You’ll find here some insightful talks by Ken Myers (Mars Hill Audio) and Matthew Dickerson (The Mind and the Machine, A Hobbit Journey) that help us recover the imagination and recognize its significance. Enjoy.
Life and Culture
Life As A Night Terror
Imagine this: Night Terrors.
I was eleven. I dreaded the night time and so a visceral and physical something thickened in my belly and chest as evening approached. I was sent to bed, and even before I crawled into bed, I knew whether it would come tonight or not. Sometimes the feeling was not there, but when it came, I knew with certainty that sleep would bring to my dream world things not easily spoken of: night terrors.
I was having them with greater frequency, and this terror had become a rather constant drum beat of my young prayer life. God save me. I tried to explain the terrors to my parents, but it all came out rather jumbled, and the visions didn’t sound as terrifying to my parents, or to me, for that matter. I knew that my descriptions had not done them justice.
And then that thick feeling of doom descended on me at dinner, and I knew that tonight I would dream again. This was my dream: I am at the edge of a twenty story high rise. I fall over the edge and plummet to the ground. I feel the wind and the rise of my stomach into my throat and, finally, I feel my skin and then my bones and bodily organs hit the immovable pavement…but I do not die. I only agonize in pain, unable to even writhe or check my kidneys because I am broken and mashed all over.
The fall has not awakened me. I am still in the terror and I can feel the earth tremble as though an enormous beast gallops my direction. I open my eyes and see a machine with a rolling pin on its front— like the machines used to crush and level asphalt roads—and it is rolling in my direction. It moves with inevitability and the earth rattles my crushed form. I try to scream, but my lungs are crushed. I cannot breathe. I reach out my hand to stop the machine, but my hands will not budge, and then it is rolling over me; first, my feet, then my knee caps, and it moves toward my head.
This is the point at which I woke up. At least, my reason told me I was awake, but my imagination painted a different picture, told a different story. My imagination, and my physical body as a result, told me that the catastrophe really just happened. I was convinced that it happened. I checked my feet. They could move.
Every night it was the same: night terrors became a regular and unwelcome bed fellow. After one night terror, I needed to use the restroom and this was evidence that my bladder worked: some good news. This is how I remember things: I am standing in the bathroom, staring at the mirror, adjusting my world—body and imagination—to “reality.” The terror slowly subsides and I move to use the toilet when, quite unexpectedly, the machine comes through the bathroom wall. It moves slowly, but it is huge, and there is nowhere to run.
If my parents remember this event in my life, they will tell you that they found me huddled in the corner of the bathroom by the toilet, weeping uncontrollably. They will tell you that they spent many minutes—how many, I cannot tell—trying to persuade me that there was no machine, that I was only dreaming, and that I was safe. My imagination had fully accepted a new reality and placed me in an unmerciful story of anguish. It was my imagination, that synthesizing and unifying function of the mind, that needed convincing, and so my parents had to open my eyes and give me new images to overcome the old ones: no broken wall, no machine, no high rise buildings.
Dad helped me use the restroom and lead me to bed where I worked overtime to believe what my parents had told me. I am sure that sleep eventually found me because I was in a terror again and facing a new twist this time. This time, I am in my room upon my bed and I know, somehow, that my sister and brother are in grave peril. I know without a doubt that they will die horrible deaths, and I also know that the only way to save them and to save the rest of my extended family is for me to do the unimaginable and eat them.
Yes—eat them.
I am in a catch-22 that I cannot explain, but that I know exists, and I know the only way out is to perform what I cannot perform. I also know, without a doubt, that my siblings are hanging, imprisoned, in ropes attached to the ceiling above my bed.
