Life and Culture

I was still working through significant health problems at the age of thirty-four and did not know that it would be a year of death and a year of resurrection. I could not move my legs. I could not move my hands. My body trembled and nobody knew why. I was strong enough to attend a banquet one night, but felt the onset of tremors—wave upon wave. Afterward, I made it to the car, but I couldn’t pick up the keys. My fingers wouldn’t work. I fumbled to pick up the cell phone and push one number: speed-dial home. When my wife answered, I tried to speak, but my head was shaking too much and my words got scrambled on my tongue. They would not come out except in lurches and I felt like I was learning to drive a stick shift in my mouth.

“Trouble,” I said, but it took me some time to say it.

“I in,” I said, but it took even more time.

My wife called my parents for help. When my mom and dad drove up, they found me sitting helpless in the driver’s seat of our van and sitting in an empty parking lot. I They helped me into the driver’s side and dad drove me home while mom followed with their car. I was a child again. I thought like a child. I spoke like a child. I felt an overwhelming urge to lie down with my head in his lap like I used to do when I was a child. Dad helped me into bed. My dad and mom drove home to stay awake, stare into the night, and pray.

I was curled up in a fetal position on the bed. My wife holding me like a child and whispering into my ear. I was awake. And then I was in a dream, but I was awake and there was an immense desert spreading out from beneath my feet. I felt a boundless chasm-like immeasurability stretching out on every side of me. I knew it was not real: I could still hear and feel my wife next to me, but I could not climb out of the vision and into what we would call reality.

In my dream, I felt myself pulled by each hand in two opposing directions. I looked to my right and there was my wife holding onto my hand with both of hers (though she was still holding my body and whispering to me in reality). Behind her, my dear children pulled on her. Behind them and, likewise, pulling, were my parents and siblings and the line seemed to grow to include my peers and my students and church family and basketball team. Off in the distance was a great and towering city that I knew was filled with people whom I loved. All of those lovely people pulling me with all their meager strength.

My other hand was also pulled. I felt another hand holding mine with a dynamic force so magnetically overwhelming that I knew my surrender to that presence was only a matter of when, never a matter of if. I knew with unparalleled certainty that my wife and family’s grip would fail and that the city of loved ones in its entirety would fall away. The feeling of inevitability terrified me. I turned my head to see who, or what, pulled with such uncontestable vitality and I saw God, or I knew that I had seen Him. I saw neither face nor body, but it was as though I had seen both. It was a mystery that swallowed me.

All my terror and perplexity of soul were not eased by the glorious vision of divinity. They were amplified. I was devoured by the pervasive, comprehensive, and incomprehensible, and in that moment, I was the happiest I have ever been in my life. I felt terrified, brittle, like a china mug still falling to the ground and I felt happy, like I would burst. Both at the same time.

Behold, I felt George MacDonald’s cry echo in my soul: “My harvest withers. Health, my means to live—All things seem rushing straight into the dark. But the dark is still God.” In that moment I knew what it was to worship the wellspring of all my joys with fear and trembling. In that moment, I knew what it was to simultaneously fear God and call Him “Abba.” I knew with Orual in Till We Have Faces that “I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one…and he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming.”

I knew, also, that what I had all along called reality was not comprehensive enough. It lacked dimensionality and a clarity which that vision presented. That dream of God pulling me gave new color to my present life. I was an invalid, fetal-positioned and trembling, but my desires, my imagination, were scampering along highlands of lush greens. I was panting as a deer longing for water and I knew where that water was found. It is found in the desert, in the bewilderment, in the terror, in the suffering and in the presence of God for he did not leave me in the suffering alone. This is the Joy inexpressible! So I will not be dragged into the wilderness, but will go willingly because God spoke saying, “now listen, I will woo her (Israel), I will go with her into the wilderness” (The Book of Hosea chapter 2).

God was not testing my faith in order to find out its quality (C.S. Lewis). It is I who had not measured its buoyancy. It is I who knew not its durability nor the power of its wing.

