My 8 Pages for BGCC

Sunday, March 18, 2007

^{Hebrews 11:8-10 8}By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. ⁹By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. ¹⁰For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

The Shadows

C. S. Lewis chose the metaphor Shadowlands to reference this world, which is not the world as it should be, nor the world as it will be, but rather the world as it is: a vale of tears within which even ts Messiah weeps before his journey is complete. This world, to Lewis, as his beloved Plato suggested, but more importantly what the writer of Hebrews plainly told us, is: a land of shadows and light, illusions and reality, darkly lit landscapes to be endured even as the pilgrims of the Book of Hebrews earnestly seek the ""better country"" they would find not here, but hereafter.  The city they seek is the one the Great Architect has built for them.

Just as the Gospels show us that Jesus admonished his disciples to be ""in but not of the world,"" we too must serve our time in the Shadowlands. We must be in it, not of it. We resist becoming its dreary underworld captives. We long for light, which is news from home, and so we preach, as did Lewis, a ""gospel of homesickness,"" one with built-in appeal for those who are estranged from this world, and struggle to make it through the toils, trials, and tribulations of this life, who must labor mightily to discover in this world what the next one has in store.  Our citizenship is in heaven, and we confess Jesus is our Passport, our Courier, and Chief Immigration Officer. Heaven is his hometown, and he can let in anyone he wants.

Here's my summary of what Lewis—along with the Apostle Paul, and after him Augustine, and many saints through the ages--have told us about what living in the Shadowlands is like:

The world as it now is, a world of spoiled goodness, a world of decay, is withstood and understood only by those with an unfathomably wild sense of the anticipation of soon sure redemption.

The world of shadows, of almosts, and neither/nors, close calls, what ifs. will give way to the bright sunshine of a world to come free of evil, free of pain, free of death.

These secret facts inform our every attempt to explain, or explain away, the universe and of our place in its shadowlands. The stubborn rumors of a Lost Eden, and a Passage to Eternity that no civilization has been able entirely to dismiss or disavow in all that millennia that we have traversed the earth are, in the end, the truest estimation of our predicament, and of our destiny.

Tell me that is not the same thing Paul is getting at in  Romans 8:18-25:

 (18) I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. (19) The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. (20) For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope (21) that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

 (22) We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (23) Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons [and daughters], the redemption of our bodies. (24) For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? (25) But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.  

Are you waiting patiently? Have the Shadowlands gotten to you?

C. S. Lewis understood how they can.  For many, defending and explaining the faith might seem to be exclusively some kind of highly intellectualized, philosophical argument involving arcane research and the verbal sophistication of a kind only people like Lewis or possesses.

 But, as Lewis's own example shows, apologetics could, just as likely, yield a good fairy tale, or maybe a song or a poem, a symphony or a sculpture, even a quilt; sometimes it even might even be a nod or a wink, a shrug or a sigh, if the right person is sighing or shrugging.

Living in the Shadowlands, and leading others out of it, requires improvisation, and improvisation demands a settled soul, nimbleness of heart, creativity of spirit, and most of all borderline insanity, at least from the world's point of view. We live and long for the sun, but we inhabit the shadows—WHY?: because that's where the rest of God's chosen are. We plead that the sun is not a myth, and the end of darkness is at hand, but, of course, they first check to see if we own a pair of sunglasses. They're not going to follow just anybody out of the cave.

Jack Wrote a Book: The Problem of Pain

Lewis has this audacious, whimsical, borderline insanity down pat. When he was asked to write a book about pain during WWII, his publisher and the rest of the world thought he would be, properly, humbly, defensive. I mean who even agrees to writes a book about pain while bombs are falling over London and Hitler is on the march? A madman, right? After all, doesn't the existence of pain rule out a good God from the start? And doesn't it establish, once and for all the Shadowlands as our permanent homeland?

Not so, Lewis argues in his book: Pain does not create a problem for Christian faith, but that in fact, it is the other way around—pain and evil are actually a problem for those who have no place for a personal-infinite God, the kind of God who becomes one of us, to save us from ourselves, to lead us to paradise:

To ask whether the universe as we see it looks more like the work of a wise and good Creator or the work of chance, indifference, or malevolence, is to omit from the outset all the relevant factors in the religious problem. Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity. . . . It is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.[1]

Mind you, this is not the famous Narnian Lewis who writes The Problem of Pain; no, this Lewis is the one making his auspicious public debut as a Christian spokesman, not smuggling in theology like he did in his space novels past the watchful dragons of unsuspecting readers. But that is the reason that the man who asked Lewis to write this book invited him—because he saw a man who could spin a tale that would envelope his readers in an imaginative web nearly against their will, cast a spell that would rekindle, reignite a longing that dared not speak its name, a longing for home, what Tolkien called "the true west," and Lewis called later in Narnia, "the utter east."

