We love because he first loved us.
Why did I drift into the philosophy section of a now-defunct bookstore chain?
I had zero intellectual aspirations at the time and no intention of ever going to college. I’d graduated high school by the skin of my teeth and was trying to rebrand my chronic loafing as “taking some time to think about my future.” But with no clear parameters or set goals, this little interval didn’t even rise to the dignity of a gap year. Truth be told, I simply wanted to inhabit that hazy in-between space for an indefinite period, to click pause so that I was perpetually poised between childhood and adulthood. A buoyant lack of responsibilities augmented by the privileges of adulthood—sip a beer, surf the web, but don’t worry about paying for the internet. Best of both worlds. My token measure of responsibility was a job at a video store—those beautiful cultural relics. I got five free rentals a week and that was a pretty sweet gig as far as I was concerned. My life was one big daydream.
But drift I did, and the lack of any immediate precedent didn’t stop a golden spine from commanding my attention from the bookstore’s inert shelves. I squinted and The Basic Writings of Existentialism came into focus, neatly piercing my indolence. I had no idea what existentialism was, but it sounded weighty enough to keep me from drifting any further. Those five free rentals would have to wait.
I got home and pored over my discovery. The anthology began with an excerpt from Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s baroque meditation on Abraham and Isaac’s agonized trek up Mount Moriah. The excerpt was titled “Is There a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?” Up to that point I’d never known that there was a distinct category with a flag marked “ethical.” Nor did I imagine that this strange terrain could be suspended, let alone in a teleological fashion! In all honesty, I had no idea what a teleology was. I panicked and called my dad, who was on the road doing apologetics and probably using the word teleology every other sentence.
I could hear his smile through the receiver as he began to patiently walk me through the foreign language of “Continental philosophy.” This was a moment he’d anticipated for quite a while, and a submerged memory rose like mist from the troubled waters of my mind: Dad staring into my eyes and declaring, “You’ve got a deep sense of curiosity, son. One day the dam will burst and on that day I’ll be ready.” At the time this cryptic statement simply left me bewildered. Now it was starting to make sense. Given the current state of my mental life, it was a kind of backhanded compliment: Dad had clocked the torrent of nascent (read, wildly immature) thoughts building up in my skull, and he knew that a breach situation would necessitate a treatment process not unlike water purification.
I plowed ahead in the Basic Writings, understanding a fraction of what I read and growing more and more captivated with each page. Far from frustrating, my ignorance was a goad to deeper investigation. The more I read, the bigger the world became. Kierkegaard made me feel like I’d never really read my Bible. Why had I never even considered the psychological torment of Abraham as he went about the painstaking and lengthy preparations to spill his own son’s blood? And what about the spiritual upheaval of the fact that the living God—the sum and standard of all goodness—issued this seemingly immoral command? Despite the laconic pace of the biblical narrative, read between the lines and you quickly notice that this beleaguered dad had ample time to think about what he was doing during that long ascent. But, like a good cultural Christian sleepwalking my way through God’s Word, I’d spared my brow many a furrow by simply skipping ahead to the providential ram caught in the bushes, and I was more than willing to follow this same ram to the cross if any stray misgivings about the holiness of God cropped up.1 Fear and Trembling is a book-length refusal to cave to that false consolation, and as such it’s the book that restored Scripture’s hard edges for me.
At the same time I was gaining a vocabulary for describing realities I had long sensed on an intuitive level. The first excerpt that got through and continued to rise like dough in the oven of my mind came from Kierkegaard’s Despair Is the Sickness unto Death. In his characteristically recondite way, Kierkegaard offers an anatomy of modern despair, construing it as an invisible sickness that colonizes the heart, where it remains undetected as we go about the business of our daily lives. For Kierkegaard despair is at its most severe when it evades our awareness. Plenty of folks who lead what appear to be happy and well-balanced lives, filled with big houses, hypoallergenic dogs, emerald-green lawns, yoga studios, and beautiful towheaded children, are actually experiencing despair in disguise. They’re not happy, but they think they are. However, it’s not just that they want to convince everyone else of their bliss. Worse, they’ve fallen under their own spell, and their velvety circumstances only serve to reinforce this counterfeit sense of well-being. With his incisive portrait of the opulence of contemporary despair, Kierkegaard gave me the skeleton key to all those free rentals that chronicled suburban anomie (hello, Ice Storm), rabid consumerism (American Psycho), and “God’s lonely man” in the overcrowded city (Taxi Driver).
