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Fantasy and Geography of Faith
By Belden C. Lane

"We want to be able at last, through the power of story, to rediscover our own world. So, in our imaginations-late at night, with extra coffee poured-we stretch out on the wide table before us all the ancient maps that we've gathered... We reach for every possibility, in our ravenous effort to quench the geographical thirst that drives us. Through it all, we long to uncover new and unexplored landscapes of the imagination, realizing that the deepest human impulse is to 'map'not only what one knows but also what one hopes."

I have a small stone on my desk at home, picked up from a footpath in the woods near Magdalene College, Oxford, some years ago. There, in south-central England, the River Cherwell divides as it flows along the edge of the campus, leaving a small section of undeveloped land in its middle. They call it Mesopotamia, this land between the rivers, and around its edge is a walk named after Joseph Addison, the eighteenth-century English essayist and poet. Something happened on that footpath called Addison's Walk one Saturday night in September of 1931. 1 have kept the stone as a way of recalling that distant event because, in some strangely Celtic if not also sacramental way, it symbolizes for me the story as well as the place. It provides as good a way as I know to begin to explore the function of place and story in the operation of the religious imagination.

That night in 1931, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were strolling over the grounds of Magdalene College after dinner, listening to the water in the river, to wind rustling in the leaves. They were talking about myth, and Lewis said-rationalist that he still was at that time, before his conversion to Christianity-that "myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver." "No, they're not," argued Tolkien, just as a rush of wind sent leaves scattering all around them with a hush of mystery. Tolkien was a Catholic and a firm believer in the power of myth. "Look at those trees," he cried as they walked down the path, "We say the word tree and think only of some vegetable organism. We look at stars and have in mind a ball of inanimate matter moving on a mathematical course."

Belden C. Lane is Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. He is an editor-at-large for The Christian Century and, among his publications, are Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (1988) and a tape series on the uses of storytelling in ministry, Storytelling: The Enchantment of Theology (1981).

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But the first people to use those words, he said, saw things differently. Imagine the early Celts who passed here before us. "To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jewelled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things come. To them, the whole of creation was 'myth-woven and elf-patterned.' "¹ And they weren't far wrong, he added.

Tolkien went on to suggest that Lewis was stumbling over Christianity because he wanted to accept it only as an abstract system of thought. "Receive it as story!" he said. They went on to talk about the mystery of myth and metaphor and faith until three o'clock in the morning. That evening would form an important part in C. S. Lewis' conversion. Twelve days later, he wrote to a friend that he had just made the decision to embrace the Christian faith. He came to that faith, curiously enough, by having first been converted to myth, as he saw it coming alive in the woods that night amidst the familiar landscape of home. This joining of story and place would exercise his religious imagination for the rest of his life. In his novels, books of fantasy, and science fiction, he would try to create for his reader a place in the imagination where mystery could be accepted as normal, where faith could be tried on for size within the context of a coherent but alternative world.

I

Biblical religion always involves a joining of geography and narrative, the repetition of a story anchored in the living context of a specific place. Such is the nature of an inextricably historical faith, rooted in the incarnation. The task of the storyteller-the novelist or poet-is to create an alternative world, as authentic and true to its own principles as possible, into which the reader can enter by way of the imagination and explore new ways of being within the framework of this ersatz geography.

Eudora Welty, in her essay on "Place and Fiction," says that it is characteristic of good storytelling always to be bound up in the local. A story lives only to the extent that it evokes the fabricated realism of a place, to which the reader is readily able to go in her mind. It is place that lends narrative its sense of exactness, delivering it from vagueness and indeterminacy. Welty suggests that, if you were to take any story, lifting its characters and its plot out of the place in which it is set, and put it in another place, you would have another story. Try to imagine Wuthering Heights happening somewhere other than the Yorkshire Moors. Can you conceive of Huck Finn taking place on the Hudson River north of Poughkeepsie? Or the Grapes of Wrath being played out

¹ Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979), p. 43.