In blithely taking this assignment, Lewis saw his task not just explaining the "problem of pain," but the more daring and expansive goal of the rehabilitation of God's reputation, on behalf of laymen everywhere who had been disenfranchised by their liberal clergy, and, moreover, he sought to establish and maintain the historical linkage between the faith once for all delivered as a historical faith with historicity on its side, a faith with an event in the center of it that helped explain not only the problem of pain, but the meaning of everything.

The message of The Problem of Pain was both profound and simple: the Author and Finisher of our Faith has Himself joined the human race and is even now unworking the powers of death and destruction, preparing a home for us, having willingly submitted Himself to its wanton, reckless power, but yet has overcome it in His Passion and His Resurrection.

Pain is a fact, Lewis told his readers. But pain as "fact" needs a context in which it can be understood. What is that context? Simply this: Pain is autobiographical and is the birthright of every person since the Fall. This means Pain is personal. Pain is woven into the fabric of the universe. And living in the Shadowlands requires offense, not just defense, and its chief weapon is keen storytelling, adroit spell-casting, cleverly placed messages in bottles, that convey "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited."" [2]

Instead of pain's looming as the dirty little secret wan and wayfaring Christians must hide away hoping no one impolitely introduces it into the conversation, Lewis avers, it is the very thing that sets Christianity apart, and rather than running from it and explaining it away, we must run to it in order to understandood the nature of the salvation we seek, or which has sought us.

Pain as part as life in the Shadowlands is to be met not by wishful thinking, but in allowing it to point us to the place prepared for us, a city whose architect is God.  The gospel addresses our homesickness by telling us where our home is, and what the pathway is back to it. Pain evokes a nostalgia for its absence, a time when it wasn't, when the discomfort was not there, when the loved one was still here, when the relationship was intact not broken, before the hurricane, before the tsunami, before the flood, and before the garden was closed, guarded by seraphim with flaming swords.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Pain

Lewis demonstrates, as does Paul in Romans, that it makes a difference in how we talk about it, whether pain is for us a problem or a privilege. As "problem" pain may rob you of a place to stand in this world, a devastation that leaves in its wake no moral order to cling to; as "privilege" pain may be one more obstacle toward the pursuit of a holy life, a challenge indeed, but only one, and not its defining moment or proposition.

The problem of pain implies a cascading set of arguments and counterarguments that demand detached scrutiny, historical contextualization, philosophical debate, logical analysis, perhaps refutation or falsification, or maybe simply a final shrug of the shoulders. The privilege of pain implies something else: a personal stake, a participatory investment in fathoming an answer to unlock its mysteries, an answer that is the key to everything else, everything else that matters. The problem or the privilege?

The "problem of pain" is how we tend to talk about it to those outside the faith. The "privilege of pain" is how we must talk about it among ourselves, whispered, then proclaimed as one more clue to the meaning of the universe, for the alternative is to surrender the compass that guides us home to those who believe there is no home, no room at the inn, no mansion, where joy and comfort reside and await. On this score, the absence of pain, not its presence, is the problem. As Lewis remarked:

The real problem is not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not. Our Lord Himself, it will be remembered, explained the salvation of those who are fortunate in this world only by referring to the unsearchable omnipotence of God."[3]

Pain is personal. Pain is autobiographical. Pain is not a theory or a hypothesis. Pain is a narrative. The meaning of pain, its verifiable absence or presence, its predictability and inevitability, the power of pain to debilitate depends not only on the objective fact of its existence but upon the person who endures, embraces, expresses, succumbs to, or triumphs over it. Pain is, if you will, in the body of the beholder.

We say blithely that history is written by its victors; but so, too, is the history of pain, but not only its history, but also its geography, sociology, economics, and even the very epistemology of pain, these are all written by its overcomers. The catalogue of lives lived long or short in incessant complaint against or quiet resignation to their chronic discomfort, hurt, alienation, privation, and ultimate death is uninteresting, unsustainable as a narrative or as a philosophy, unless they have refused to go "gentle into that good night," refused by their resolute doubt, their pilgrimage of faith, or simple human stubbornness to give in.