No rolling machine this time, my lungs have enough oxygen to scream for help, but I know that doom will fall upon them if I scream. I also know that whoever has placed me in this impossible dilemma will come any moment and I will be out of time. There is no exit strategy, no door of escape, so I can only weep. Sobs wrack my body and my imagination begins to buckle under the strain of this unbearable thickness. I weep and weep and weep until my father, hearing the sobs, comes in and sits down next to me. He holds me in his arms until I am awake. Again, my reason is awake, but the story in my imagination, the worldview which now swallows up all others, is still quite relevant and active, so I will not look up. My father and mother probe for reasons, but I cannot give them a reason. I know, even though half asleep, that it will sound ridiculous when it comes out of my mouth, and I cannot afford to so mislead him. My poor parents have spent all night consoling me and reasoning against unbridled panic. I explain the situation to them in whispers. My face is still burrowed into the pillow.
“Nobody is making you eat your brother and sister,” Dad says. Oh, how naïve he sounds to me. I remain burrowed. “Look at the ceiling, son.”
I shake my head, ever so slightly.
“They’re not up there.”
He quietly prays by my side for a few moments. I begin to sob again.
“Tell me why someone would make you eat them?” he asks.
I cannot tell him. I know that, but I also know that he is fighting the fire of the imagination with propositions—logic will not fly.
My brother and sister are standing next to the bed. My weeping has woken them. I know this in my mind, but my imagination is locked upon one particular story. I am even more terrified than before.
“Look up, son.”
I will not. He moves my body and head and I resist.
He is stronger than I am, but the fright grows, and even as he forcibly moves my face, I weep uncontrollably and squeeze my eyes closed.
Dad’s hands cup my face and point me upward. “Open your eyes, son!”
I won’t.
“Open them! Nobody’s on the ceiling.”
Still, I won’t.
“Your brother and sister are right here by your side.”
Yes, but the fear is also here. It broods over every breath I take.
“Son, you need to believe me.”
Belief is hard right now.
“I promise.”
This is something, at least.
I open one eye. That is the beginning of a reawakening from terror. My father leads me from bed to bed and makes me look upon their empty beds and then he makes me look into their bewildered and sleepy faces. The fright subsides, and so I collapse in a heap of emotional, mental, and spiritual exhaustion. Dad carries me to bed and tucks me in.
How did my father combat such a wild imagination? He started by making appeals to reason, but he did not settle for logical defense alone; instead, he replaced one image with another image. He replaced the false image with the true one. Dreams are sometimes a picture of our entire lives. Some of us have survived the terrifying. Some are still not out of the metaphorical woods. The outcome is very much in doubt. For many people, life is a kind of prison camp, a brutal existence where pain is the common denominator. The imagination takes all these events we would rather forget and synthesizes them, integrating them, and finding correspondences. We need the Truth, biblical doctrine, to point the mind’s eye toward God, as he actually is. Our faces, our imaginations, our hearts and minds, are cradled in God’s hands and he calls to us. The night is pitch dark, but he has given us a torch by which to see the path: “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105).
The imagination needs a guide. It needs a touchstone; namely the Scriptures. God has given us an imagination so that we might look for him and find him. He has set our souls on pilgrimage and surrounded us with signs, pictures, that point back to him.
Dreaming of Skulls
Christianity is a religion of metaphors, analogies, types, and shadows. All these are only understood by imagination and for this reason, “imagination is indispensable to theology” (John M. Frame). And theology is indispensable to imagination. The doctrines of the Christian religion are theological boundaries that keep the imagination synthesizing and pointing in the right direction. More than that, to imagine is to perform a theological activity because every faculty of the mind participates in divining the divine from what we experience. To imagine, to synthesize, to integrate experience into a whole, to find correspondences in the world—all these are theological activities because God is calling to us through our imaginations. He has given us the means by which to see as He sees and by which we might move toward Him. “We know that the Son of God has come and given us understanding to know him who is real; indeed, we are in Him who is real, since we are in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, this is eternal life” (1 John 5:20).