Was the dream a spasm of the brain, a hemorrhage in the imagination? No. It was the imagination drawn to the lip of the horizon that separates us from the eternal enchantment of the Trinity and dangled there for a moment: great suffering and great joy. Things difficult to communicate. I knew in some small degree, but first-hand, the terror and exultation of Mary and of Moses before the presence of the Angel of the Lord. I knew, first-hand, what it was to believe with my heart, mind, soul, and strength what hitherto felt like a meager intellectual and emotional exercise. I realized more vividly than before that while our emotions, senses, and minds are vehicles for encountering God, our imaginations are a powerful vehicle God uses to draw us to himself.

We pant as a deer for water and the water is found in the desert, in the bewilderment, in the terror of suffering: in the presence of God. The path toward God is filled with suffering for “in the long journey out of the self, there are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places. Where the shale slides dangerously and the back wheels hang almost over the edge at the sudden veering, the moment of turning” (Theodore Roethke).

The Christian life is a continuous stream of “moments of turning” because it is a vocation of worship, a pilgrimage toward holiness. True worship is an expression of both joy and terror in the presence of God’s holiness. Suffering, like singing and eating and laughing, is a form of worship: we worship well or we worship poorly. Suffering is simultaneously our unmaking and our remaking.

People travel from all over the world to fly-fish the St. Joe. Celebrities find momentary anonymity while fly-fishing: waders, vest, and fly pole are the accouterments of common humanity. Peasant and president alike bask in the light that sifts through the thick greenness of trees and passes through the clear water until it dances like lightning upon the sudden movements of a trout.

The St. Joe has become a favorite for my father and me. The fishing is especially enjoyable when my eldest daughter joins us. Her wrists are still stiff with the pole, but she has learned to allow for the drift of line and fly. On one fishing trip, my father –or Papa, as my children call him—ventured upstream and my daughter stood between us. Her fly landed hard upon the water’s surface: she was still learning. I saw a bend in the river and the evidence of a trout haven. I saw the curve of the stone wall, the shade of the trees, the surface of the water, and the delicate play of insects upon the surface and I knew. I have fished nearly my whole life and these things speak as truly as any computerized diagnostic tool, more truly, perhaps. Those tools are sometimes wrong. I am sometimes wrong. But I was drawn to the distant unknown, to the possibility, by the eternal what if of my longings and I believed that I was right this time. I found a place to hide amongst the larger stones and let my line out to slip along the current. No bites, no nibbles. I cast again. Nothing. Patience is not my thing. I glanced downstream. Twenty yards away I saw another bend in the river with towering rock cliffs and all the signs of another fish haven.

What did I do? Did I wait and cast until I was sure there was nothing there? No, I was pulled, unequivocally, magnetically, toward the new and the different and the remote. I pulled my line in and maneuvered downstream. I had lost sight of my daughter by now, but I did not worry. She was near her Papa and he would honor all his grandfatherly instincts by watching over her. I, her father, on the other hand, lost sight of everything but my own instinctual unrest. Perhaps this time I would land the trophy fish we were all hunting.

I cast and waited. Nothing. I cast and waited again. Nothing. I glanced downstream. There, about fifty yards away was a promising hole. “I shall give it a go.
I thought. I pulled my line and tramped downstream.

Again, I did the same and glancing downstream saw another promising hole. By now I had forsaken all pretense. This was less about fishing and more about adventure, of pursuing the yet unattained. I lost track of time and place until I heard distant yelling. I followed the sound with my eyes and located my father and daughter up on the road, high above me by about a hundred feet. They were calling me to come and gesturing upstream. This bugged me, of course, because I had just cast for the first time into what looked to be a very promising trout den. I cast another time, but received no bites. Reluctantly, I pulled in my line and clambered over the enormous boulders that served as a barrier between the fish and me. I was just within a stone’s throw when my daughter began shouting about a big catch.

“Papa caught one! Papa caught one!”

I am decidedly competitive and a male. This news bothered me. “How big was it?”

