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“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.”
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird