“spirtually and passionately alive”
The leading pastor at a Christian Church I attended while I was living in Columbia, MO recently posted the following passage from C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain on the Crossing Blog. The excerpt resonated with me, so I thought I would share it here too:
“There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in or heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words. …You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life. …Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction… something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? …Some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which … night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. …[If you ever truly found it], beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.”
I’ve stood before God’s stunning landscapes and felt what Lewis is describing. Finally, for a few fleeting – yet wonderful – moments, I would feel at home. And whether I was out off the coast of California visiting the barking seals that live on Channel Islands or off the coast of Honduras SCUBA diving at the world’s second largest barrier reef system that rings the Bay Islands – the “clap-clap of water against the boat’s side” was always an inexplicably warm, familiar sound. I grew up in Mid-Missouri, not on the sea. While I have been on boats from time to time, the clap-clap sound of water lapping against a boat is always a treat for me, not an everyday encounter. Still, I think someone hearing it for the first time would find the sound comforting and familiar. Yes, I know what Lewis is referring to – I feel it and sense it every time I travel, make a photograph, listen to my favorite music. I feel it each time I meet yet another person whose life and soul leaves me awed and inspired… those encounters are the “tantalizing glimpses” and fading echoes that Lewis describes. Perhaps, this is why I’m so passionate about travel and adventure. I want see more “glimpses” and hear more “echoes.”
Popularity: 11% [?]
The self is made up of a bundle of selves.
— , Steppenwolf
RSS feed
Email updates
Tweets