“Really big!” She laughed and jumped up and down. I smiled and adjusted the pole in my hand.

The river is catch and release so I have only the word of my daughter and her Papa, but it turns out that while my pursuit of the remote and the what if had left me bankrupt, my father had planted himself at a rather lukewarm location and patiently cast his line. He even changed his fly after awhile and, wouldn’t you know it, caught a sizable Rainbow trout. The patience of Job. And then I remembered that he had offered me the choice of land when we arrived. I chose the better pasture downstream. He settled and made the best of it. He is Abraham. I am Lot.

Someday we will go back, and I know myself too well to expect anything less than a repeat of that experience. I will long to see what is around the next bend in the river, chasing my fluctuating desires because that is who I am, that is what I do.

The defining, universal, quality of my life is the pursuit of satisfaction. I live an anticipatory life, always looking toward the next thing. I spend the winter months, for example, bewailing the cold which constricts my lung capacity and longing for spring when rain warms the air and when the smell of damp soil and cherry blossoms arrest my senses. When spring arrives, I spend much of it anticipating the warm sun of summer which will free me from the dampness in my lungs. I wait for summer to liberate me from school life demands and thrust me into unplanned week upon week of camping and sand castles. Summer arrives and within a few short weeks I long for the routine of a school year and for the coolness of fall when I won’t have to bathe my scalp in sunscreen or mow the yard or clean the kids’ pool. Fall, of course, leaves me longing for fresh snowfall and snow ball fights and hot chocolate by the fire. When winter arrives, however, I stand in the driveway again with my chin rested on the end of my snow shovel. I stare at all the back-breaking work left to do and wish spring were just around the corner.

My discontent, my dissatisfaction, infects not only the seasons of life, but every part of life. During the week, I long for the weekend. During the weekend, I prepare for (or dread) the week. At night, I anticipate the morning or the next day’s activities. During the day, I long to lay my head back upon my pillow and sleep. Before meals, I anticipate the savor of delicious flavors and a full belly. During the meal, I anticipate the after dinner routines: family time, clean up, piano practice, and bed time. During bed time, I anticipate a little quiet time without child interruption before turning to bed myself.

When I am at home, I long to take a road trip. When I am on a road trip, I long to be home. And so it goes and so it goes. There is always somewhere else to be and something else to do. Almost never am I here, now, in this moment. A kiss will capture me in the now sometimes. A sudden, unexpected smell or sight will sometimes hold me in the moment, but those unexpected events are rare and they dissipate quickly like fog.

I am like this because I am not yet home. The flux of my desires is the expression of a restless soul. I am an arrow shot from a bow string.

I am a bird in flight.

I am a falling leaf.

I am the horizon: always shifting, never at rest and for this reason John Wesley wrote, “I have thought I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God and returning to God; just hovering over the great gulf, till a few moments hence I am no more seen.”

Resolution and the need for resolution are not just characteristic of my life, they are built into the very fabric of the universe. Music and art act as similar signs of this restlessness so wired into the fabric of the cosmos. An art major, for example, will tell you that the eye has a natural longing to find a resting point. The eye will travel along a painting in search of somewhere to center and stop. In music, also, one finds that every song, regardless of genre, begins at a home key, moves away from home, and returns to home again. Discordant harmonies, for example, always leave the listener yearning for resolution: concord. Jeremy Begbie at Duke Divinity School has conducted some wonderful work on this subject. He suggests that the great composers and song writers utilize our inborn sense of homelessness not so much in lyrics as in the musical play of notes. We find satisfaction in musical resolution: discord to concord, dissonance to consonance.

Disorder, in art and music alike, leaves us dissatisfied and restless. These brief examples suggest that God has not only created within us a longing for resolution in himself, but he has wired the entire universe with shadows, hints of longing that draw us to the realization of our need for resolution. We are indeed, “music moved to music…the restless soul, immersed in the spectacle of God’s glory, is drawn without break beyond the world to the source of its beauty, to embrace the infinite” (David Bentley Hart).

