The Jabberwocky and Spiritual Warfare

Once words leave our mouths or our pens, they are no longer ours. They belong to the listener or the reader and are subject to their interpretation no matter the speaker or the writer’s intent.

And in this mysterious process of making meaning out of life, both the writer and the reader are often surprised.

For example, while editing another chapter in my memoir about my adoptive mother’s near fatal car accident, I realized, as a fourth grader at the time, I had no concept of her brush with death or its possible consequences on my childhood.

This was evidenced by the fact that even though my mom was in the hospital fighting for her life with a ruptured spleen, broken ribs and a broken pelvis, a punctured lung, innumerable contusions and a severe concussion, the night of the crash, I put on my flannel pajamas and said the prayer I’d been taught as usual,

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord, my soul to take. God bless…everybody I knew starting with mommy and daddy.”

As a ten-year-old, it never occurred to me to beg God to keep my mother from dying. Death was beyond the boundaries of my cozy bed. God was only a concept, and my rote prayer was simply a long string of words I didn’t completely understand. I might as well have been reciting a verse from Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky.  

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!”

This mention of the Jabberwocky wasn’t in my previous draft of my memoir. So why did it appear in my latest version? Perhaps because my church has been going though Ephesians chapter six which discusses spiritual warfare. My mind connected the spiritual battle that was going on for my mother’s life, and the future of my childhood with a poem that uses nonsense words to make its case for combating the ever-present evils of this world.

The child hero in the poem takes up a vorpal sword and strikes the fearsome Jabberwock with a snicker snack. The long time manxome foe is vanquished, and although Lewis Carroll uses words he made up, his meaning is clear, the beamish boy has slain our worst enemy, Satan himself. At least, that’s the way the author’s words resonate with this reader.

My point is to set our words free into the universe is a brave enterprise, never knowing how they will be received or what work they will do in another’s inner man.

Writers wish their works to resonate. In other words, by portraying a universal problem we’ve wrestled with, we hope the truth we’ve discovered echoes in our reader.

As a child, I didn’t know God as he knew me, yet the Almighty was already fighting on my behalf in ways I could not see.

But now, knowing His amazing grace in my ordinary life, “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

I take my vorpal sword in hand to write of God’s glory and kindness.

That fearsome accident happened on a dark day in March not unlike this one, yet my mother survived to love me well.

SNICKER-SNACK!

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” 

Ephesians 6:10-12 (NIV)

Cover photo by Philip Myrtorp on Unsplash

Copyright Ann C. Averill 2023