The Godward Life

Imagine this: Christmas Eve. My family opens presents on Christmas Eve and my father always buys each of us something special. On the Christmas of my fifteenth year, I knew what my gift would be because I had asked specifically and I had seen dad doing research. It would be a CD player, tape player, and radio combined. It would record from tape to CD and play both sides of a tape without my having to open the deck and turn it over. It would be a miracle of science, a source of endless pleasure and hours of musical entertainment. I would be happy.

I waited all day. Breakfast was fine, a special Christmas rice pudding which I generally love, but this morning I was looking forward to something even more sweet than rice pudding: my new gift. The day passed drearily and exceedingly slowly. I was all anticipation. The evening arrived. Excitement continued to build. I longed for the moment when I ripped the paper off of my present and I could hold it in my hands.

Father lit the advent candles and read the Christmas story as he does every Christmas Eve. The story is long and I have heard it before. Then he finished A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Even the ending of Scrooge’s adventures (another family tradition) could not distract me from the sheer pleasure for which I was so highly tuned. And when we had apparently wriggled and wrinkled our faces in agony long enough, mother handed us our presents. They were all regular, but smaller than anticipated. I opened mine and they were nice, but they were not the gift. My siblings opened their gifts. It was all very nice.

Then my father disappeared into the back room. He came down the hallway and told me to close my eyes. I felt my body tingling and I shivered with sheer delight. I was happy.

The opening of the present and the subsequent pleasure of holding that big black music box were what you would expect: pleasurable. But even while I was holding it in my lap, the happiness was slipping from me, for it cannot compete with the happiness I felt before holding the present in my hands. This inconsolable longing is the same longing we feel just prior to Thanksgiving dinner. The air is so thick with the smells of turkey, gravy, and potatoes, of apple pie and cranberries, that we nearly choke with longing. But we soon find that while the meal is all deliciousness, it lacks the deliciousness of longing before the meal. It is as if the anticipation were more wonderful than the actuality. This longing, almost characterized by a kind of pain, is Sehnsucht.

Let’s not disregard these indicators of our need for God. The signs are everywhere and this inconsolable longing, this Sehnsucht, is an important sign of our pilgrimage. We long for some thing. Pleasures, whatever they might be, never deliver the lasting satisfaction we so desire. Perhaps I am playing the humbug here, but I only write what Lewis has pointed out already; namely, that our lives are characterized by this longing. We long for the old thrill of anticipation almost as soon as we have the object of our desires in our hands, but we cannot have it strictly as it was. Sehnsucht was Joy and Joy was a desire and so “all joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings” (C.S. Lewis).

What Lewis realized much later in life was that as long as he tried to recapture that moment, he was endlessly rebuffed. The old thrill was gone, or at the very least going. He could not have that moment again. It was gone, but the memory was there and the memory itself was a kind of longing, a desire for a desire. “Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing” (Surprised by Joy).

Lewis understood that what he wanted was a state of mind, a thrill, and so he focused his imaginative energies on claiming that thrill: “And there lies the deadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else—whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard—does the ‘thrill’ arise. It is a by-product. Its very existence presupposes that you desire not it but something other and outer (Surprised by Joy).”

Our lives are characterized by this inconsolable longing precisely because we are not home yet. Our desires are not satisfied so much in a state of mind as in something “other and outer,” namely, God. Were we to have this thrill granted to us by way of drug use or some other form of virtual reality, we would immediately find that the thrill itself had lost value. Joy is what we want and we find it most readily in this deep longing.

Perhaps for this reason, for Sehnsucht, we long for the weekend, for summer break, for extended vacation time, and for retirement. These, in themselves, do not deliver Joy. We already have the Joy when we long for these things and this longing is the shadow of a much deeper longing. Pleasure is not the same as Joy. Attaining the next mountain peak (whatever it may be) will not finally be the source of Joy, it will only show definitively that it was not what we actually desired. What we desired was something else entirely and our pursuit of pleasure is a sign of this misguidance. Augustine came to realize this fact only later in life, after squandering his youth. “I was mad for health, and dying for life,” he writes in his Confessions, “I was greatly disturbed in spirit, angry at myself with a turbulent indignation because I had not entered thy will and covenant, O my God, while all my bones cried out to me to enter, extolling it to the skies. The way therein is not by ships or chariots or feet—indeed it was not as far as I had come from the house to the place where we were seated” (St. Augustine).

