Removing our Dragon Skins - A Matter of Grace

Elder Dale Whitman
Senior missionary, Hong Kong

I have been learning more recently about the writing of C.S. Lewis. Of course, Lewis was not a Latter-day Saint, but he was a profound thinker and writer about Christianity, and one of the most popular English writers concerning Christianity. It can be quite enlightening to compare his views with our understanding of the restored Gospel. 

Lewis' book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, tells the story of Eustace, a boy who is the cousin of the Pevensie children from "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe," with whom he goes on an ocean voyage to a strange series of lands. Eustace is a brat – an obnoxious, complaining, and unpleasant boy. He becomes separated from the other children and finds a dragon's cave filled with treasure. He is transformed into a dragon as the result of sleeping on a dead dragon's hoard of treasure with "greedy, dragonish thoughts" in his heart. He very much wants to return to being a boy. There is a beautiful pool of clear water nearby that he believes will cleanse him if he can rid himself of his dragon skin. However, he discovers that, while he can peel off his dragon skin, there is simply another dragon skin underneath it. After trying three times to remove the skin, he gives up in discouragement.

Then he is approached by Aslan, the lion, who represents Christ in all of the Narnia tales. Here is Eustace's explanation of what happens:

Then the lion said – but I don't know if it spoke – 'You will have to let me undress you.' I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you've ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.

"Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off -- just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt -- and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobby-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. There he caught hold of me -- I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on -- and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again..

"After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me . . . in new clothes -- the same I've got on now, as a matter of fact. And then suddenly I was back here."

Eustace's dragon skin represents the "old person" – the one that we are to leave behind when we come to a "newness of life." But Eustace discovers that, even though he would like to leave the old ways behind, he is unable to do so. Only with the help of Aslan, who represents Christ, can he do it, and it is even then a painful experience, at least initially.

Lewis proposes that this is a fundamental principle: that we cannot change ourselves in the fundamental way that a new birth contemplates, and that such a change can be brought about only with the intervention of Christ.

The term often used by Protestants for this intervention is "grace." Perhaps surprisingly, it is not a term we use very much in the Church. In general, "grace" means a gift – a benefit extended to someone, not because they deserve or have earned it, but because the person extending it has love and concern for the beneficiary. I want to suggest that the scriptures use the word in at least two different senses.

Perhaps the way we are most likely to use the word in the Church today is to refer to the atonement itself. The concept of grace, in this sense, is that the atonement was a gift – a gift from the Father in giving his Son, and a gift from the Son in suffering for our sins. I think that this is the sense in which the word is used in 2 Nephi 25: 23:

For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.

But there is also another, more preliminary sense, in which grace must act upon us. We cannot take full advantage of the atonement unless we repent, experience a newness of life, and change. The problem is that we cannot change ourselves to the necessary extent. So it is the influence of the Father and the Son that must help us change, and put off the old person, just as Aslan helped Eustace put off his knobby dragon skin and become a clean person again. The ultimate goal of this grace is to help us learn to keep all of the commandments – indeed, to have no desire to break them. I believe this is what Moroni meant in his final words in the Book of Mormon:

Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God. [Moroni 10: 32]

We need the grace of God to be perfect – indeed, even to begin to approach perfection. C.S. Lewis put this in another vivid metaphor:

If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.

If we try to change ourselves, it is easy to become discouraged, as Eustace did in trying to put off his dragon skin. We need to remember that repentance itself is a gift of God – a product of God's grace, and to seek that grace in our lives. That we may do so, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.