We are shot from God’s imagination. The further we are from God’s presence in this life, the more restless we feel. The further away from the center of the turning wheel, the more we suffer the bumps. All of the created order, as studied by scientists and physicists and musicians and architects, is witness to this restlessness. Creation is filled with bodies in motion and at rest and supports the inherent claims made upon our desires by this restlessness. In him alone will we find rest. We came from him and we are restless until we find ourselves in him again. In his presence, in Heaven alone, will we taste the eternal sweetness of resolution, of fulfillment, of satisfaction.

In the meantime, we are on a quest. A quest is the final product born from a small germ of desire. That desire is hatched in the imagination and from that desire, an action is born. A man longs to see the United States, so he walks across it. A man yearns to rediscover a lost city, so he explores uncharted regions of the earth. A man desires to please a princess, so he sails where no one dared sail before. We have a picture of the good life framed and hanging in our imagination. James K.A. Smith calls it a kind of primordial “Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail,’ that hoped-for, longed-for, dreamed-of picture of the good life—the realm of human flourishing—that we pursue without ceasing.”

While our desires painted that picture, they are also nourished by staring at it. So we wake up each morning to saddle up and pursue that picture. Many of us, unfortunately, have a picture of the good life that does not coincide with the life we currently live. Prestige and power elude us while we bag groceries or grade papers or do laundry. We all wish for certain changes, but the life we have is the one God, the master author has conceived. Our life goal is to perceive this life as conceived in all its particulars by God, in an effort to keep him as the fixed point of this pilgrimage. God is the destination of our lives. My hope for us is that we would be captivated by this destination so that the pilgrim road is a little easier to walk. The road won’t be paved and you can bet that there will be switch-backs, but knowing who conceives the story helps us patiently wait for his timing.

Perhaps we will never walk across the continental United States, but our lives are nothing less than stories, quests, that future generations will read. A quest worth reading about is one that begins with big desires. It is our desires that captivate us and if we are captivated (no matter the desire), then we are already on a quest. The quest of our spiritual life is the pilgrim quest of wayfarers whose home is not yet attained. Let us not be so easily distracted by the temporal pleasures and small ambitions of selfish men. Let us be motivated by the mighty call of God on our lives and relentlessly pursue that ultimate destination.

Really, the only way to reach a destination is by keeping that destination in mind along the way. Getting lost without a map is one thing, losing sight of the destination is another thing altogether. The success of our spiritual journeys, like our physical journeys, hinges on how well we keep our imaginative eyes fixed not only on God, but along God’s line of sight. Over time and with practice we will learn to distinguish the straight line through all the tangled ones, the stable path through the fog.

Many of us walk tangled paths, but even though we live out discordant notes, we intuitively lean toward concordant notes. It is perhaps during these dark times that we feel that pang of homelessness most, but if we are attuned to the inner discordance of our souls, we will realize that the pang remains, even when life is moving relatively well. That sense of homelessness is a longing like that which we feel upon smelling a nostalgic childhood smell. Summer rain storms and the smell of rain upon grass and hot asphalt swamp me with happiness that is centered on memories from childhood. Fresh baked bread affects me similarly.

These reminders of happiness push us toward satisfaction. But what if I eat the fresh-baked bread or smell the rain-drenched grass? Will I be satisfied? Perhaps momentarily, but most likely, I will realize that the sweetness of that longing was what I most desired. What I longed for was the longing itself. C.S. Lewis called this longing Sehnsucht, an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. He calls it Joy. It is a stab, a pang, of inconsolable longing. We have many examples of this in our lives. The first time I heard Tom Bombadil sing through the reading of my father was one of those moments for me. When I was a boy, I wanted so badly (and I think “badly” is the right word) to see and hear Tom Bombadil. My desire was accompanied by a kind of pain. C.S. Lewis said that the central story of his life was about nothing else than Sehnsucht, and in many ways our stories are no different.

A healthy imagination considers these traits of our lives and follows them to their logical conclusion: we are not home yet.