 So our lives are a pilgrimage, a search for the object of Joy, and the bewilderment we face comes most often from a confusion of happiness with pleasure and the confusion of Joy with both happiness and pleasure. Longing is Joy, but not happiness, and certainly not the satisfaction of a pleasure. Joy points to something else above and beyond both happiness and pleasure. We do not seek Joy itself, but the object of Joy’s desiring and pleasure is not it.

Pursuit of pleasure, whether religious fervor or sexual ecstasy, will in either case lead to frustration. Those are not the things for which we hunger, but an unhealthy imagination, an imagination that does not see as God sees, will confuse pleasure and Joy. An unhealthy imagination will likely be the seat and cause of much frustration resulting from this confusion because the imagination is not only the creative and integrative faculty of the mind, it is also the propulsion of our desires. Within the imagination are born images of the Good Life. Those images are given to us through various means: advertising, experience, memories. For most of us, the Good Life has a great deal to do with the fulfillment of pleasure—think Hawaii or laughing with svelte and suave friends over beer—and very little to do with anything higher than our own sensual pleasures. The satisfaction of pleasure, however, will not lead us, finally, to our pilgrim destination.

We wander and we wonder at the dissatisfaction that so characterizes our lives, but we don’t realize that a key rudder to this enormous ship of personal longings is the imagination. By it, we can turn from ourselves and back to God. By it, we turn from wandering and point toward home.

I do not believe this pilgrimage will automatically lead home for everyone. God became flesh for a reason: to show us the Father and to show us the way to the Father. Some saw and worshiped while others simply crucified him. Many are the wanderers: they do not know the way home and do not want to know the way home, particularly if it is a way that leads away from self. All of us are on a spiritual journey, but not all of us will find our way home. Some are more lost than others. The cross of Christ is the only means of rescue, and if we follow the cross, we feed the imagination and the soul strong food and good drink, thereby pointing her back to her founding: God’s imagination.

We live in a time when directions to happiness shout at us from every wayside curb and billboard. We are loaded with extraordinary busyness and practices that leave us living hamster lives—always moving, but rarely going anywhere. God is pressing in to meet us on this pilgrimage, and he has used the entire universe as a means by which to pull us to himself. There is one transcendent goal in life: union with God. Our souls long for their resolution in him and nothing less than God will satisfy this longing. What we need, then, is not more to do. There’s enough of that already. What is needed in our lives is a shift in perspective, a shift of vision: we need the imaginative vision to see our lives as God sees them and the courage to walk the path set before us by a loving story-maker even if the journey leads through pain.

I’ve always hated hiking. I’ll go camping and enjoy it immensely, but hiking sours everything for me, like too much baking powder in the bread dough. I prefer a nice slow stroll through the woods without gear clanking on my back. My father, on the other hand, loves hiking. His really long legs need a release. I think hiking acts as a kind of free gallop to a thoroughbred horse who spent weeks pent up in a stall. He covers ground in a hurry.

One of my childhood hikes took place up north toward Canada. It’s beautiful country, but the hike—if my memory serves correctly—was five or six miles up a mountain before we reached our camp site.

I’m sure I let my father and anyone else within range of my scowl know how much I was hating life on this hike because my father kept assuring me that the destination was spectacular; at least, that’s what he’d been told by a friend who had a friend who did this hike a few years back. I wasn’t convinced.

The path was rocky and dry as the sun beat down on us, and I trudged up the mountain for my five or six miles, stubbing my toes and dragging my shoes through the stones the whole way, until we crested a ridge and my eyes saw a lake so blue and so clear I wanted to dive into it, backpack and all.