Pain has a story. And pain is a story. Pain thus has a beginning, a middle, and, we must say, praise God, an end. We learn this not through reading about it, but from living, living among the unimaginably poor, the aggrieved, and the devastated, as do our sisters and brothers in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Congo, and, now, the Sudan. In the face of inconceivable horror, indescribable fear, famine, and torture, mental and physical, there are yet people of faith, clinging to hope, hoping in joy, joyful in their pursuit of love, all in the midst of pain, loss, and brokenness. These are part of their story, but they are not their undoing. Some, perhaps most of the world's greatest sufferers are also among the most persevering, resilient, faith-ward in their thinking and in their hope.

How is this possible? How can I, how can you, how can anyone conquer, "see through," pain to what St. Paul calls "the weight of glory" when all about us, pain is rampant, endemic, and pervasive? Simply put, as Lewis suggests in The Problem of Pain, our Savior has called the church, his body, to complete the ongoing mission of suffering on his behalf—this is what Paul means when he says:

^{Col. 1:24}Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.

The pain we witness, the pain we ascribe, the pain we report, yes, this is grievous and depressing and demoralizing, but, Lewis underscores, we do not experience it alone, and we do not do so gratuitiously. Pain is not a theory. Pain is not a hypothesis. If we treat it as something else—a conspiracy of Satan, an illusion that we can wish away or out-faith, a proposition to be endlessly debated, we will fail miserably to understand and withstand it. And what we do with it becomes the problem of pain, not pain itself. The problem or the privilege?

Pain is a loss—loss of self, loss of will, loss of health and well-being, loss of family, friend, and foe; loss of control, loss of destiny, pain as both a thing in itself and as a metonym for the whole of life: it spells "I am not my own." There is a "disturbance in the Force," as Obi-Wan might say.

But it is not to another abstraction Pain points us. Pain, my pain, your pain, points us to home. It may be, as Lewis famously says in The Problem of Pain, and incessantly in the script of Shadowlands, "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."[4] But rouse to what? Perhaps we see it better in reverse: God is pain's megaphone to rouse us to a recognition that in our body, soul, mind, and spirit something is awry: pain is not my natural state, to notice its presencet is to become aware of former ease, contentment, or health, thatwhich has dissipated or disappeared. Something is wrong in my body, or my mind, therefore something is wrong in the universe.

Pain as Homesickness: Finding Neverland

The last set of lines from the short appendix in The Problem of Pain, provided by Lewis's friend, his medical doctor, also a fellow Inkling, Robert Havard, helpfully sums up the story offered to anyone living with or amidst pain: "Pain provides an opportunity for heroism; the opportunity is seized with surprising frequency."[5] Pain may define its victims, but not its heroes. My pain and yours is a clue to the meaning of the universe. Into which narrative will we situate this "fact," which plot will we follow?

If Pain evokes homelessness, living in the Shadowlands demands a gospel of homesickness. Pain is not native to the land from which we come. Where is that land? The problem or the privilege? The Problem of Pain is climaxed by two of the richest chapters Lewis ever wrote, a stirring reassurance that Heaven is our true home and not for a second is it subject to Hell's blackmail. Any amount of pain, alienation, exile, and loss can be endured if we can be assured that the Shadowlands are in fact Shadows, and our true home is elsewhere. Listen again to Lewis:

"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."[6]

What is the gospel of homesickness? To be sought after by the very God who created us, who knows our deepest longings, countenances our most lavish dreams, relieves our most nagging fears, that we are not to be rejected or renounced, but like the prodigal on his way home, the Father is running, leaping to meet us before we are even inside the gates.

This the gospel of homesickness. Our aim is to point to "Christ in us, the hope of glory." To come home. To affirm that the Great Captain of our souls has gone to prepare a place for us, that where he is, we shall be, and we shall be like him. Our job, like Lewis's, is to awaken the joy, the search, and the hope in those who read our lives and listen to our stories. With Reepicheep and Puddleglum, we head to Aslan's country.

But, I hasten to add—this does not add up to a retreatist mentality. To the contrary, it is our understanding and participation in the world's shadows, the world's pain, that prepares most to serve, and most to live, in this penultimate world. We are to be incarnate, like Christ, finishing His work, by the power of the Holy Spirit, which involves the privilege of suffering for Him, and his body. Lewis embodies the essence of this gospel of homesickness in these famous lines from Mere Christianity:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."[7]

Life, yes, must be lived in the Shadowlands, but we are not to become accustomed to it as our homeland, nor as the last word, a valediction. When it is illuminated by the gospel of homesickness, it is, in fact, a benediction, addressing not only the problem of, but the privilege of, pain, a path lighted by the Son all the way home.

Lewis is simply reminding us of something the New Testament writer of the Book of Hebrews told us long ago:

People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—--a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. (Hebrews 11:14--16, NIV).