Coming home after a night out, mind on anything else, I somehow stumbled into a very specific memory, for probably the first time in years: The day I took my third-grade teacher Mrs. Bell aside, the next year, and shared with her my concerns that Aslan might possibly be Jesus.
I’d trusted Mrs. Bell implicitly with stories ever since the time she burst into tears at the end of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes—she got it. She was a subject of Terebithia, if you know what I mean. So when she said, essentially: “Yeah, it’s called an allegory. Please don’t ruin it for everybody,” I was disappointed. To me at this age, it was the Santa Claus conspiracy all over again, more of the same. I trusted her, and she’d turned out to be just another Episcopalian robot, I mumbled to myself. “Here it is again: The Machine.”