The cliff walls on the far end of the lake towered above it. Our campground sat on the edge of the lake, so when night fell and we lay on our backs and looked at the stars, it was like lying down in an enormous bowl scooped out by giant hands. The rumor was true: the view was spectacular and the water was crisp and clean. Even though the hike was painfully dull and hard and hot and really, really long for a lazy teen like myself, the destination was awe inspiring. My father knew the journey would lead through pain, but I’m glad he lead me through it.

The road to a vibrant life is a lifelong road, an arduous road, a pilgrimage that leads away from ourselves and towards God. It is a rather unattractive road to a generation raised on text messaging and bubblegum, but it is the best road available to us because it is the road upon which God has set us. We injure ourselves, our souls, if we deviate from it.

Our creator has sent us out and now he calls us home. God speaks into the core of our being, our soul, by accessing its tap root: the imagination. His creation and Scriptures are primarily appeals to the imagination. He uses poetry and song and story to lead our souls home. But we are not home yet. The meantime, the in-between, is an exercise in tasting resolution and glimpsing satisfaction. Let us live as pilgrims, wayfarers, who know that “happy is the man whose help is from God, when He has set pilgrimages in his heart through the Valley of Tears, to the goal He has fixed” (Psalm 84: 5-6).

 Although God calls us sojourners, pilgrims, we are not drifters because it is God who has intentionally set us upon this spiritual pilgrimage. How unhappy the person, then, who goes not to God for help in this journey, but to his own meager ingenuity. We have been set on pilgrim’s ways for two reasons: to cultivate our own gardens and to cultivate his garden (the world), preparing both for their telos—their end or purpose or resolution—in God. This redemptive labor requires intellectual fortitude and a synthetic, imaginative vision to see both our gardens and God’s garden as he sees them. Imaginative depth is not easily come by, but it is the only means by which we can identify any meaning in life.

Such a high calling for this pilgrimage does not alleviate the often bewildering circumstances that make this sojourn a spiritual trial. Our earthly adventures often capture both the bewilderment of being lost and the ecstasy of arrival. The promise of satisfaction, the picture of something wonderful, leads us through the bewilderment until we reach our destination.

I remember one such moment in my life: My father told me that we had to hike in to our campground. I told him that the idea stinks. The whole coastline was full of campgrounds right off the road. All we’d have to do is pull over and throw up the tent. He tossed one of his favorite lines to me: “all the best places are off the beaten path.” I’d heard that one before, but it didn’t make the hike any more exciting.

We had a load of equipment in the car and the whole family to trek down. “The hike is just over a mile, but we’ll have to take a couple of trips to get the stuff down there,” he said over his shoulder.

My day just got worse.

We loaded up like pack mules. My dad looked like a llama with his long neck and a load of bags piled high up over his shoulders. We hiked in, of course, and when we finally broke through the trees and onto the sand, I was suddenly astounded at the beauty. The campground was nestled in a cove and the tide brought water nearly right up to the tents.

Again, the rumors were correct: absolutely beautiful. No wind, just sand and water. We didn’t know it yet, but the next day the tide would go out further than it had in a very long time and we would see ocean life rarely seen by beach walkers or tent campers. The mile hike was tedious and burdensome and we had to do it twice. My father knew the path would lead through hardship, in this case a kind of tedium, but I’m glad he lead us through it just the same.

We are like cranes who have an incredible journey ahead. The crane’s durability and dedication has been a source of legend for centuries. Those legends provide a picture of how we might reach our destination with greater success. It is said that the crane flies higher and farther than any other bird. High up in the altitude, the crane is buffeted by severe winds. Some say that the crane swallows stones as ballast to prepare for the journey and suffers the discomfort until finally reaching port. Some say that the crane flies in company so that when the lead crane grows exhausted, another might take his place.

Our journey, like theirs, is arduous. Our destination requires that we fly high up in the spiritual stratosphere. It requires that we carry ballast in our soul and mind, that we fix our spiritual vision on the distant goal. It requires that we fly in company.

