Wonderful Alice!

About a year ago, the film ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was shown in our cinemas. Think back to the mid-nineteenth century, before mass media and marketing could propel books into the Hall of Fame. It was an illustrator and a writer who came together to create one of the best-selling children’s books of all time.

The author was an unmarried clergyman and a maths lecturer, who appreciated logic and satire. He lived most of his life at his Oxford college. His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; but he is better known by his ‘nom de plume’, Lewis Carroll.

One day he told a story to the children of his friend, the Dean of Christ Church, based on one of the Dean’s daughters, Alice Liddell. It was full of riddles and imaginative characters, including the child heroine who grew and shrank rapidly throughout the tale. So, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was born.

This world, where a large Cheshire cat grins down from a tree; where a mad March Hare entertains at a tea-party and a domineering Queen repeatedly shrieks, ‘Off with their heads!’; plus a world of odd verses like:

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘To talk of many things;
f shoes and ships and sealing wax,. Of cabbages and kings,
And why the sea is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings’

is full of nonsense humour and we enter a very strange world indeed.

Why should we adults enjoy the zany, the odd, the bizarre, the literally nonsensical? Normally we’re at pains to make our world as rational and predictable as possible. The ordinary is a matter of getting up, going to work, seeing friends, watching telly. The extraordinary might be – seeing a volcano erupt, looking down from the top of Mount Everest, surviving forty days in a boat!

But really this is an arbitrary distinction – for everything is extraordinary, and a religious person might almost be defined as one for whom nothing is ordinary any more. Rather, the nonsensical questions our matter-of-fact way of looking at the world, and evokes in us a sense of the extraordinary nature of the ordinary, like ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

Not long after Jesus’ death the first Christians experienced what they called the coming of the Spirit, and the Book of Acts goes on to say, ‘A sense of awe was everywhere.’ All good gifts come to us from God, but one thing in particular the Spirit is seeking to do, and that is to open our eyes to the fabulous nature of the world about us; that nothing is ordinary any more, for we live in a Wonderland.