Since we are pilgrims in search of home and since our home is found in God, it behooves us to find the directions He has given to us. Christianity, as it abides by the Scriptures, has an unswerving commitment to God’s Truth. It is utterly dedicated to the myth that is as true as any fact, and as hard as a rock; namely, that the God of the mountain has come down and taken on human flesh so that He might die for His people and, thereby, appease His own holy wrath for their revolt against him. The Gospel, the godspell, is the good story of God bridging the divide between the infinite and the finite. We were in rebellion and would not, could not, bridge it on our own. Jesus Christ, the son of God, is that bridge and because he is both the image of God in flesh and “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, He is the means by which the imagination is trained and the only way for it to flourish. The entire Old Testament points to Him with every detail and every metaphor and every song. The entire New Testament points back to Him with every exhortation and metaphor and story. The imagination needs the Scriptures as a prevention against self-destruction. Thankfully, my mother and father taught me this concept my whole life and I will teach my children the same.
After three years in Africa, we came home for a brief furlough. I was seven, maybe eight, and I was on U.S. soil for the first time in three years. There was plenty to keep a boy’s imagination active in Africa, but having limited exposure to television or movies, I was unprepared for Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was but a child whose senses had never so vividly encountered the skeletons around every corner or the melting off of a human face by the spirits of the dead.
We were staying with my grandparents in Pennsylvania at the time and we were sleeping in their basement. After watching that movie, I could not bear to go downstairs at night or in the day. I began to see those faceless faces everywhere. The fear paralyzed me for at least six weeks. My wise mother sat by my bed and read from the Psalms while I stared at the ceiling and begged for every single light to be left on. She wrote a verse on a sheet of paper each evening and taped it above the bed where I slept. Because we were traveling on furlough, the bed was a new one almost every day, but God’s word remained a firm bedrock during a tumultuous season of life.
“May the Lord answer you in the hour of trouble!
The name of the God of Jacob be your strong tower.
May He give you help from the sanctuary and send you aid from Zion!” (Psalm 20).
“God is our shelter and our refuge,
a timely help in trouble;
so we are not afraid when the earth heaves
and the mountains are hurled into the sea,
when its waters seethe in tumult…” (Psalm 46).
“Be gracious to me, O God, be gracious;
for I have made thee my refuge.
I will take refuge in the shadow of thy wings
until the storms are past” (Psalm 57).
Suddenly I remember baby chicks and a furious hen. I will hide beneath those wings, for only beneath them will I find safety. The Truth has begun to work, slowly, upon my imagination. The Truth replaced one picture with another one.
Vestiges of that fear still linger with me in my adulthood. The old fears will crawl up to the surface of my imagination, restoring to me the images of death, if I simply hear the soundtrack to that movie. The John Williams theme song, musically wonderful and adventurous, can nonetheless pull me down into a vague creepy-crawly terror. The verses that Mom read to me were not like magic pills. I wished they were magic pills, of course, but the fear did not leave me the first or second night, nor even after a few weeks. Still, the Scriptures worked upon me gradually. The verses soaked into my imaginative bones until I could decipher the pictures that were false and believe those that were true.
The Crane’s Claw
The imagination, overloaded as it is with sensual pleasure and distraction, needs a touchstone, a frame of reference by which to be anchored. Remember the cranes? The legends suggest that during the journey they will land for short respites. Huddled together, they will select one of their members to keep watch. That crane lifts a stone in one claw while standing on the other. The stone provides that crane with a focus point for his sleepy mind and if he falls asleep, he will drop the stone and wake not only himself, but those whom he was to protect.
The medieval bestiaries were a wonderful example of imaginative vision: they saw symbols everywhere. To those medieval Christians, the cranes represented us on our pilgrimage and the stone represented Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life. Our safety on this pilgrimage depends upon our holding Christ and focusing all our attention upon him lest we drop the Touchstone. Not only must we fly as high as the crane, we must also be alert like the crane.
The healthy imagination so necessary for our pilgrimage depends not only upon a right trajectory toward Beauty, but a knowledge of the Truth. This knowledge is what keeps the imagination from feeding on every sense experience and all the particulars of our lives as though every single one were a source of nourishment. By analogy, we can put nearly anything in our mouths, but not everything we put in our mouths will be nourishment to our bodies. Because the imagination has an appetite, we would do well to feed it properly for the sake of the soul. There is plenty of spiritually poisonous gas in this life of ours, but God has given us the tools by which to find the Truth and to expose false imposters.
