Past Watchful Dragons

Lewis in his great essay on writing for children talks about the challenge of writing stories that bear the reality of the gospel but without the doctrinal and interpetive baggage that adults want to place on the simple story. Says Lewis, "I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could." There is something about us preachers and teachers that sometimes doesn't want to trust the power of the story itself. Somehow we feel the compulsion to tell people what the story means, instead of letting the story do it. I suppose in a sense that's what preaching is -- explaining the story. But maybe our preaching and teaching become the "watchful dragons" that prevent people from feeling the grasp of the tale. George MacDonald, Lewis's literary mentor, in his great essay The Fantastic Imagination compares these things to the experience of listening to a sonata: "If two or three men sat down to write each what the sonata meant to him, what approximation to definite idea would be the result? Little enough -- and that little more than needful. We should find it had roused related, if not identical, feelings, but probably not one common thought. Has the sonata therefore failed? Had it undertaken to convey, or ought it be expected to impart anything defined, anything notionally recognizable?" Can we trust that the story of Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit will rouse in those who read and hear what can and should be roused? Jesus seemed content to tell gospel by simply telling stories. Why must we post watchful dragons of explanation and doctrine at the door?