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in upper New England? She says good writing springs so wholly out of its place that it is as if the sap has run up into it like a tree.²

In the mystery of narrative, time may often be vague, taking the listener back to an indeterminate illud tempus, "once upon a time." But place is very specific, leading the listener by the hand to a locale readily imagined, bristling with its own smells, its own play of light and shadows-the back of a wardrobe in an old English house, Christopher Robin's cottage near Hundred Acre Wood, the slopes of Mount Parnassus at Delphi, the Bo Tree near the Ganges at Gaya. We first enter the story by occupying its place. The rest of the imagination subsequently follows.

The attraction of good stories is that they let us travel to new places where we can imagine living new lives and becoming new people. That is why so many of the great myths and sacred tales have taken the form of travel narratives. Gilgamesh travels to where the sun rises, across the waters of death, to learn the meaning of life. Odysseus returns home from Troy. Frodo makes his way to the Crack of Doom. Joseph Campbell's hero journeys into the land of night to bring back the day. Travel stories are always moving toward or away from home-evoking the desire of the unsettled to be settled and of the settled to be unsettled. Abraham, by faith, leaves home in search of a land that God will show him. Ezekiel is carried away into exile, weeping for a lost Jerusalem by the waters of Babylon. In stories of faith, we find ourselves situated between places, on the road toward home or launched into exile, forced into growth by reference either to the place behind us or the one ahead.

Place is the life of story, even as stories also give life to places. They feed each other. Two summers ago, I was in England, visiting, with my family, certain places connected with the Arthurian legends-places like Glastonbury Tor in Somerset and Tintagel Castle on the cliffs of the Irish Sea in Cornwall. These are wonderful places that seem, by the very power of their presence, to give rise to great stories. Or is it that the stories exist first-grand stories like those of Taliesin and Merlin and Arthur-and seek out appropriate places in which to set themselves? Which comes first, the story or the place? The glory of the one depends upon the consistency of the other. The story thrives to the extent that it is rooted in the particularities of place.

Perhaps no one has demonstrated this any better for us than Garrison Keillor. Much of his success as a consummate storyteller comes from the enormous sensitivity that he has for place. His Lake Wobegon stories are about a place where nobody has ever been, but it is so concrete and specific, so consistent and honest, that everybody

² Eudora Welty, "Place in Fiction" in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 116-133. Speaking to the issue raised by C. S. Lewis of the "truth" of myth, Welty admits, "Fiction is a lie. Never in its inside thoughts, always in its outside dress" (p. 119).

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has been there. We all know the place "where the women are strong, the men good-looking, and the children all above average." We have spent time in our imagination down at the Chatterbox Cafe with the boys eating Aunt Em's powdermilk biscuits on a cold February morning. There is the patent realism of Charles Kuralt's America in every one of Keillor's stories. He takes a place that does not exist and makes it as real as anything we know in reality.

Even the "non-existence" of Lake Wobegon makes sense within the "inner coherence" of Keillor's imaginative reading of Minnesota history. Why is Lake Wobegon not on the map, he asks? It's all because of the Coleman Survey of 1866. That's what left Lake Wobegon off the map. The state legislators, in that year, hired a team of Irish surveyors who had been attached to Grant's army in the Civil War. They'd been misdirecting it for years, he said. They were given the job of drawing up an official map of the state of Minnesota. When they arrived, they divided into four groups and began each working from one of the four corners of the state in toward the middle. Now, it was a hot summer and some of the surveying groups made faster time than others. They never did meet exactly in the center of the state, overlapping a good bit here and there. So, when they finished their work and tried to fit together the four different maps they had made, they wound up with more territory than could adequately be squeezed into the perimeters of the state. So, they had to leave out some of the places in the middle. And that's what happened to Lake Wobegon ....³ Even totally imaginary places burst into life for us, if their stories are told with enough integrity and consistency.

II

This imaginative creation of non-existent places provides an excellent study in the exercise of the religious imagination. Not all imaginary places are sacred, of course, but no place can function for us as sacred apart from the imagination. There is a process of world-making we all enter into as we are socialized into accepting the world around us and a process of world-dismantling in which we participate when we imagine new worlds and new possibilities beyond the limits of the one in which we live.

