Safe? Of Course He's Safe

he's the king, I tell you

If you grew up in Narnia, this is one of those quotes that haunts the corners of your spirituality. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children discover that the king of Narnia is a Lion. That sounds dangerous! Is He safe?

“Safe? Who said anything about safe?” snorts Mr Beaver. “Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good! He’s the King, I tell you!”

Mr. Lewis, what a terrible thing to teach small children about God - that “God is not safe but God is good,” as if safety and goodness can be separated from each other.

It’s easy to try and dismiss Lewis’ “not safe but good” by using examples from Narnia of when Aslan is extremely safe and also good, but I am also a bit haunted by that terrible, horrible story of Aravis in The Horse and His Boy. Aslan chases her in the night and attacks her as punishment for the suffering she causes her servant, so that she’d know what it felt like to be hurt that much, and teach her a lesson about pain through more pain, about violence through more violence.

I will love C.S. Lewis forever, and Aslan is still my God figure along with David Tennant’s Doctor who will always be my Jesus figure, and there is still beautiful and holy truth to mine from Narnia - but holy shit, this image is a really scary way to have your imagination formed about God as a tiny kid.

Imagine if when we were very young, our parents gathered us up and said “I will always be good to you, but I am not necessarily safe. Maybe I’m a little dangerous. Probably you should be a little afraid of me. But I’m definitely a good guy. It’s all for your own good.”

This is maybe an awful example, because a lot of our parents did actually do that, but not explicitly? We were told that they were good, that they were doing everything for our own good, but sometimes they hurt us and were scary and they felt unsafe. So we built a fake category in our brains called “unsafe but good” for intimate relationships, and what could go wrong with a category like that built into our brains??

I wish I could pin all of this on the evangelicals, but terrible parenting based on fear-called-love is everywhere. Pretty rough, though, that evangelicals took that terrible parenting and then made it a Divine trait. Unsurprising that so many people leaving the evangelical church leave Christianity altogether, because how do you re-see the traits of God - grace, compassion, love, merciful - when those words themselves got all twisted around so that they also kind of meant the opposite too? “God is Love but God’s Love is also JUSTICE and justice means hurting people until they Love God back!” How do you see the phrase “God is Love” ever again without it being moldy and corrupted? Some people just can’t, and have to walk from the whole idea of Christian religion, and honestly that seems pretty fair to me.

For those of us still wrestling with Christianity, and trying to see a God who is safe, we just keep trying to break the old enchantments and cast new spells that help us see a God whose love actually means love, and whose goodness is always safe, because that’s what goodness means.

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. - C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

There is a chapter in The Artist’s Way, a book about creativity and art, that is called “Recovering a Sense of Safety.” The book is not a cozy book - it’s bracing and challenging and a lot of work. I’ve started it six or seven times and not gotten through it completely, because it’s asking me to wrestle with things that feel really hard, or overwhelming, or that I’ve buried.

The foundational message of this difficult book, though, is clear - unless we feel safe, we can’t take risks at all. Unless we feel safe, we can’t move into the difficult questions or move past our resistances or push forward when we’d rather sit down or give all we have to the poor and follow Me. Until we “recover a sense of safety,” our inner artist will be all tied up in shoulds and fears and regrets and perfectionism and shame.

The concept of a dangerous God was hard for me to let go of, because I was worried that if I wasn’t at least a little bit scared of God, I’d never do anything difficult or take risks or be bold. I thought fear was the only possible motivator for resisting sin.

Turns out this is absolutely just not even a little bit true!

Unraveling evangelicalism has been a big step for me in recovering a sense of safety. It has meant learning that God is good, and God is also safe, and those things exist together in the infinite wildness of the Grace of God.

—

I mean YES, God is also infinitely wild!