Truth certainly speaks into our reason and the propositional training of the mind is an important equipping process for discerning Truth. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of reason in the life of a Christian disciple and there are many valuable books on the topic. But there are more ways to apprehend Truth than reason. As Thomas Howard shows so eloquently, we find the Truth in propositions like the book of Proverbs, the Gospel sermons, the apostolic writings, and the law of God. We also find the truth in history, where it takes not the form of proposition, but narrative. We find it in the Psalms where it comes in the form of poetry and dance. In the prophets we find the truth in startling images like a woman clothed in the sun and in the parables we find the truth couched in anecdotes. Finally, we find the Truth best expressed in the incarnation where it is embodied by Christ for all men to see.
Scientific experiment and verification is not the arbiter of facts. Though very few will admit it, even scientists work from certain assumptions about the natural world just like a logician works from certain premises. These assumptions, these life premises, are based in stories. No matter how they are told, whether in textbooks or in song, these stories are creation stories, stories that tell us where we came from, where we are going, and what we are doing along the way (Dickerson and O’Hara). This fact does not remove my ability to know something truly, but it does verify that there are many ways to know: I know facts about my wife. Yes, but I also know my wife poetically, as a best friend only can. Even more so, I go into the bedroom and close the door, and we know each other intimately.
God has also given me the imagination as an instrument of seeing, and therefore of knowing. The imagination helps me to know poetically, three-dimensionally. By the imagination, I take all three ways of knowing just listed—factually, poetically, and intimately—and create a whole picture or story that provides meaning in life.
What instrument of the mind synthesizes our experiences, facts, assumptions together in search of correspondences that tell a meaningful story? The imagination. What serves as a directional basis for the journey of the imagination toward God? Beauty. What keeps us upon the correct road as we move toward God by means of the imagination? Truth.
Once again, I’ve planted tomatoes in my garden. I like tomatoes, unless they’re canned or boiled. The plants looked fine when I first put them in the ground, of course, but now it’s August and they’ve sprawled spinelessly all over the garden. I like tomatoes. I don’t like tomato plants. They are ungainly, unbridled droopers and stinkers.
I am at a friend’s house. It is still August. He has a small back yard with a garden tucked into the corner by the garage. I like gardens and so I snoop while he’s up at the house. He has a thick and happy crop of blueberries. He has pumpkins and cucumbers and herbs. He has tomatoes, too. His tomato plants rise like a vine along a 2×2 post and his tomatoes hang like pearls along fruit bearing branches—a lot of tomatoes. They look like they’re from an advertisement and I begin to think there’s a catch. My friend joins me in the garden just in time to catch my blossoming suspicion.
“Where did you get your vine tomatoes,” I ask. I’m waiting for him to shuffle his feet and confess that they’re plastic.
“O, those aren’t vine tomato plants. These are just regular ‘ole tomato plants. What lots of people don’t realize is that tomato plants produce better with a couple of minutes of attention each day. You know how on a tomato plant you’ll have the main stalk and the main branches growing and then you have these little nutrient suckers that will pop out from the inside elbow where the stalk and branch meet?”
He shows me the “sucker branches” and I recognize them as the driving characteristic of my plants at home. I nod and smile.
“Well, those are the ones that will outgrow all the fruit bearing branches and use up all the nutrients. If they’re allowed to grow, then they’ll restrict the output of actual tomatoes and sometimes choke out the plant.”
The imagination, while essential for accurately perceiving the world and ourselves in the world, is like that tomato plant. It will bear fruit in action. What we are concerned with here is how to train the imagination so that it does not become unwieldy and undisciplined as a result of negligence. Like our emotions and like our reason, the imagination will feed on whatever it is given, and if it is not pruned periodically by the Truth, then it will synthesize our life experiences into a story that is self-contradictory and possibly self-destructive. A destructive story leads the soul away from God. Since the imagination is the tap root of the soul, it is the imagination in line with the Truth that will lead the soul back to God.