Tolkien spoke of the writing of fairy tales (and the making of fairy kingdoms) as an act of "sub-creation," entering into God's own imaginative work in designing a secondary world where truth may be lived more consistently than here. In a world such as this, one encounters the possibility of "Eucatastrophe," the unexpected breaking in of joy beyond the walls of a world bound by fear and despair.⁴

³ Garrison Keillor, The Prairie Home Companion, National Public Radio, August 4, 1989.
⁴ J. R. R. Tolkien, "on Fairy-Stories," in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), pp. 37, 68.

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Lewis himself remarked that,

since the Creator had seen fit to build a universe and set it in motion, it was the duty of the human artist to create as lavishly as possible in his turn. The romancer, who invents a whole world, is worshipping God more effectively than the mere realist who analyses that which lies about him.⁵

Simply to dismiss the making of fantasy worlds as escapist literature, Lewis and Tolkien argued, is to fail to recognize the importance of the imagination in questioning and dismantling the false and unjust structures of a world stubbornly resistant to change.⁶ In short, there is a subversive, even revolutionary, quality about fantasy literature and the imagining of alternative worlds. The blueprint for another universe of discourse calls into question the character of the one in which we participate.⁷

Admittedly, armchair fantasies of a change of place can be deceptive, as Thomas á Kempis cautioned.⁸ One too easily imagines that going to a new place means automatically being granted a new identity. Travel is never a guarantee of growth, as much as the impulse to pilgrimage is always stirred by that hope. Yet, each time we go to new places of the imagination through the magic of story, our old world is conceived differently. We are invited, like Abraham with his face set toward Canaan, or John with his vision of a new Jerusalem, to restructure the old after the image of the new. Again and again, it is place that holds for us the mythic possibilities for change.

The human psyche is so fascinated with the power of place that we continually make up new places of the imagination available to us only by way of story. Our health, as spiritual and myth-dependent beings, it seems, lies in dreams of imaginary places, remaining wholly inaccessible to us by ordinary means of travel. We love stories of unknown places-those not charted on any of the familiar maps. "True places never are," insisted Herman Melville.⁹ "True places" are those that occasion the joining of noumenal and phenomenal worlds, this world and the worlds of our dreams, in a way that makes palpable our experience of the sacred.

The history of literature-and of religions-is filled with accounts of invisible mountains, unexplored rivers, nonexistent deserts, and inaccessible

⁵ C. S. Lewis, as remembered by one of his students, John Wain, in his book, Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1963), p. 182.
⁶ Lewis once said in a review of Tolkien's Ring trilogy that "the value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by 'the veil of familiarity....' If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in the mirror [of myth]. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves." (Tolkien and the Critics, Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, eds. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 15-16).
⁷ Cf. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New York: Wildman Press, 1983).
⁸ Thornas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1, 8.
⁹ Herman Melville, Moby Dick chapter XII (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964), p. 88.

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islands that long to make their way onto cartographers' maps, in the same way as those bizarre animals of fantasy that kept appearing on the edges of ancient charts of the terrestrial globe. Griffins and wondrous dragons prowled the antipodes of a world we hardly knew. We have an insatiable thirst for places that do not exist, for places that symbolize states of growth we have yet to achieve.

Aldo Leopold, the American naturalist, was fascinated by rumors, found in seventeenth-century Spanish journals, of a great river running east from the Andes, a river without beginning and without end, known as el Rio de la Madre de Dios, the River of the Mother of God. While appearing on some early maps as a short heavy line falling into the Amazonian forest, it never was found. He described it as a "perfect symbol of the Unknown Places of the earth," pleading in one of his wilderness essays for the preservation of land that remains undeveloped and even unknown. The human spirit, he thought, requires the existence of, if not accessibility to, places of great imaginative power and mystery.¹⁰

Repeatedly in the history of religions, one finds reference to landscapes of the imagination, used as a way of describing the deepest longings of the human spirit. The maps to these places are always sketched in metaphor. One needs imagination to be able to read them.¹¹ One thinks of Barry Lopez' whimsical description in his book Desert Notes of how to get to the desert of mystery and meaning:

There is, I should warn you, doubt ...about the directions I will give you here, but they are the very best that can be had. They will not be easy to follow. Where it says left you must go right sometimes. Read south for north sometimes. It depends a little on where you are coming from, but not entirely. I am saying you will have doubts. [But] if you do the best you can you will have no trouble.¹²

As is often the case in the effort to "get" to a sacred place, the traveler has to be guided by a deep need to reach it.