Our life goal, union with God, may require a difficult pilgrimage, but God is speaking to our imagination throughout the journey. New imaginative eyes that are tuned to his fingerprint will make the journey rich beyond measure, but we need fellow pilgrims for the journey.

A distinguishing mark of great stories is the human tension, the conflict, that shapes the characters. Longings, failures, ambitions, sins, and desires all play significant parts in who the characters are and who they become. The recognition that we are characters in a larger story helps inform how we live that story. We are rich, round characters, because God made us in his image. When we read our lives in this manner, then we look at our failures, our desires, and our various tensions differently, realizing that they all have a purpose. Each of them points toward the author’s shaping of the character and the resolution of the story. When we see our lives in narrative terms, then we better understand how transformation takes place. Our tensions, feelings, and aims, like the setting, play a significant part in transforming us.

The imagination is the tool God has given us by which we not only perceive the sequence of events, the setting, and our various character qualities, but we also conceive or weave a story from those parts. We certainly feel inadequate, sheepish, maladjusted, and bewildered more often than we’ll admit, but that doesn’t prevent our imaginations from creating a story in which we play a particular role. The quality of that conceived story, the richness and degree of complexity, is the source of meaning we find in life. If our story is busy, our desires are shallow, and our spiritual ambitions are low, then the meaning we find in life will likewise by shallow.

I worked at a small lumber store as one of my college summer jobs. One old curmudgeon muttered through the week and lashed at anything that wasn’t a costumer. We tiptoed around him for fear of catching his attention and even the inanimate wood appeared to shy away when he approached. Friday evening was his only bright point of the week and all his shallow desires centered around it. He saved every penny during the week so he could binge with the best steak and the best beer; everything else was an agonizing wait for the next Friday night.

Though he had low ambitions, I’m convinced that he was not always that way. We all seek meaning and I think his inability to find it chafed his soul. At the deepest level of our person, we all seek a meaningful story. The quality of our conceived story plays an enormous role in whether we find that meaning in life. No wonder we lack meaning in life: like Macbeth’s, our stories feel like sound and fury signifying nothing. We feel like we’re walking through our parable on broken feet and we want to be better than broken. We want to change our parable, but God is telling the parable. How does the lead character climb out of the plot, tap on the window of God’s study, and suggest some adjustments? We try, but our attempts haven’t worked so far. What can we do, then, when the story we perceive and conceive feels like the unwanted child of failure and exhaustion?

I think there is one important imaginative activity that effectively propels us along our pilgrim way: we can remember the author’s promises. Every single promise that God made to his people was a call to the imagination: a call to get up and follow him. The old hymn calls us to stand upon the promises of Christ the King, but to stand on a promise requires the ability to envision something which has yet to be. It requires imagination. Abraham lies on his back and stares at the starry canvas. He remembers God’s promise to make him a nation. God had pointed to the stars and said, “So shall your seed be.” But Abraham’s arthritic knees flare up as he tries to get up off the ground and the damp ground chills him faster than it did twenty years ago. Stand on the promises. So many promises like great boulders across a wide river: we hop from one to the next until we reach the other side.

Here’s a statement of fact: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness” (Jeremiah 31:3). The promise? I have loved you and I will always love you. We are the epiphany of God, as Alexander Shmemann said, and therefore the offspring of his love. God’s love for his creation finds expression first in his imagination and then in what he does with that creation.

He imagines you.

He speaks you.

He leans in and claps over your parable.

He is love pressing in to meet you and to fill you. Imagine that!

“All this is from God who has reconciled us to himself through Christ” (I Corinthians 5:18). The Christian tradition teaches a beautiful doctrine of salvation, that only the blood of Christ saves us from sin. We could never overstate that fact, but it is worth remembering that our imaginations are at work even in comprehending that fundamental fact of our redemption. Imagine this: we are robed in the righteousness of Christ! There is no other meaningful way of understanding redemption than by way of the imagination and there is no other way for my life to have meaning until I see it as a redemptive story. In an elegant dovetail, God utilizes our imagination to know him more fully and to desire him more completely.