Naturally, it was only a matter of time before I applied Kierkegaard’s haunting insight into my own life. I looked in the mirror and saw through my idle rendition of despair. Years later I discovered that Walker Percy had beat me to the punch with his novel The Moviegoer. Designed to be a fictional counterpart to Kierkegaard’s book, the story opens with an epigraph from Despair Is the Sickness unto Death: “The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”2 The Moviegoer introduces us to Binx Bolling, a man who is suddenly aroused from the slumber of his everydayness and begins to approach the mystery of his despairing existence like a detective following clues. Underscoring the everydayness of his despair, the first of these clues arrives via an inventory of the possessions on his bureau:
I stood in the center of the room and gazed at the little pile, sighting through a hole made by thumb and forefinger. What was unfamiliar about them was that I could see them. A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible.3
“The search” is Bolling’s general designation for what happens once we’ve been liberated from the stupor of our everydayness. It’s what happens to Plato’s prisoner who flees the cave’s bewitching shadows, or, to draw from a modern spin on the parable, Neo when he takes the red pill and flees the consoling simulation of the Matrix.4 Bolling relentlessly exposes our many attempts at finding some kind of superficial relief or premature closure as nothing more than cushy evasions that play right into the hands of despair. Part of the novel’s brilliance is the fact that it doesn’t pander to our appetite for the exotic and exploitative. Binx doesn’t start manufacturing meth or go on a killing spree—those are the subjects of our entertainment, the premier escape hatch of middle-class despair. No, Binx’s evasions are of a decisively more domestic and even pedestrian variety: movies, cars, money, women.
For all its inherent risk and subsequent damage, there’s a sobering aspect to extreme behavior because it often blows despair’s cover, exposing our true condition. When people in crisis counseling circles extol the virtues of hitting rock bottom, this is the kind of wake-up call they have in mind. It’s hard to hold on to your illusions of control, for instance, if you’re sitting in a haphazard circle of folding chairs in a high school gym and introducing yourself as a fellow addict. This is why the novelist David Foster Wallace uses a halfway house to craft one of the more radiant explorations of spirituality in recent fiction. Despair is poorly hidden in a crisis. Cloak it in the pristine linens and matching curtains of a fine suburban home, however, and you’ve got an immaculate costume.
Because it reveals our true condition, the search inverts our normal categories so that “what are generally considered to be the best of times” are in fact “the worst of times” and vice versa.5 Why? If the distinctly modern guise of despair involves a heavy dose of deception, “good times” frequently prove to be its most fertile ground. The laundry list of addictions plaguing our nation is a clear indication of this point. How many times are we led into bondage with the promise of a good time? For an example, look no further than the porn industry, which remains a colossal player in America’s economy. By commodifying one of the most sacred expressions of human intimacy, pornography neatly caters to the modern fantasy that happiness simply equates to feeling good. If you think despair and feeling good are incompatible, consider the plight of any addict relishing a fix in the wreckage of her own life and you’ll see that we’re perfectly capable of feeling good amid desperate misery.
But how are we fooled into thinking that we’re happy when we’re miserable? The only way to disguise subjective satisfaction as happiness is to avoid all true self-awareness. Our culture may epitomize narcissism and self-aggrandizement, but it does so through an increasingly exaggerated lens that insulates us from honest introspection. In short, selfies generally don’t promote true self-awareness; their carefully manicured images have more in common with a funhouse mirror than with honest portraits. If you don’t believe me, try on a bathing suit in the unforgiving light of a dressing room, and you’ll quickly see the difference.
So many of our “good times” depend on a fundamental lack of self-awareness. The real ingenuity of pornography consists in its ability to distract us from the fact that we’re indulging in it. Indeed, any level of self-awareness is lethal to the enterprise. Its machinery is designed to trick us into thinking that we’re much more than a leering spectator. If we suddenly lock eyes with our reflection as we’re going about this degrading business, the spell is broken. Likewise, the illusion collapses if we’re suddenly bombarded with facts that betray the humanity of the people we’re objectifying. Imagine a porn video that featured pictures of the stars as babies or interviews where they talked about how their favorite meal was meatloaf and that they hoped to one day open a coffee shop in Brooklyn.
But there’s an oddly consoling aspect to our catalog of conspicuous addictions. Since we’re comfortable filing porn and substance abuse away as destructive habits, they tend to shine a glaring spotlight on the actual condition of our hearts, and, as grueling as the prospect of facing our moral failings may sound, what Kierkegaard and Binx have in mind is a whole lot more unsettling and insidious. If we want to discover modern despair, we have to look at the places between the crises. We need to look at the times before our cover is blown. We have to follow the inverse logic of Binx’s search and look for despair in the “good times” because that’s where it hides. When we think that everything in our life is going well, when we think that everything is under control, when we make the fatal mistake of forgetting our total dependence on God—what Scripture refers to as the “fear of the Lord”—we are in profound despair, no matter how resplendent our lives may look.