Rene Daumal, the French poet and orientalist, left an unfinished fantasy novel at his death in 1952, in which he described in vivid detail a mountain so high that its summit remained inaccessible, a mountain that was invisible under usual circumstances because of a peculiar property of the curvature of space. Yet it was a real mountain that existed geographically and could be found only by those who experienced great need. He recounted the events of an extraordinary expedition to this mountain, undertaken by a group of people "for whom the impossible no longer existed." It was not accidental that he wrote at a time when Mount Everest, the highest, unclimbed mountain

¹⁰ The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, edited by Susan Flader and J. Bard Callicott (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 123-127.
¹¹ Cf. Phillip C. Muehrcke and Juliana 0. Muehrcke, "Maps in Literature," The Geographical Review 64/3 (July, 1974), p. 319.
¹² Barry Lopez, Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven (New York: Avon Books, 1981), p. 75.

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of the world, was very close to being "conquered," as some people described it. After Everest, there would be no more "inaccessible" places in the world, wholly beyond human control. Yet such places, he knew, were absolutely (and mythically) necessary for the health of the human spirit.¹³

This is why invisible landscapes remain so important in the mythologies of all the great religions. Every twelve years, at Allahabad in northern India, a great Hindu pilgrimage, the Triveni, is made to the point at which three sacred rivers converge-the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the Saraswati. The third river is the most sacred of all, but it is not to be found on any map. This is a mythical river, having long ago disappeared from the earth, thought now to flow underground, in the hidden fields of the spirit.¹⁴ This is an imaginary river, sacred to Hindu believers in a way similar to the imaginary mountains of Mt. Meru and Mt. Kaf, sacred to Buddhists and Muslims respectively. Mt. Meru is hidden somewhere in the Himalayas, a mystical mountain 80,000 miles high, from which the sacred rivers of the world all flow. Mt. Kaf is a cosmic mountain rising out of the deserts of Iran and serving as the "mother" of every mountain on earth, being connected to them all by subterranean branches and veins. One must walk for four months "in the darkness," in mystical prayer, to reach this magical peak.¹⁵ One must need to go there.

We have a longing for places that are unknown, affording no entry-accessible only by deep need, serendipity, and grace. From Augustine's uncharted island of paradise to the surreal landscapes of Heironymous Bosch, from the non-existent Seven Cities of Cibola to the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino, the Western imagination has given birth to abundant geographies of the mind.¹⁶ The whole enterprise can be seen as an effort in what William James described as "truing it," acting "as if" a reality were present to such an extent that, in effect, it actually is brought into being.¹⁷ Having been granted the grace of living creatively in the story of what "might be," the reality of what "is" can no longer be the same.

Garrison Keillor admits that, from one perspective, what he is about as a storyteller is "telling lies" about places that do not exist. But from another perspective, he views that very act as one of the deepest exercises of faith. Artfully imagining non-existent places can be an

¹³ Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974).
¹⁴ Cf. Tony Heiderer, "Sacred Space, Sacred Time," National Geographic 177/5 (May, 1990), pp. 106-117.
¹⁵ Cf. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 74-75.
¹⁶ Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi offer a Baedecker of fantasy places in literature in their Dictionary of Imaginary Places (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980), Umberto Eco makes a study of the real and surreal places of American culture in his book, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986).
¹⁷ Cf William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays (New York: Longmans, Green, 1897).