Here is where we run into some trouble again. Since you and I have grown up in a world that believes Truth is relative, our imaginations and, therefore, our souls, have nothing to guide them. We choke ourselves at the deepest point with our own metaphysical freedom and autonomy. I’d like to suggest that if we are the epiphany of God, the offspring of His imagination, and the expression of His love, then He would not send us whirling into a cosmos void of absolute meaning and objective Truth. He would not leave us stranded in this world without a map to guide us toward home. He is calling us back to himself by speaking into our imaginations and he has given us not only a map, but the pruning shears of the imagination that we so desperately need. They are called, in my tradition, the Old and New Testament Scriptures.
I say “my tradition” because it is the one in which I was raised. Indeed, it is not mine—I did not find it. It found me. It is the one I have come to love and embrace as my own though I was baptized with hardly a clue as to the nuances and profound claims of the Christian faith. I say “my tradition” because there are many religious traditions clamoring for an audience and, thankfully, Christianity is not one of them. As C.S. Lewis put it, not all roads radiate from a circle and we will not gradually draw nearer to the center if we follow them long enough. We live, “rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision…It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection…I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road” (from the preface to The Great Divorce).
The road that leads to God is found exclusively in Christianity. In its most faithful expressions through history, Christianity has always been the most unassuming of religions. Ironically, it is also the one that begets conviction, nobility, and a love for martyrdom by preaching a life of servanthood.
Christianity is a religion of irony.
Irony can only be understood by imagination.
A Quote From Geoffrey Chaucer
“All men know that the true good is Happiness, and all men seek it, but for the most part by wrong routes—like a drunk man who knows he has a house but can’t find his way home.”
-the knight in Chaucer’s A Knight’s Tale
Life Without Toad
How fondly I hold hands with our narcissistic society. Nearly every corner of my life preaches a gospel of self-satisfaction, that a vibrant life is found strictly in the satisfaction of personal desire. But the road to a vibrant life is found outside and above self—only when we transcend egocentric gratification. A vibrant life is found only in the pursuit of Joy and Joy has as its object something—Someone—outside of self. That object is Beauty and the source of all beauty is God. For this reason, every pilgrim journey must be a thrust away from self-preoccupation and toward Beauty.
This spiritual pilgrimage is about pursuing something higher and outside of myself; it consists in pursuing Beauty, True North, in order to reach God. Our animal existence is no longer enough. Like the prodigal son, we can set aside eating husks and lean toward home.
How then do we lean toward home? Again, I believe that God is calling to us not only through suffering, but primarily through Beauty. It is essentially and effectively, in our longings, that God speaks most. Even in suffering, in darkness and wilderness wandering, Beauty has a magnetic pull on the soul. As we pursue ultimate Beauty, not her footprints alone, then we amplify the natural integrative ability of the imagination and give it a higher calling. Imagination has to work at a higher pitch to discover the enchantment or glimpses of Beauty, hidden or not, wherever she looks. An imaginative vision trained upon Beauty will find Beauty not as a fixed point but an expansive horizon, like her source: God. God’s creation cannot contain Him and the scent of Beauty is not the same as Beauty himself.
We do well to remember that God (Beauty) is so far above us that He must stoop down, as I believe Calvin once said, and lisp in our childish ears. He is primary Beauty. Every other expression of Beauty is less than primary, like smaller, more manageable bites of ultimate Beauty. Were God to rip open the great blue heavens like a curtain and present himself in all His Beauty, I would be vaporized by the sheer glory of His being. Thankfully, God knows our frame. He speaks to us, therefore, in baby-talk, using small words and gentle tones, so that we might follow His voice and cross the ravine that divides the finite from the infinite by means of the imagination which He has supplied. Jonathan Edwards echoes this truth when he wrote, “as men, when they teach children, must teach them after their manner of thinking of things, and come down to their childish capacities, so has God taught us concerning himself” (Jonathan Edwards).