On the road I’m often asked about how we reach those who are happily living apart from Christ—the so-called happy pagans. I used to think this was a daunting question; now I think it’s little more than a misnomer. Despite appearances, true happiness is impossible apart from Christ. If he is indeed your Maker—the one who knit you in your mother’s womb and the one who knows you better than you know yourself—how could it be otherwise? Despair has a beguiling wardrobe that includes everything from worldly prosperity to fame and widespread influence, making it all but invisible to those without spiritual discernment. Those who see the world from the standpoint of eternity, however, know that its leathery wings often beat above glittering kingdoms.
Dallas Willard argues that if churches abandoned the consumer Christianity of our day and applied the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) more broadly, we would see a moral revolution.6 But what does an addiction-recovery program have to do with the life of the church? We can begin to make sense of Willard’s proposal by considering the first three steps, which require respectively an admission of our powerlessness in the face of addiction, the recognition of “a power greater than ourselves,” and the subsequent surrender of our “will and lives” to this power.7 In lectures and conversations Willard never tired of insisting that Christians ought to introduce themselves as “recovering sinners,” dispensing with the armor of social niceties. It’s a wise proposal: “Nice” people are always “doing well,” generating glowing newsletters, returning from the perfect vacation with the perfect tan, and maintaining the ideal work-life balance. Recovering sinners, like recovering addicts, take it one day at a time.
Willard is far from alone in pointing to the spiritual power of AA. Over the years several shrewd writers have highlighted the confounding effectiveness of this homely little program. One of the more memorable voices in recent years belongs to a contemporary novelist with a reputation for trafficking in postmodern tropes and making colossal demands of his readers. Boasting 1,079 pages, an immensely convoluted plot that defies neat summary, protean sentences that often span paragraphs and even pages, as well as sprawling endnotes that take up nearly a hundred pages in and of themselves, the late David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest seems an unlikely place to encounter a vision that challenges our modern despair. Nevertheless, Wallace uses this towering edifice to rejuvenate our spiritual imagination. By offering a searing account of the triumph of faith in the desolation of our modern addictions, Infinite Jest shows us what full-bodied Christian love looks like.
Wallace joins Percy in examining the contours of modern despair, and he’s particularly interested in the ambient sadness surrounding our current American landscape. Specifically, why is a place this convenient, this connected, and this affluent so undeniably sad? In an interview with Salon, Wallace tries to describe the ineffable sense of unhappiness that dogs our nation:
There’s something particularly sad about [life in America], something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.8
Infinite Jest chronicles this lostness through the lens of addiction. It’s a canny maneuver because a nation that fetishizes feeling good all the time is a nation in which our desires are bound to run amok. Acute despair may slip under the radar, but our numerous addictions paint a picture of increasing lostness on a national scale. While Wallace’s book features a near-encyclopedic depiction of substance abuse, his eccentric characters keep reminding us of the spiritual nature of anything that captures our hearts. “Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith?”9 That our “temples” can include everything from a cherished pet to pornography to athletic prowess to opioids is a profound insight that we can trace back to Augustine of Hippo.10 For Wallace, our various addictions are more than mere distractions and modes of self-gratification; they constitute nothing less than a “distorted religious impulse,” and the only way forward is to reorder our worship and learn to love virtuously.11 Remarkably, this is a clear echo of Augustine’s fastidious account of properly ordered loves.12 In the broken English of one of Wallace’s characters, “You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.”13
Infinite Jest is a work of apocalyptic realism that unveils the inherently spiritual nature of all of our desires and aspirations, whether they show up in an actual temple or not. It unfolds as a kind of spiritual pilgrimage that mirrors Augustine’s “road of the affections”—his phrase for capturing the rich tapestry of signs we encounter on our journey to our “true homeland” in the heavenly city.14 For Augustine these signs took the shape of actual graven images and sacred monuments. For us they show up in ads, memes, movies, music, and shows. Though we’re accustomed to seeing Augustine’s “road of the affections” in the classic imagery on display in Dante’s Divine Comedy or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Infinite Jest gives us a contemporary road of the affections, one that unfolds in a world where the calendar is now subsidized and the majority of our religious pursuits are invested in the world of entertainment. If Bunyan’s Christian must battle dragons and ogres and resist the enticements of Vanity Fair, the characters in Infinite Jest must resist the temptations of Demerol and “lethally compelling” movies. Far from a clever gimmick, Wallace sees all these pop culture references as an accurate reflection of our modern scenery: “What I mean by it,” he said, “is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It’s just the texture of the world I live in.”15 People once took annual pilgrimages to temples and cathedrals. Now they flock to Disneyland.