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expression of one's yearning for the Kingdom of God. He puts it this way:

...[T]he reason you tell lies about a wonderful place is that you believe that if you get every detail right-absolutely right, and every character in that story has exactly as many hairs on his or her head as he's supposed to have-that if you get it absolutely perfect ... you will be lifted up out of this life and you will be set down in that wonderful place that you've told lies about. And all your lies become true.¹⁸

He keeps telling stories with the hope that ultimately he will be able to live his way into them. That is why we all tell stories, loving those tales that begin to give form to a world that is not yet here.

III

This concern for bold and imaginative "sub-creation," as Tolkien calls it, can be understood still further within the larger framework of biblical theology. The task of world-making (and world-dismantling) lies at the liturgical and theological core of biblical faith.¹⁹ David Clines, in his study of the narrative character of the Pentateuch, makes this claim:

What is offered in a story is a "world"-make-believe or real, familiar or unfamiliar. To the degree that the hearer or reader of the story is imaginatively seized by the story, to that degree he or she "enters" the world of the story.... The Pentateuch ... performs [this] function of creating a 'world' that is ... unlike the world of the reader, and that invites the reader to allow the horizons of his own world to merge with those of that other world.²⁰

The Torah functions as an alternative cosmos into which people are invited by faith, imagining themselves able to live like Abraham or Moses, Sarah and Miriam, entering their stories as if they were their own.

Storytelling in the Scriptures involves an intricate process by which imaginative worlds are made and others unmade. Jeremiah speaks of his double function as Israel's bard in the sixth century BCE, telling stories that pluck up and destroy, and other stories that plant and build (Jeremiah 1:9-10). At its best, the task of singing tales becomes a ritual act by which the story of Yahweh's reign is not only remembered, but reenacted in the moment of its being retold. In the retelling, existing kingdoms are challenged, a new world constituted.²¹

¹⁸ Garrison Keillor, "News from Lake Wobegon," cassette tape (Columbia, Missouri: American Audio Prose Library, n.d.).
¹⁹ Terrence Tilley, in his book, Story Theology (Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, 1985), speaks of "Stories That Set Up Worlds" as well as "Stories That Upset Worlds."
²⁰ David J. A. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1978), p. 102.
²¹ John Dominic Crossan, in his provocative analysis of the parables of Jesus, understands him often to be functioning as a "linguistic Bolshevist," challenging the structures of expectation by which his listeners put together their world. Cf. The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Allen, Texas: Argus Communications, 1975) and Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges (New York: Harper & Row, 1976

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Walter Brueggemann describes this process in his study of the enthronement psalms as they were used in ancient Israel's annual liturgy recognizing Yahweh as king. Here the great stories of the past were retold-stories of deliverance out of Egypt and out of Babylon, stories of God's liberating triumph on behalf of God's people, when they were slaves and exiles, long before finding themselves safely settled under the monarchy in Jerusalem. He emphasizes the liturgical power residing in this act of retelling. "The moment of the creation of the new world is not the moment of the triumph, but the moment of the telling."²² In its liturgical setting, the act of singing the tale brings about a dramatic actualization of God's world-not just a "commemoration" of what had been but a "making so" of its reality in the present moment. The world is remade each time the liturgy is reenacted.

Miriam's dance in Exodus 15 in celebration of Yahweh's triumph is to be repeated again and again as a liturgical event of transformation. The dance of the women against Pharaoh becomes a way of dismantling a world of tyranny and despair, showing it to be not nearly as permanent and secure as it may seem. The imagination is thus awakened to a world (Yahweh's world) that has been known in the past, and will be known yet again in the future. "In the very act of unpermitted dance, the world is transformed."²³ The stories are whispered over and over at night in the slave huts of Egypt and Babylon, even in the streets of Jerusalem, calling the people to hope, even to acts of civil disobedience, in response to the liberating world now formed in the act of telling. If this does not happen-if God's new world does not break into the present through the creative repetition of the tale-then the liturgy degenerates into a matter of bureaucratic routine, serving simply to legitimate the way things are.