Like Abraham, we bump into imaginative barriers, spiritual rocks, and groan in our confusion. We search God’s shadow for dimension, for an explanation to the difficult, seemingly unassailable events of our existence, but we cannot fully grasp their purpose until the day when we see God himself. So God gives us his promises to foreshadow that moment. His promises build a bridge of images by which the imagination can travel toward God. The separation we feel between this finite life and the infinite God is a ravine of our own making, but we spend life attempting to bridge that gap with poor material: emotional euphoria, positive mental thoughts, philosophy, “ten steps to a better you.” Unfortunately, our bridges do not span the distance required and we find ourselves falling short of lasting happiness, or joy, or satisfaction.

The vibrant life, the abundant life, is assured to those whose spiritual ballast consists of God’s promises. The storms will not disappear. The waves and wind will play havoc. We will face deep trouble and heart-breaking sorrow. We might even taste depression, but our ballast keeps us from keeling over and a healthy imagination will point the ship in the right direction.

But behold, I have taken my hands off the authorial rudder and we are lost in an ocean of mixed metaphors: parables, boulders, bridges, and ships. Perhaps it’s time we returned to life as a narrative. Augustine’s famous claim mentioned in chapter 1 is a narrative claim: “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God” (Confessions). It implies a beginning and points toward an end. It is a word picture: an image that acts on the imagination and informs our journey. If Augustine is correct, then our only tangible hope is to feed the imagination with God’s promises until they bring us, through faith alone, to our final rest in God.

Reclaiming the primacy of the imagination will give us a needed fresh perspective on everything that constitutes our parable: what we do, what we think, how we feel, and everything that has or will ever happen to us. The healthy imagination is narratively aware, constantly reading its own parable and the parables it encounters. Understanding the fundamentals of a good story and looking for those aspects every day will change how we view this life’s journey, how we view suffering, how we view knowledge, affection, ethics, the daily urban grind, and other people.

The imagination will not save humanity from eternal separation from God. Only the blood of Christ can do that. But the imagination is the vehicle of faith that follows the promises of God and crosses the bridge between God and us, created by the blood of Christ. The imagination will also save us from our own distraction and self-preoccupation. God has given us an imagination as the primary instrument through which we can see things as God sees them, as narrative, and thereby find meaning in a cosmos that is pregnant with it. Lasting happiness will elude us until we align our vision, our imagination, with God’s narrative vision.

Follow me and we’ll take a peak behind that veil to better understand why God gave us, his characters, an imagination. Let’s take our memories—each one of them—each sense perception, each fact our teachers diligently injected into us, each emotion, each reason, and all the other parts of who we are and label an imaginary puzzle piece with each one. The puzzle would be gigantic, far bigger than those intimidating 10,000-piece puzzles. Then, just imagine, we gather those pieces together and promptly hurl them onto the living room floor. Let’s amplify the pressure by removing the puzzle box with the picture on top so that all cheating aids are removed. What we have is a metaphysical mess and a metaphor of our daily lives.

The imagination has the herculean task of gathering those pieces together and assembling a coherent picture of the whole thing. We deduce meaning based on how well we feel those pieces are slipping together and what kind of picture it is. Between sin and the resulting fractures of our lives, however, the chances of matching the puzzle pieces to the master copy found in God are slim indeed. Most of us have spent decades building a picture that is botched, jammed, cut and torn, just so we can conjure an image that makes some sense to us. But the image leaves us with only glimpses of meaning, fragments, unless we align our vision with God’s vision. A vision rightly aligned knows that “to tell the story of anything is to tell the story finally of everything” (Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home). Every memory is tied to every other moment in our lives and bound inextricably each to each. And when we extend out for the moments of our lives to the convergence of our lives with other life stories, we find the connection still in tact. Our lives have touched, for good or for ill, ten thousand others. To every brother whom I harm, I harm not only those who are touched by him in this lifetime, but his children and grandchildren. To every sister whom I bless, I bless also her children and grandchildren.

