The desire, the restlessness, points us to the solution just as hunger points us toward food. We all chase our own elephants, but how to be satisfied in cactus land? We eat camel hair in hopes of nourishment and drink lizard piss to assuage our parched lips. If Einstein is correct and insanity is simply a matter of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then we qualify as an insane bunch. This book is my attempt to run to the front of the line and yell, “Stop! Stop the insanity!”
Christ came to give us more than camel hair, at least for those who have the spiritual eyes to discern the difference between camel hair and bread. He broke bread and said, “Take and eat. This is my body broken for you.” When Christ walked this crust of earth, he often spoke like that, in metaphor. Mark 4:34 says that he never spoke without a story leaving his lips. His disciples, probably in an attempt to keep things simple for the masses, asked him why he couldn’t just speak in straight lines. His answer indicates our deepest problem. He told the disciples that he spoke in stories “because people see what I do, but they don’t really see. They hear what I say, but they don’t really hear, and they don’t understand…For the hearts of these people are hardened, and their ears cannot hear, and they have closed their eyes—so their eyes cannot see, and their ears cannot hear, and their hearts cannot understand, and they cannot turn to me and let me heal them” (Matthew 13).
The solution to our modern fractures is not in doing more. We’ve already tried all that. The cure must fit the disease and the disease, in this case, has less to do with diet than with vision. A man who chooses camel hair over bread either has no discretion or really poor eyesight. Most of us prefer bread, but our eyesight betrays us. We lack the vision.
“The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.”1
We are caged and dispassionate beings who suffer from spiritual myopia. Since just about everyone else suffers from the same eye-disease, we think it’s normal. Spiritual myopia isn’t normal. It is a kind of blindness with sweeping influence because “the lamp of the body is the eye. If your whole eye is good, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Matthew 6:22). What eye was Christ describing? What eye impacts the entire person? What eye was given to us for the purpose of seeing spiritually what is not presently before our eyes?
The answer is simple: that eye is the imagination.