Biblical storytelling and its place-conjuring process, therefore, can function in a highly subversive way, calling for justice, pointing beyond the dominant order of the world as we know it, to a new world taking shape in the act of courageous telling. The prophet Jeremiah, for example, provokes a radical reorientation of the way Israel conceives of the world. At the very time when the king of Babylon stands at the gates of Jerusalem, threatening its destruction, when all is lost, Jeremiah buys a plot of land-now absolutely worthless-as a stubborn and resilient sign of promise. According to the God of Israel, he insists, "Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land" (Jeremiah 32:15). He sees a new geography of hope even now to be rising out of the ashes of defeat.

A little later, the same prophet writes a letter to those already

²² Walter Brueggemann, Israel's Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), p. 49.
²³ Ibid., p. 42.

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carried into exile. He has the nerve to ask them to pray for the welfare (the shalom) of the city into which they have been taken captive. He insists that Babylon is not entirely what it seems-a place of despair and defeat. In God's imagination it becomes, of all things, a source of Israel's welfare-a place for their healing (Jeremiah 29:7).

This is a landscape of fantasy, not yet existent, brought to birth by an act of faith and given shape in the religious imagination. Of necessity, it moves beyond fantasy to substance, requiring that new maps be drawn, that land be purchased in anticipation of a reality taking shape in the eyes of faith.

IV

The mythic energy contained in geographies of fantasy came home to me once again recently. My daughter and I, both lovers of Tolkien's fantasy, were able to see an exhibition of his letters and illustrations written and drawn over the years (between 1936 and 1949) that he spent working on The Lord of the Rings. It was in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, a place architecturally rich in fantasy itself. There we saw Tolkien's first rough map of Middle-Earth-a number of yellowed pages glued together, erased here and scribbled-over there, as the detailed geography of that alternative world had gradually taken form in its creator's mind. These were places that had never existed, but we recognized them all-the oak-lined lanes of the Shire, the dark forest near Tom Bombadil's house, the scorched and barren expanse of Mordor. We had walked them often in our reading of Tolkien's books. But being in Oxford and looking firsthand at such a map made the places tangible to us once again.

Oxford and its university have far more connections with places of fantasy than one might expect. Charles Dodgson, the mathematics don at Christ Church, made up stories for the young daughter of his academic dean, writing Alice in Wonderland under the name of Lewis Carroll. C. S. Lewis, fellow in English at Magdalen, imagined the floating islands of a planet called Perelandra, as well as the castle at Cair Paravel, home of the kings and queens of Narnia. Charles Williams, an editor at Oxford University Press, penned novels, like The Place of the Lion, that intersected this world with the world of magic, even occult, possibilities. J. R. R. Tolkien, Professor of Anglo-Saxon Literature, began writing his Hobbit tales as an entertainment for his children. George MacDonald of Aberdeen never lived in Oxford, but his ghost surely did; no one was more esteemed than he within its circle of scholarly fantasy writers. His magic forest in the book Phantastes and his mysterious world At the Back of the North Wind served as models for all those who would follow him.

Who were these creators of other worlds at Oxford? A motley group of men at middle-age, university types-baggy tweeds and meershaum pipes, lecture notes sticking out of their pockets and books on Chaucerian English under one arm. Several of them formed a group

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called the Inklings. Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and a few others met on Thursday nights at Lewis' rooms in Magdalen College, wandering in after nine o'clock, when Old Tom, the great bell at Christ Church, had finished tolling its 101 strokes. They would pour tea or fill up glasses with beer, light their pipes, and then discuss literature (anything from Dante to Milton) or read each other the fantasies they had themselves written most recently. On Tuesday mornings, they would meet at the Eagle and Child Pub before lunch, a place they nicknamed "the Bird and Baby."²⁴

The Inklings created stories out of whole cloth, fascinated as they were with the role of language in making and unmaking worlds. Tolkien had first created an Elfin tongue with its own runic alphabet and subsequently developed a geography in which it might be spoken. They had two passions: for place and for story, asking always how God's hidden presence could be discerned in the world through the power of myth. They were drawn to the places of Icelandic folklore with its compelling sense of "Northernness," to places no one had ever been (from Narnia to Middle Earth), to places they might visit on their next hiking tour through the Cotswolds. One of the dreams of Lewis and his brother Warnie was to compose a pub map of England, drawn on the basis of their own sampling of spirits at every local inn.

