PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Uncovering the buried original shimmering you!”
By: Ron Woodrum
In the play Death of A Salesman, written by Arthur Miller in 1949, which won a Purlitzer Prize for drama, and a Tony Award for Best Play, there is one scene that speaks volumes. Willie Loman has committed suicide. The family is standing at the graveside. Happy, Willie’s 32 year old son says “he had no right to commit suicide”. Linda, Willie’s faithful wife, wonders where are all the friends and acquaintances that knew Willie? His eldest son, Biff, hits the nail on the head in explaining his tragic end when he declares “Willy had all the wrong dreams…he never knew who he was!” That epitaph could be written over the lives of most Christians, who for all practical purposes have committed spiritual suicide with the lives that God intended for them to live. We often miss out on the fulfillment of fully following Jesus because we spend all of our waking hours “chasing all the wrong dreams and failing to realize who we were really intended to be in Christ!” The great intellectual Christian thinker G.K. Chesterton saw this dilemma when he wrote in his magnificent book Orthodoxy these words-“We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. . .Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.” Any attempt on our part to sort this confusing story out will end in futility and frustration. Robert Jenson points out the inherent reason why this is true. He says, “Human consciousness is too obscure a mystery to itself for us to script our own lives”. Any attempt to script our own lives leaves us trapped in an eternal present, we come to a sickness of heart like that of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, the Scottish nobleman who sells his soul to play the role of the king who sells his soul to play the role of king in his own small story. At the end of his life he laments, “I am sick at heart…tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time; Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard from no more! It is a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Act V, Scene V). Frederick Buechner, in his book Telling Secrets, also points out this dilemna facing Christians. He says, “the world sets out to make us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something the world will like better than it apparently liked the selves we originally were. That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all. Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather”. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, calls this dilemma a “mental calamity” that robs us of our “spiritual identity”. He clearly points this out by saying, “We have all read in scientific books, and indeed, even in romance novels about the story of the man who has forgotten his own name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is….We are all under the same mental calamity; we have forgotten our names. We have forgotten what we really are.” Most, including most Christians, never escape this “calamity”. Though we know God, through His son Jesus, we settle for far too little. We chase all the wrong dreams. C.S. Lewis said it so well-“We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink, and sex, and ambition, and religious efforts, when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant b the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
How do we get out of this dilemma? How do we escape this mental calamity? How do we uncover our original shimmering selves? It is beyond our reach to “script our own lives!” Simon Tugwell clears this up for us. He says, “So long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart. But it is the other way around-He is looking for us!” A.W. Tozer becomes more explicit in explaining how this works for us. He writes-“Thirsty hearts are those whose longings have been wakened by the touch of God within themselves”. George Herbert, marveling at the message of Isaiah 62:4, 12 which reads, “No longer will they call you Deserted. They will be called…the Redeemed of the LORD; you will be called the Sought After”, caused him to write, “My God, what is a heart; that thou shouldst it so eye and woo; powering upon it with all thou art; As if thou hadst nothing else to do?” (Mattens). Chesterton explains how he came to the conclusion of God’s work bringing this to reality in our lives; “I always had believed that the world involved magic; now I thought it perhaps involved a magician…I always felt life first was a story; and if there was story there must be a story-teller!” Anne Dillard, calls this divine wake up call a mystery. She says, “We wake, if ever we wake at all, we wake to mystery!” Frederick Buechner gives us this advice-“listen to our lives” and God will speak in a clear way which way to follow Him. He writes in Now and Then, “If God speaks to us at all, other than through such official channels as the Bible and the Church, then I think He speaks to us largely through what happens to us…if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that however faintly we may hear Him, He is indeed speaking to us, and that however little we may understand of it, His word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling!” C.S. Lewis referred to this divine communication to our hearts, this eternal tug from God, as the “secret signature of each soul”. He says, God speaks to our hearts “of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are watching for, looking for, listening for? You have never had it…tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should ever manifest itself…and did not die away…you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would know it and say ‘here is the thing I was made for’. We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each sould, the incommunicable and unapeasable want…If we lose this we lose it all!” Responding to this call of God to our inner heart, choosing to follow the way of salvation, provided by God in His son Jesus, and giving ourselves fully to His call and direction. That must not just be a once in a lifetime decision, though it begins with that, it must be a pursuit of our whole heart, to know Him, and follow Him, and let Him transform us with His love, presence, and power. George MacDonald put it this way, ” But we who would be born again indeed, must wake our souls unnumbered times a day”. Once we have awakened to God’s call, and responded to Him by trusting in the finished work of His Son on the Cross, our lives must consist of putting Him first, following in His steps, to do that consistently means turning all else away to listen for His direction. C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, put it this way, “It comes at you the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes of the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply of shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that larger quieter life come flowing in. Standing back from all your natural fussing and frettings; coming in out of the wind!” (Mere Christianity). Responding to this inward call of God. Embracing His Son as our Savior, and choosing to lose our lives following Him-is to finally know who we are…understanding our story…no longer chasing the wrong dream…finding fulfillment and joy we have been longing for all of our lives. But in order to make that born again reality a continued experience we must pursue Him with a whole heart…listening to the other voice…the larger perspective, let His eternal life come flowing in. Today’s message talks about how Unprofitable Servants of His are Made Profitable.