But if modern despair hides in the good times, and our constellation of distractions only reinforces our false security, how do we wake up? How do we learn to love virtuously amid such abundance? These are matters of life and death because the final destination of misdirected love is bondage. In the words of one of the novel’s many recovering addicts, “By the end I was undead, not alive, and I tell you the idea of dyin was nothing compared to the idea of livin like that for another five or ten years and then dyin.”16 The nod to zombies is interesting because Infinite Jest hit shelves in 1996, a good while before our current infatuation with all things undead. Tying zombie imagery to addiction is highly perceptive. After all, zombies are the embodiment of mindless consumption. These slobbering ghouls are slaves to their appetites, led willy-nilly on the leash of their urges. In our era of rampant consumerism and ensuing addiction, it’s hard not to see them as our decaying doppelgangers.
But Wallace adds a sardonic twist to the Augustinian insight regarding misdirected loves by riffing on Neil Postman’s unforgettable title Amusing Ourselves to Death. Yes, the phrase “infinite jest” is lifted from Hamlet, but it’s also the title of a “lethally compelling” piece of entertainment that’s circulating in the world of the novel, one that an eager terrorist organization sees as the ideal weapon for subduing a nation enslaved to its desires. It’s hard to imagine a more effective weapon in the contemporary United States. The film offers a kind of time-lapse photography of the fate of an impenitent addict. To see it is to become engrossed beyond recovery—newly infantilized viewers slowly starve themselves to death and perish in a mess of their own waste, idiotic grins frozen on their emaciated faces. In a world where numerous people continue to die in pursuit of the perfect selfie, is Wallace’s lethal entertainment so far-fetched?
In the words of our Lord, “Truly, truly I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). This is also Wallace’s picture in Infinite Jest, and it’s the reason that the heart of the book concerns an alcohol-and-drug recovery house, known as Ennet. Wallace deliberately chose to explore the subject of virtuous love in the world of recovery because it’s one of the few remaining institutions in post-Christian America where honest introspection is unavoidable:
The thing is, it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can’t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity. Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough, ravaged people know and fear, all of them trained to remember the coyly sincere, ironic, self-presenting fortifications they’d had to construct in order to carry on Out There, under the ceaseless neon-bottle.17
There’s an uneasy parallel between these AA meetings and the testimony circuit in the world of ministry. As I argued earlier, it’s easy to hide behind an exotic testimony. In her memoir of addiction and recovery, Leslie Jamison points out that an effective storyteller is often a liability in recovery programs. She highlights one man in particular who finally conceded, “My story isn’t much different from anyone’s. It’s the story of a man who was made a fool of by alcohol, over and over, year after year after year, until finally the day came when I learned that I cannot handle this alone.”18
Substitute the word sin for alcohol and that’s all of us. Though some people have been delivered from extreme circumstances, at a fundamental level every one of us is in the same boat. We’re all sinners in desperate need of God’s grace. We’re not all former Satanists, drug addicts, and criminals, but every one of us needs to be saved, even—or maybe especially—if we make our home in a sleepy suburban neighborhood. In Wallace’s unsparing words, “You are not unique, they’ll say: this initial hopelessness unites every soul in this broad cold salad-bar’d hall.”19
There are no special testimonies, if by special we mean that they lay claim to a higher degree of vitality and authenticity. Extreme circumstances do not enhance a person’s spiritual credentials. We’re all in extreme circumstances. From the discreet gossip of homeowner associations to infidelity to murder, sin is always lethal. We all need to be saved, and, according to Wallace and Willard, we need to stop pretending that we’ve got it all together, and we’re somehow special. If we’re Christians, we’re recovering sin addicts, learning day by day what it means to crucify “the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24). This is painstaking, unglamorous, “maximally unironic” work, and we take it one day at a time, fiercely guarding against the temptation to think that we’re now out of the woods for good. In the words of the late Father Thomas Hopko, “Expect to be fiercely tempted to your last breath.”20 Recovering addicts worldwide would add a hearty amen to that admonition, and Christians ought to as well.
Like many kids growing up in Christian households, I hated being dragged to church on Sunday mornings. Now that I’m a dad, I get to inflict the same ordeal on my kids, and I probably enjoy it a little too much. Full circle, as they say.