It was non-existent places that engaged them most, because these were places that allowed them a fuller entry into their own world. They knew that fantasy, at its best, never takes one away from reality but more deeply into it. A child who reads a story about enchanted woods is not going to despise real woods as a result. Instead, what will happen is that he or she looks at real woods with a deeper appreciation of their unseen mystery. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis confessed that, as a child, he had never been very impressed by the garden and the woods behind his house. At least, not until the day that his brother Warnie brought into his bedroom the lid of a biscuit tin on which he had arranged a miniature landscape of moss, garnished with twigs and flowers-a toy garden with a tiny forest beyond it. "That was the first beauty I ever knew," Lewis recalled, gazing with wonder at the meticulous detail of the little world before him. "What the real garden failed to do, the toy garden did." Because of the toy garden, he now took a closer look at the real garden as well.²⁵

That, after all, is the goal of every ritual act that engages itself in the making of other worlds. That is why we succumb to the lure of sub-creation. We want to be able at last, through the power of story, to rediscover our own world. So, in our imaginations-late at night, with extra coffee poured-we stretch out on the wide table before us all the ancient maps that we've gathered from dusty libraries through the years. We compare the most recent charts, exact and detailed, that

²⁴ This seems to have been an exclusively male club, to which women were not invited. One imagines that Dorothy Sayers would have been a delightful addition to the group.
²⁵ C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1955), p. 7.

408 - Fantasy and Geography of Faith

we've ordered from government mapping offices. We dig out barely-legible notes scratched on the backs of old envelopes, drawn from our readings of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. These notes describe, in the coded language of mystery, bizarre places that do and do not exist. We lay out timeworn atlases, treasure maps from the back of old cereal boxes, directions scribbled down for us years ago by an old man at a desert gas station in Moab, Utah. We reach for every possibility, in our ravenous effort to quench the geographical thirst that drives us. Through it all, we long to uncover new and unexplored landscapes of the imagination, realizing that the deepest human impulse is to "map" not only what one knows but also what one hopes.

The trick is to be able to see the one world overlapping and breaking into the other. To do that, we have to be able to read our maps in two different ways. They need to tell us exactly where we are, as well as pointing us toward where we long to be. To the extent that they plot the existing contours of our world, these charts have to be trustworthy. As Saul Bellow reminded us in Mr. Sammler's Planet, "All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality. It may be boring, but one has to know where he [or she] is."²⁶ Accuracy is required in faithfully mapping the world around us. Getting to the new place is impossible without knowing where it is that we begin.

But we also have to recognize that every map is a metaphor. It suggests far more than what immediately meets the eye. No map is ever completely and precisely "true." It invariably sacrifices truth in one dimension in order to demonstrate it in another.²⁷ That is why maps demand interpretation. They have to be read with a lively imagination. W. G. Hoskins, the great English geographer, once remarked that "poets make the best topographers."²⁸ The skillful map reader has to be able to discern what isn't readily seen, keeping an eye alert to that terra incognita always hidden within (and beyond) the world as we know it.

This is what Tolkien tried to convey to Lewis that Saturday night in Oxford in 1931. His invitation to an exercise of the imagination was an invitation to faith. In the joining of story with place, geography with myth, we all are summoned to a double reading of the maps by which we live. Mircea Eliade described that cartographical encounter as offering an experience of sacred space, a return to the "founding of the world," in which "the real unveils itself" and we know ourselves existing anew in a world that is joined to its center.²⁹ There we, too, are surprised by joy and, in returning to the earth beneath our feet, called to see it transformed in the shape of justice.

²⁶ Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, 1971), p. 208.
²⁷ Phillip Muehrcke and Juliana Muehrcke, p. 329.
²⁸ W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 1.
²⁹ Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1959), p. 63.