Reclaiming the imagination will undoubtedly refocus our efforts away from blindly doing more and help us to see differently instead. We want the vibrant life, but vibrant, transformed, purposeful significance is elusive because we can’t quite see the whole story. Sometimes we taste the vibrant life and then it is gone. Life feels awfully regular and mundane most of the time. Seeing our pilgrimage and the pilgrimages of others as God sees them—as divinely imagined stories—might just open the floodgates. A reclaimed imagination helps us not only embrace suffering as part of the divine story, it helps us refresh some of the habitual thinking that mires us in the drollery of our day-to-day. No longer are we the cogs of an economic wheel, but the bright stars on the canvas of God’s imagination. No longer are we chained to relationships that have all the spark and wit of pumpkins. The world is the theater of God’s imagination and we are the players acting upon his stage. There is no two-bit, pedestrian part. There is no such thing as a small, insignificant event. He knows even the falling of a sparrow and its fall is significant in the larger story’s unfolding.

Narnia will one day give way to Aslan’s country, but the journey toward the door is clogged with trouble and meandering. There is a destination but that destination is not the now of this moment. We live in the now a bit like blind fish in a stream, bumping into every rock and pebble, rushed along in a flurry of momentum leading to who knows where. But God has given us the imagination to circumvent the blindness of soul and mind that we inherit. With the imagination we glimpse a larger purpose, a far more complex plot, behind our stories.

But a plot, regardless of quality or complexity, has a setting. The really rich stories have a rich setting because the setting intimately impacts both the events and the character. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, it matters very much that Lucy should find Tumnus in a snowy wood—a rainy, dreary wood or a even a city neighborhood would change everything. The cold, the quiet, and the thick whiteness adds a great deal of tension in the story and impacts not only what the characters do, but how they interact as well.

Our stories have a setting. On a macro level, our setting is the universe. My mind wants to break the unfathomable universe into little manageable pieces. God gives it to me whole. The milky-way dances and I can’t keep up. I want to think theology. He says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). We prefer vivisection to poetry, microscopes to the ocean. My mind stutters under the weight of all this light and color. It is more than I can handle: light and color that slips through a pin hole in the curtain that veils God’s absolute glory. Tear down the curtain and I die, ripped up, bowled over, and tumbled like a weed on the prairie.

On a micro level, our setting is this city, this street, and these walls. The entire stage, all the curtains and furniture, is our setting. Where we are physically significantly impacts not only what we do, but how we interact with others and how we interpret our life parable. A boy who spends his entire life on a farm may not understand why a city boy acts or responds to certain situations in a certain way, but the setting has played a significant role in shaping those responses. But this discussion goes much deeper than whether a boy grows up on a farm or in the city or whether Tumnus was in a snowy wood or not.

The most influential setting in our lives is what we call “home.” At any given moment, we have somewhere that we call “home.” Where is that place? What is the tone of that place? Who lives there? What kind of sounds and smells are found there? The quality of one’s “home” will largely be responsible for the quality of our responses to the events in life. If you come over to my house tomorrow, you’ll be greeted by an eager dog and five very different children. There will likely be music playing somewhere in the house and, Lord willing, the welcome smell of something cooking. Shortly after your arrival, my son will invite you to play hoops in the backyard: bump, 21, one on one, or whatever you like.

This is my home. Its textures have shaped me. I cannot imagine that I would respond to life or make the same choices were I single and living in an apartment; neither can I imagine things being the same if I lived with all my children in New York City. We are spiritual and physical beings who not only pilgrimage through a physical world, but whose spirits, intellects, and imaginations are all molded by that physical world. The setting of a parable is as important as the character himself. The house he lives in is as important as the house inside him.

Wisdom suggests that we pay closer attention to the textures of our stories. The health of the soul depends heavily on the health of the imagination. Since the imagination is so heavily influenced by its surroundings, its setting, choosing the location and quality of the roof over our heads is more than a pragmatic decision.