The Deplorable Word

Monday Morning Restart - 5/27/24

Hello everyone,

Welcome to another week! If you didn’t notice, last week Ryan sent out his first post in his guest column here on The Modern Quest:

Now, on to today’s show.

The Deplorable Word

I finished the Percy Jackson series, well at least the first five books and I don’t have the desire to read all of the twenty or more books Riordan has published in that series. They were fun. For my next fiction book, I picked up The Chronicles of Narnia, which I have not read all the way through since I was in high school. I am in The Magician’s Nephew and I came across something interesting last night.

Digory and Polly have been tricked into leaving our world and find themselves in a wood in between worlds. Digory convinces Polly to let them explore other worlds before going back to ours. During this process, they find a place called Charn and Digory awakens the Queen, who later becomes Jadis, the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Jadis begins telling them the history of Charn and exactly how she got to the situation she had been in.

She was at war with her own sister over the throne of Charn. She new what she called, ‘the deplorable word’, which she knew would end all of life besides hers in all of Charn. She decided not to speak it unless completely necessary. In her words, the situation unfolded to where her sister forced her to speak it - she had no choice. It was her sister’s selfishness that made her destroy all living things.

So, the witch spoke the deplorable word and, sure enough, every living being in the world of Charn was killed, except Jadis.

“Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun.”

“But the people?” gasped Digory.

“What people, boy?” asked the Queen.

“All the ordinary people,” said Polly, “who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.”

“Don’t you understand? said the Queen. “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”

The witch obviously represents Satan. The distinction between Satan and God is that Satan will sooner rule over an empty world than give way to God. And God, a loving Creator, wants all of His creation to be with Him. Satan will destroy the world for the sake of his own pride.

But there’s something else here too: Sometimes we act like Jadis. Our worldly pursuits will get in the way of our souls. We will become busy chasing our careers, raising our kids correctly and properly, sports, travels, etc. If we are not careful, we will end up sitting on a throne we’ve created, looking down at the nothingness of our life if we don’t keep priorities in the proper order. None of those things are bad or evil, necessarily. We just need to remember what the great philosopher Ferris Bueller said,

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” - Ferris Bueller

That’s all for now, see ya next time.