A Filling Hunger

I take a right out of my family’s farmyard, jogging down the hill of the gravel road. Alfalfa perfuming the air on my left, corn leaves jostling each other on my right. Turning east at the corner, I hear the creek gurgle in the ditch, surrounded by thick, short trees and brush, blocking my view in either direction. Yet the setting sun’s rays gently lay upon the leaves, tickled by the breeze. Several gravel-crunching steps farther, the view opens up. I look south. Just beyond another hayfield and more impenetrable brush lies the pasture: tumbling, lolling hills clustered with oaks. The sun’s diminishing light casts its subdued glow.
    I stop. There it is again. Beauty’s poignant touch. It fills me, yet leaves me hungry, saddened that something I deeply desire is just out of my reach. I want to run toward the scene, but I know I won’t find it. It’s there, but I’m not.

    In the years since, I’ve had that experience during other encounters with beauty--canoeing in Boundary Waters, being surrounded by trusted, loving friends, sitting alone with a cup of coffee and a good view, reading or watching artistic creations.  It’s that simultaneous sense of yearning while feeling filled.
    A character in a C.S. Lewis novel (Till We Have Faces) summed up the experience. She said, “I want to know where all the beauty comes from.”  And that’s just it. I notice the beauty, delight in it, yet the sharp longing suggests there’s something more I cannot grasp just yet, cannot get to now. Something that is wonderfully filling just in the longing for it.
   
    One of the criticisms of Christians is that they so long for heaven that they take no real interest in the world, that they are of no earthly good here; while atheists or others who simply believe in this life alone are the ones who truly love this world because there is no “beyond” to distract them.  However, Christians and unbelievers of whom the above descriptions fit are both missing something.
    Genuinely loving this world--or anything or anyone for that matter--necessitates a teleological approach, a worldview that affirms purpose; without it, loving it simply devolves into just enjoying it. While enjoying it is not wrong, just enjoying it can become patently self-serving; whereas, enjoying it with an eye to beauty deepens both the joy of enjoyment and longing for something more, something this world is no doubt a part of, yet is fragmented in its expression.
    I appreciate G.K. Chesterton’s analogy of this world containing pieces of broken stained glass. We can rejoice in the beauty of each shard, while simultaneously longing for wholeness. While unbelievers may suggest the shards are all there is, that hardly explains the longing of the informed conscience--atheist or not--for wholeness, hardly explains the oft-experienced sadness regarding the brokenness. On the other hand, some Christians can get so caught up noticing and judging the brokenness, they neglect the shard’s beauty and fail to aid in the redemptive journey toward wholeness, and instead wait--in protective uselessness--for “the end.”

    The life of Jesus best exemplifies the tension between beauty and brokenness. He was a man of joy and a man of sorrows. His immersive awareness of the love of God enabled him to see beauty in all those the world rejected and even in those doing the rejecting. Yet his awareness of their brokenness broke his heart, ultimately literally. He came from the place where beauty and love come from, but “the world did not recognize him” (John 1:10). We still don’t.
    Recognizing beauty and love is vulnerable. If you open your heart to the joy of it, yes there will be the sorrow. The world’s brokenness prevents us have from having it completely. “For now we see in a glass dimly” (I Corinithians 13:12). Still, the reality is there though we cannot see it.
    And this, in part, is faith: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). It’s not belief without evidence, nor belief without reason. It’s a belief that realities exist beyond my perceptions that evidence themselves based on my openness to them. It’s a trust that what is ultimately real is love and its concomitant beauty.
    When Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6),  they are blessed because righteousness does ultimately exist--it is not just an ego construct of purportedly societally-evolved people. When he tells us to pray, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done,” it’s because a kingdom and a will exist worth hungering for because they are actually there.  And loving this world means rejoicing when we see that kingdom expressed as well as sorrowing over its lack where brokenness has eroded it. From that sorrow grows the passion to challenge and nourish those fragments.
    Why hunger for anything that is not ultimately real?  If beauty, love, justice, mercy, grace are only elevated societal constructs of no eternal value beyond this life, then they are just the empty calories for the ego rather than the fueling and enticing nourishment for the soul.
   
   
   

Freedom That Becomes Us

Freedom is always inviting, yet it’s risky and vulnerable, for it means change. I understand that as freedom was procured for slaves in the waning days of the Civil War, some slaves preferred the predictability, the security of the plantation. They had become slaves, and the prospect of becoming free--even if they were in fact, free--was overwhelming.
    I read something recently wherein someone conceded they were living in Hell, yet candidly admitted to a comfortable familiarity with it-- “At least I know the names of every street!”  I’m sure the streets in Freedom and Peace are nice, but I won’t be familiar. I’d have to acclimate, and I’m unsure I can pull that off . . . so I’ll just stay in Hell.
    Just today, my husband related his having heard that huge adult elephants can be tied via a rope to a stake in the ground, and they will remain even though they could walk off with the rope and stake quite easily. Why? Because when they were babes, the stake and rope had the power to hold them then. Now the enormous adult elephant still believes they can. Of course, this story isn’t so much about a fear of freedom, but rather the questioning if one actually has it: If you believe you are smaller than that which holds you, you really won’t be free.
    My faith in Jesus Christ appeals to me primarily because of the freedom He invites me to, the freedom He invites all of humanity to, and it’s the only freedom offered which is commensurate with our human dignity . . . and beyond. He invites us to live larger than that which we believe holds us.
    He invites us to a freedom from condemnation. Since he has absorbed the cost of our reconciliation, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8). Now if we are free from God’s condemnation, we are free from everyone’s condemnation: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” We are free from the condemnation of others, of ourselves.  Familial, educational, societal condemnations no longer hold because God has accepted us. And no voice carries more weight, though we may not always think it so.
    Now I realize there’s a whole self-esteem industry marketing means for us to feel good about ourselves.  Feel good about ourselves based on what?  That there are now a few overweight models so we really can feel good about ourselves because the media gods have finally affirmed size variety?  How about that my friends assure me I’m smart, talented, attractive--got some good things going for me? That my parents have affirmed me?  That “in comparison” to whatever or whomever, I’m better? But isn’t that all a relative? All a sliding scale?  I’d prefer a transcending self-assessment, based on something far less fickle than surrounding culture . . . and my moods. Indeed, if God says I’m loved and accepted just as I am, that He has no condemnation for me, then indeed I am genuinely free to love and accept myself, condemnation-free.
    Being free from condemnation of any kind means I am now free to become who I am: the Beloved. The journey of spiritual growth is becoming who you are--learning to live loved. And this really isn’t about living by some moral code--as handy as those can be. In Christ, we’ve received an identity shift: living lives of love is a result of internalizing an identity. As I become who I am, loving other becomes obviously consequential, rather than something achieved by obeying laws or religious dictates. “For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace” (Romans 6). Soaking in that humbling amazing grace shifts the foundations of the heart: it’s no longer about obeying ethics while remaining internally unchanged; it’s living new: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creation: The old is gone, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
    If there’s a discipline involved in it, it’s learning to regularly receive grace, receive God’s love until the old measurements, assessments, condemnations, achievements and failures purported to give  identity in this world fade into their apparent superficiality. As they diminish, the freedom to be me increases. And clearly, I’ve got a long way to go, yet indeed there is joy in this journey.
    Don’t become so familiar here, so comfortable and familiar in your present assessments that you decide to remain a slave, remain on the streets of whatever hell you’re in, or remain tethered to a stake so much smaller than you.
    Begin the freeing journey of becoming who you are: the beloved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSIVjjY8Ou8