Happily Ever After - Part IV of the Saga

Did it dawn on you for at least one short moment during the Christmas season that you were celebrating living in the beginning of a great story? Really, think about it – the thousands - no, millions - of people that spend a good part of December putting up and tearing down, wrapping and unwrapping, preparing and cleaning up, packing and unpacking , traveling and coming back home – we must believe that there is something behind all of this to warrant all of this effort and good cheer (however pasted on). Why is it worth celebrating? Why is it worth your time, your effort, your money? Seriously now, why did you do all of this last month?

Pardon my brusqueness, but if in Christmas I celebrate only the promise of floating from cloud to cloud while taking part in a never-ending Christmas carol sing-along (as much as I love them) I think I’d rather spend eternity at least reading about the life I really want.

Did Christmas remind you that the life you REALLY want, the one you read about in books, is really possible someday?

Did it remind you that you were not made for just following standard operating procedures, making things more efficient, getting things done faster and better than your competitor? Yes, our work is made up of these things, and work is important to God. But if we aren’t careful we can lose our heart in all of it pretty easily. We can lose our way, in a sense. We forget what we love, what we are passionate about, what we were made for. We can begin seeing life only through the eyes of our brains, and not our hearts.

I’ll again quote John Eldredge from “Waking the Dead” (paraphrased, emphasis mine) “One means of trying to recover the image of God and unveil it for his Glory is ANY story that will help us see with the eyes of the heart. Which brings us back to myth. Poet David Whyte says, ‘Myths reveal to us what we are capable of’. Clyde Kilby offers this image ‘Myth is a lane down which we walk in order repossess our soul.’ Wow! Wouldn’t you love to repossess your soul? To live with an unmasked, unveiled glory that reflects the glory of the Lord? That’s worth fighting for”. (1)

Connect me to God? Repossess my soul? Twilight? Lord of the Rings? Star Wars? The Matrix? Chronicles of Narnia? Yes. Stories help us do this. They blur the bullet points and operating manuals long enough for us to get a glimpse of the eternal.

They expose something about you.

But beware.

Because when you get a peek at the eternal, you may get confused.

And disappointed.

After reading a great novel or watching a movie that sucks you in, you may be fooled into believing that what you really want is what’s in the book. Or who's in the book. Edward. Or Jacob.  Or to become a vampire. Or to at least pick up and move to Forks so you can live in such an adventurous story.

Maybe you want to be Frodo – you want to carry the ring to Mordor, so your life can finally mean something. Or maybe you just want to be with Arwen.

Whatever it is, we end up disappointed, because we can’t have what we want.

It’s like a cruel joke, then. The story “opens the eyes of my heart” only to make me desire something I can’t have. Nice. C.S. Lewis describes this disappointment in his famous address, “The Weight of Glory”:

“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel certain shyness. I am almost committing and indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence”. (2)

Darn it, it’s just Nostalgia, you might think, I’ve got to shake it off and get back to reality; get back to work.

Listen, though. Here’s the deal:

It is our tendency to think that what we want is what’s in the story, and therefore, unattainable.

But it’s not. It’s not what we want.

C.S. Lewis continues, in the same address:

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was a longing.  These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past- are good images or what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”(3)

What we really want is God. To live in a story as great as the ones we read about. Have you ever wondered why your best day on this earth doesn’t satisfy you, if for no other reason than you know good days don’t last forever? This should tell you something – it should be a clear reminder that God did not design your wanting soul for this world, but for the next.

We WILL have real romance. Not “God loves me”-like-my first-grade-Sunday-school-project love, but REAL romance. And your heart won’t be ripped open because the love affair dies, exposing open wounds for years. We will have adventure. Not duck, duck goose. But the kind where YOUR gift – the thing you love but find so hard to really use and to be appreciated for on this earth – this will be NEEDED. Others will finally understand it, see it clearly for what it is and admire it. All will depend on it, as well as on your character and your bravery that took one difficult, painful life to create. It will all be needed for something big-something that really matters.

My blog friends, can you start looking at stories a different way? Instead of judging them by their moral cover, or finding them a waste of time, or a disappointment, see them as something you really need? Something to recover your heart – something that helps you realize what you really want, and where you can really find it? Rolland Hein says (paraphrased) “…Mythic…stories…wake you up, and suddenly you say, ‘Yes, yes, this is what my life has really been about! Here is where my meaning and destiny lie!” (4)

So why did the world get sucked into Twilight? Because we are all disoriented, under a spell that has us believing all that matters is in this world. This “paranormal romance”, as it has been described, awakens something in us, something “otherworldly” (paranormal). Rightly so – we were not made for this world.

Here’s my challenge:

Read a story. Look deep. Ask yourself what it’s saying to you. Is it whispering of something great, something that does something to you inside? You might be fooled at first by the ache. You may be utterly convinced that what you want is that something – that something that’s most likely temporal. When it dawns on you that what you really yearn for is God, and what He has waiting for you in the next world, thank Him for the story He has up His sleeve for YOU – for what your REAL destiny is.

After that,

Pack the book in a bag; take it with you, because you’re going to need it if your heart is to survive this world.

And then,

Read another story.---alg

(1) John Eldredge, Waking the Dead, p 83

(2) C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory p 4

(3). C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p 4-5

(4) John Eldredge, Waking the Dead, p 25