There are parts of what Lewis is doing that resonate. God is unbound. “He’s not a tame Lion,” Lewis repeats. I still love this so much. This way of talking about God catches the philosophical idea of “the sublime” - things that are too great and wild and spacious and free to contain, that takes you entirely out of yourself in shock and terror and joy. This is a vast, unmeasured, boundless, free God. Maybe Lewis’ central intention was to shake the apathy of the church culture as he experienced it - a contained religious expression, where nothing, not even the holy, was breaking in to secularism, and nothing breaking out.

Lewis didn’t find a tidy God compelling, and hunted for holiness in wildness. An untamed Aslan feels sacred and true, like the stories of God in the Hebrew Bible - God in pillars of fire and smoke, shaking mountains, parting oceans, collapsing walls, controlling and containing and in the entirety of the wild natural world.

God is untamed feels better to me than God is unsafe, though, even when adding the qualifier God is good.

I think this is because evangelicalism is obsessed with fear, creates fear, nurtures fear, and only lives because of fear. If there was no fear in evangelicalism, the whole system would collapse. Evangelicals often translate “God is not safe but God is good” not so much to mean “we stand on the edge of the holy, and taste something untamed and sacred in the wildness of God’s mercy,” but that you are a sailor, and the storm has come in and you are unprepared, and also Jesus is not going to wake up in the boat to calm the storm.

Probably because you were bad and are being punished.

How are we telling our small children and our own small souls that God is not safe; that God could hurt us at any moment for our own good; that there is an unpredictability in God that could end up harming us; and that that harm is for our own good.

Living in that kind of fear of God will never make us brave; will never help us give up all we have to follow Him; will not not keep us soft and tender to our neighbors; and will not draw us to God in the intimacy the mystics long for.

Evangelicalism always told me out loud that the point was to be close to God, but then so much of their theology assumed a type of closeness that thrived on low-key fear, and I’m reading too much of Krispin Mayfield’s work on attachment theory in theology to be very tender towards that idea any more.

—

I love C.S. Lewis. I think Lewis was better at the things he didn’t think he was best at. When he writes apologetically, to prove points, not only are a lot of his points a bit sloppy, but there is a sharpness to his writing that feels self-satisfactory. When he writes from where it hurts, or from where he is tender or vulnerable, or when he wrestles with his own questions, his writing feels softer and wiser. So I’m still pretty tender towards him, and want to think the best of him, even when I think he’s wrong.

I do love God as a wild Aslan who is big enough to with us when we rise on the wings of the dawn or settle on the far side of the sea. When I stand on the rocks on the coast of New Hampshire and watch waves hit the rocks and seagulls are calling and it feels like being on the edge of magic, the edge of wildness, the edge of holiness - this is a taste of something a bit on the edge of safety, but also good.

God is the deep purple storm coming in, waves breaking on sharp rocks on the New England coast.

There is holiness there, and sometimes C.S. Lewis had words for what that untamed holiness was.

Jesus, though, is the final word about what God looks like. And when storms overwhelmed the disciples, Jesus was the safest thing.

Jesus doesn’t walk across the water in a blaze of terrifying glory, demanding the trembling worship of his friends. God in Christ made safety out of what was unsafe, and said to his Beloveds, It is I! Do not be afraid.

This is the last word about the nature of God - Jesus, coming across the waves, saying that because He is here, the disciples don’t have to be afraid.

When God arrives on the scene of whatever storm we’re living in fear of, God’s response is always - because I am here, you are safe.

—

It’s incredibly difficult work unraveling those stories about how being scared of God is a good thing and will make us better people and bring us into closer intimacy with God. I use C.S. Lewis’ own enchantments against him, though - on my desk is an old homemade watercolor painted with just the one line from Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

Courage, Dear Heart!

We can be much braver when we know that we are always safe in the Love of God, and that “dear heart” is always our name, and that the heart of God towards us is always gentle. A lot more is possible when we believe that. The life we live out of that belief - that we are infinitely loved and infinitely safe - will be a much kinder and braver life than one we cobble together from fear, shame, and guilt.