Longing for Home

There is a great line in CS Lewis’s Perelandra that summarizes a theme found in most of Lewis’ writing and that is, “the sweet poison of the false infinite.” The idea is pretty straightforward, but the wording, in typical Lewis fashion, is just tight. Basically Lewis’s insight is that we humans have a desire, a longing for God himself. That is, we long to be filled with, and satisfied by, the infinite.

We often attempt, however, to satisfy this longing or desire with objects that are not suited to fill the gap. And this is the point: Everything, other than God, is incapable of satisfying our heart’s desire; they are in this sense a “false infinite.” That is, they promise to satisfy, but upon gaining them we find that they held out false promises. What makes the situation even worse is that the “false infinite” can taste sweet; the goodness of the created world is in fact sweet and should be enjoyed, but it cannot satisfy in the way we hope. We can convince ourselves, however, that the lack of satisfaction just means we needed more of the supposed antidote. Hence we become poisoned into thinking that the temporal sweetness was a foresight into a complete and eternal satisfaction that the “false infinite” is actually unable to deliver.

One blatant example of this principle is in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Recall when Edmund visits Narnia for the first time he meets the white witch who gives him whatever he wants to eat. Edmund asks for Turkish Delight of course. But this is magic Turkish Delight. The more he eats the more he wants; the more he eats the sicker he feels, and yet he wants more. This desire for Turkish Delight begins to cause the ruin of Edmund. He can no longer appreciate the common pleasures of other food because the desire for Turkish Delight has become so consuming and yet so unsatisfying. This is basically what Lewis conceives hell to be like; people infatuated with the wrong objects of desire that not only remain unmet, but consume the one who is taken by them. It’s a horrible cycle.

So we find ourselves in an interesting position. We hunger for something that is not given in our experience, but yet things in our experience remind us of that for which we hunger. Hence we are tempted as Edmund was by the “sweet poison of the false infinite.” But to fill the hunger with the “false infinite” will invariably ruin our appetite for the appropriate food, namely, God. To resolve this tension, Lewis suggest we take on the dialectic of enjoyment and renunciation. That is, we are free to enjoy those things that are given to us in our experience. And yet we must all the while renounce them as the real satisfaction to our longings.

As Lewis puts it in The Problem of Pain, “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe, or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

It is quite easy to be captivated by the “sweet poison of the false infinite”; to keep mistaking the inns for home. And this is all the while ruining our appetite for God. There are so many things I have been trusting in to make me secure and satisfied, but they have in the end shown themselves to be “false.” We do well to pay close attention to the yearnings of your own heart because, as Lewis says, our desires will always reveal the falsity of other gods.

Life Is Good

I saw this sticker on a car not too long ago and was intrigued by the statement. Although it is punctuated with a period I began to wonder whether it was a proclamation (!) or a reminder or a statement of fact or a question. And who was the message intended for anyway? I suppose at different times in life it can function in all those ways, but for me it was functioning as both a reminder and as a question (why else would you need it as a bumper sticker). As I have mentioned before, for me there is this tension between reality and desire: what I have and what I want to have; who I am and who I want to be; who others are and who I want them to be; who God is and who I want God to be. The more I focus on the tension the more it seems to call into question that life is good.

Brennan Manning once wrote, “Every change in the quality of a person’s life must grow out of a change in his or her vision of reality.” The particular vision of reality that Manning has in mind is how we think that God views us. To get us thinking along those lines Manning asks us to think about a question that Tozer once asked: What comes into your mind when you think of God? More specifically, What comes into your mind when you think of God’s love for you? These questions are directly related to whether we think of life as good or not.

To allow yourself to sit with these questions for a few moments can be a time of brutal authenticity. I was surprised myself what floated to the surface as I sat in silence for only a brief moment thinking about God’s view of me. I am embarrassed to even write it, but here are a few things: I perceive God looks at me with disappointment, waiting and watching for mistakes, looking at me with indifference, and waiting for me to get things together. On the other hand, I also perceive God as tender, a hint of compassion in his eyes, and tears for my hurting.

In large measure, these perceptions are projections of my own view of self and not God’s. But that is Manning’s point I take it. That is, I am the one in desperate need of a change in my vision of reality, namely in my view of self. Manning’s challenge stands: Do you accept yourself as the one utterly loved by God? Do you wholeheartedly trust that God likes you? “When we’re steeped in selfishness, indifferent to the poor, tormented by lust, wallowing in self-pity, and flattened by depression, God’s love continues to carry us.”

If you are anything like me, you may have anticipated a different ending to that last sentence. After the last comma I was expecting something like: God can’t use us, or God can’t speak to us, or we can’t understand God properly, God can’t love us, etc. Again, this is evidence that my vision of reality needs to be changed.

Of course, I claim to “know” the correct and proper things about God and myself, but judging from what floated to the surface of my heart I don’t really “know” these things at all. Manning’s suggestion for changing our view of reality is to accept the tenderness and compassion of God for us, and in turn we become tender compassionate people. “Tenderness is what follows when someone reveals to you your own inner beauty, when you discover your belovedness, when you experience that you are deeply and sincerely liked by someone.”

How does one experience that, especially in relation to God? I’m not really sure. I mean I can think of a few ways, but that is merely theoretical right now. The only alternative to authentic tenderness is pretend having-it-together-ness. In the mean time I have purchased a few of those stickers so that they can function as reminders of God’s tenderness towards me. Life is good, of course, because God is good. As Luke writes, “In the tender compassion of God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and to guide our feet on the road to peace.”

Additionally, we should note that God’s tenderness is retroactive, i.e., it is at work even in our understanding of our own past. As Manning writes, “The wisdom of tenderness allows us to love our whole life story and know that we’ve been graced and made beautiful by the providence of our past history…. All the wrong turns in the past, the detours, the mistakes, the moral lapses—everything that’s irrevocably ugly or painful melts and dissolves in the light of accepted tenderness.”

Life Is Good.