Edwards serves as a wonderful guide in this search. Unfortunately, he is best remembered for his thundering sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” We misunderstand much of that sermon because we do not understand its context within his larger body of work and his life’s pursuit. For Jonathan Edwards, God’s Beauty and the resulting grace that pervades our existence was the only worthy imaginative and soul pursuit. Only with deep sadness over his congregation’s hard heart did he preach that sermon. He hoped beyond hope that his congregation might be moved by repentance to engage the imagination and pursue, with him, the glory of God. For Edwards, Beauty was “the central motif through which he [understood] the world, God, virtue, and divine things” (Edward Farley). For Jonathan Edwards, Beauty was True North—a compass point that lead straight to God.
By placing Beauty at True North, I am not calling for a Philistinism which turns Beauty into a means for self-fulfillment, a tool for our use. Neither am I calling for a renewed Aestheticism which claims Beauty for Beauty’s sake. Our souls long not for Beauty alone, but for God. We are set on pilgrimage by God, not by Beauty. Jonathan Edwards’ view of primary Beauty provides us with a view of Beauty that finds its source in God. Edwards lifts our vision above and beyond the footprints left by the wave upon the sand. We wander from the path as soon as we make this pilgrimage about us or our self-realization. Our self-fulfillment and self-realization will be a by-product of our pilgrimage toward God. Because we are the expressions, the epiphanies, of God’s imagination, we will be fully at home only when we return to Him. We want the vibrant life, but the way to the vibrant life is ironically found only by looking for something besides the vibrant life. If we put our imaginative nose to the ground and begin the hunt for Beauty, then the vibrant life grows up around us.
Like Toad in The Wind in the Willows, our imaginations slumber in a deluge of sensual overload after a life-time of drunken obsession with pleasure. God rouses us from our shallow stupor by giving us pangs of Joy, tastes of Beauty, Sehnsucht: crumbs along the trail that will lead us to Himself. This, then, is sanctification, the experience of faith: an unselving flight toward the One who selves us with himself. “Coming from God, then, and going to God are one and the same thing…a pilgrimage into the infinite, a journey from nothingness into God’s beauty, forever” (David Bentley Hart).
Nearly Naked With No Place To Go
I was headed to a cabin on the lake with my two eldest children. We had been there once before. It’s not a cabin, really: granite counter tops, sprawling deck, glass rails. The time promised to be a good one. The Sehnsucht was strong and we relished the longing. I turned on the radio. Advertisements. I fished for a station with music. We found one. This tune was hip and thumping and catchy: “I’m coming out, so you better get this party started”.
My son wrinkled his nose and plugged his ears.
My daughter’s peers listen to this kind of stuff. She was curious. I left it on.
“…I’m coming out so you better get this party started
Get this party started.
Making my connection as I enter the room
Everybody’s chillin’ as I set up the groove
Pumping up the volume with this brand new beat
Everybody’s dancing and they’re dancing for me.”
My daughter wrinkled her nose and shook her head. I was glad for her aversion and so I bobbed my head and waved my hands, disco style. I rolled down the window and turned up the radio to share my dance with the world. My children writhed in pain and begged for mercy. I should have been more generous. Indeed, my generation had its own musical expression of personal empowerment. We are the Michael Jackson and Madonna generation.
Most of the world has outgrown Madonna and we cling only nostalgically to Michael Jackson. We’ve set the table for songs even more tuned to our self-gratification. We’ve raised the stage and set the lights for our current priests who preach a gospel of perpetual youth. One of those more recent priests is Jay Z and his song “Forever Young” was a chart topper. Allow me to sing you a few lines:
“So we livin’ life like a video
Where the sun is always out and you never get old
And the champagne is always cold and the music is always good
And the pretty girls just happen to stop by in the hood
And they hop they pretty ass up on the hood of that pretty ass car
Without a wrinkle in it today ‘cuz there’s no tomorrow,
Just a picture perfect day that last a whole lifetime.
And it never ends cause all we have to do is hit rewind.
