Further In and Further Up
In the Last Battle, the concluding story of the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis ends his tale with the characters entering a stable; for those who didn’t have the ‘eyes to see and the ears to hear’ it was just a pitch-black stable, but for those who did, it was the ‘real world’ perfected: everything clearer, brighter, more substantial in comparison to the world the characters knew. Aslan himself invites them to “Come further in! Come further up!” The characters begin running faster and faster without getting winded or tired. So perhaps they still race further in and further up.
The idea that the characters race on suggests that the story hasn’t ended, that it was just beginning. Lewis explicitly comments: “All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
Hebrews 11 indicates that God has placed in us a desire for perfection; a desire to return to the bliss of the Garden of Eden; we each “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16). I believe this desire drives us first to the immediacy of faith—receiving the kingdom of God like a child (Mark 10:15). Not just by believing, but without conditions, without negotiation, freely and openly. But eventually the ‘adult’ in us becomes unsatisfied with the ‘on-again / off-again’ experience of life that is the hallmark of a child. We want something tangible; something we can count on.
Martin Buber in his wonderful book, I and Thou, addresses this reality. He uses the image of a hunter after prey: sometimes when we go to meet God, we find him and are filled; sometimes we go out and come back empty-handed. This reality comes against our inner desire for that better country, where we live with God face-to-face, not through a glass darkly. So we endeavor to turn the experience of the hunter into that of the farmer—by doing certain actions: tilling the soil, planting and watering the seed, we can have some sort of harvest, and therefore be comforted. Buber suggests that we embark on two approaches to this goal—we gather with those that believe the same, forming as it were the rim of the wheel with God in the center; we also come up with statements of faith that transform that moment of meeting God into something more tangible and more at hand. These acts at first help bring structure to our meeting God; but eventually they replace that meeting and so religion is born.
Unfortunately religion as described is counter to love because it emphasizes separation and division—who believes like us and who expresses those beliefs in the way we are comfortable with from those who don’t. Whereas love is a passion for connection, unity, and oneness.
October 27, 2012