Aslan's Strength

Aslan's Strength returns by Celia Redgate "O children," said the Lion, "I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh children, catch me if you can!" He stood for a second, his eyes very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing himself with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their heads and landed on the other side of the Table. Laughing, though she didn't know why, Lucy scrambled over it to reach him. Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. (From The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis.) The whole thrust of the Christian faith depends on and revolves around Christ’s resurrection from the dead. So too in a greatly scaled down ways do we as individuals, communities and even nations go through times of renewed ‘resurrection’ after passing through various ordeals that may have lasted a very long time, emerging from them with renewed hope and strength. In wild winter weather we once held a conference in a remote centre in North Wales. This was at the time when the Iron Curtain was on the point of coming down in the late 1980s, and we were praying hard for Eastern European countries to be set free from the communist yoke. At one point we found ourselves plunged into darkness as the power went off, giving us an additional sense of identification with Romania, which was suffering power outages as that time. Nothing daunted, the musicians promptly started playing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nacht Musik in the dark from memory! Within the year, the profoundly repressive hold President Ceausescu had exercised for so long over the country was broken, and a new day dawned for Romania. Celia Redgate had prepared some pieces for the under-10s to play at this event, based around CS Lewis’s tales of Narnia. The imagery and the music are so rich! What a joy to have been able to record them now, many years later. May we likewise draw our strength in and from Him, whatever ordeals we may have to pass through in the course of our pilgrimage. Musicians: Anthony Thompson, Francis Cummings, Philippa Barton, Christiane Mueller, Jo Garcia