So let’s just stay in the moment, smoke some weed, drink some wine,
Reminisce, talk some shit.
Forever young is on your mind.
Leave a mark they can’t erase, neither space nor time
So when the director yells cut, I’ll be fine
I’m forever young.”
I can say it no better than Thomas Howard: “That ain’t the way it is, baby.”
It’s tough to be too hard on Jay Z. He doesn’t realize how quickly he’ll be defrocked. He hasn’t figured out that the rewind button sometimes breaks or that he will someday get old—even the pretty girls and the pretty…well…nice car. What mark do we leave on the world by sitting on cars and flirting, smoking, drinking, and talking shit? What if that’s a mark we’d rather someday erase? And what if the director yells cut and the curtain falls and I’m nearly naked with no place to go? If that’s what life is all about—if life is only about staying in the sandbox and holding onto this single moment of dissipation—then I want out of the proverbial sandbox. There’s got to be more to life than that.
Toad wanted to stay in the sandbox. Swept up in every passing fancy, Toad became fortune’s fool. When we first meet Toad in The Wind in the Willows, he is a pie-eyed buffoon who chases anything with an engine, anything with power and zoom. The inheritor of Toad Hall and a load of spending money, Toad wanders the byways in search of something to keep his short attention span busy.
“Glorious, stirring sight!” cried Toad when he saw the car. “The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O my! O my!”
His friends, Mole and Rat, try desperately to give him some sense, but Toad can’t seem to help himself. He makes resolutions, of course, and like most of us he breaks them. Toad’s compass was set to personal pleasure and he did anything possible to avoid discomfort. He confused titillation with happiness; personal pleasure was his religion and, therefore, he moved not toward transcendent Beauty, but away from it.
Our trajectory during this sojourn, with or without suffering, depends on which direction we take as a means to communion with God. A vibrant life, a Joy-entranced life, is had only by those heading in the correct direction. Beauty is true North. If we move toward Beauty, we move toward God, and we will find Joy. So this spiritual pilgrimage requires a daily attentiveness to the shadows, the footprints, the fingerprints, the road signs of beauty—of eternity. Every created beautiful expression is a road sign pointing toward True Beauty. None of them are the destination. None of them will satisfy because none of them are the object of our Sehnsucht.
Food? A taste of pleasure, a facet of Beauty. “Not here, not yet,” says food.
Further up and further in.
Entertainment? An emotional charge that quickly fades and needs more. “Not here, not yet,” says entertainment.
Further up and further in.
The next i-gadget? A fleeting attainment of possibility. “Not here, not yet,” says technology.
Further up and further in.
Sex? A taste of euphoria, of deep fellowship, of climactic pleasure, but the morning comes, and so even sex says, “Not here, not yet,” Friendship? Fellowship, but fickle. We cannot hold friends in a permanent stasis. “Not here, not yet.” Vacation? Come and gone again. “Not here, not yet.”
Further up and further in.
These are the signs, the footprints.
These alone cannot deliver the vibrant life. So we spend our lives trying to build bridges from the finite to the infinite, from ourselves to ultimate Beauty, but our bridges are made of passing pleasure and cannot span the divide. Persistently dedicated to satisfaction, we chase the pleasure until it is no longer pleasurable: sex, food, friendship, leisure. Pilgrims who glut themselves upon these things will find themselves bloated and sick. These are only the taste of Beauty, her footprint upon the sand. How quickly we lose the trail, the scent, and find ourselves barking up an empty tree. The vibrant life evades us because personal pleasures are not the source of Joy. We need the eyes of the soul, the imagination, to see beyond these things.
Until then, we wait and watch for Joy, but the image or physical quivering, the sense of Joy is only “the mental track left by the passage of Joy—not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand” (C.S. Lewis). It was only the footprint in the sand meant to draw my eyes down the beach to their source, who even now waves at me to follow hard after him.
A Quote from Rich Mullins
“There’s so much beauty around us, and just two eyes to see…but everywhere I go, I’m looking.”
-Rich Mullins