Not all of us go to AA meetings, but all of us who follow Christ have to go to church, a prospect that often carries the same appeal as an addiction recovery program. The coffee’s usually just as bad and the conversations can be just as stilted. I remember sitting down in my small group and cringing as our fearless leader flashed a sappy smile and explained that we were going to “do life together.” Along with Wallace, I wondered, Is this “goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharine grins and hideous coffee” really the spiritual end of the line this side of eternity?21 Wallace levels this same scrutiny at AA through his characters. Much to their chagrin, they discover that, like church, “the thing actually does seem to work.”22 But why does something as aggressively boring, unfashionable, and countercultural as church actually work?
It works because we have to hear and do it over and over again to get it through our thick skulls. And so we drag our weary selves to church on Sunday morning and sing about the gospel for the umpteenth time, recite the creed again, confess the same tired laundry list of sins we never seem to shake, hear yet another leaden sermon, and slink from our pews and shuffle forward like an awkward procession of penguins to take Communion. And somehow it’s precisely what we need. We will never reach a point where we’ve worshiped enough, prayed enough, confessed enough, heard the gospel enough, taken Christ enough.
In truth the problem isn’t that church is boring; it’s that we don’t have our heads on straight. Fickle and finite, it is we who are out of touch with reality, not Christ’s church. While we pine for the fading signs of our times, the church offers only the timeless and the eternal. It turns out that church requires a level of refinement that can only be cultivated through spiritual maturity. As C. S. Lewis said so well, it’s not that God finds “our desires […] too strong, but too weak,” and church is an invitation to bite off colossally more than we can chew.23 The great irony is that church routinely disappoints us not because it fails to meet our expectations, but because it exceeds them. As we age, we come to recognize that we don’t grow out of church; we can only grow into it.
Speaking of restless kids counting down the minutes in a seemingly endless church service, James K. A. Smith offers a glorious picture of the dawning recognition of what church actually is. He asks us to imagine Andrew, a young boy using his church bulletin as a “checklist” until freedom:
Confession? Check. Assurance of pardon? Check. Reading of the law? Check. Creed? Check. Pastoral prayer and prayers of the people? Long wait to be able to check that off, as an elder seems to be praying for the entire world. Bible reading? Check. Sermon? Wait for it . . . wait for it . . . still waiting . . . Finally: check! We’re getting close! Offering? Check! Wait—second offering for benevolence? Ugh, check (finally). Doxology (we’re getting tantalizingly close now): check! Another prayer: check! Andrew can now taste it. A hymn (seven verses!?): finally, check. Here we are, the finish line, T minus thirty seconds, everyone stands, the end of worship is in sight. Benediction: yes! Freedom!24
In Smith’s illustration, Andrew grows up to relive this same restlessness as he watches his young daughter fidgeting in the pew. He remembers fondly being at that stage when the service felt like an interminable series of hurdles. He sees it differently now, not because he’s been assimilated into the lifeless routines of adulthood but because his perspective has been enlarged. You might say his vision has become apocalyptic. Instead of seeing the church service as a monotonous checklist, he now sees it as a great cosmic dance, one that reveals the mystery that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Though we make our way through a cultural landscape punctuated by all manner of spiritual longings, God’s particular message of reconciliation is made visible in Christ’s body alone. But you have to grow up to see it.
One of the more haunting pictures of the church’s beauty comes to us in Paul Bunyan’s spiritual classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Though we may think of our Sunday morning trek as little more than a tedious obligation, Bunyan speaks of a stately palace called “Beautiful,” set by the dangerous “highway side,” and “built [by the Lord] for the relief and security of pilgrims.”25 Here, Bunyan’s hero, Christian, is refreshed with worship, Communion, and rest. Awakening in the upper chamber known as “Peace,” he sings,
Where am I now? Is this the love and care?
Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are,
Thus to provide that I should be forgiven,
And dwell already the next door to heaven?26
At the end of his time in Palace Beautiful, Christian is led to the top of the house, where he catches a glimpse of the “Delectable Mountains” of “Immanuel’s Land,” a foretaste of heaven for his weary eyes.27 According to Bunyan, this sight is “visible only from within the fellowship of the church.”28
Not only do we not grow out of church, but as our spiritual vision is deepened, we begin to catch glimpses from it of the other world we were made for. It’s in this sense that church is our only true home this side of eternity, the Beautiful Palace standing amid our restless world. It’s the one place where we “dwell already the next door to heaven.” If we think it’s boring, it’s because we are far too easily amused.
But where can we turn for a compelling vision of spiritual maturity? Lord knows, there’s no end of boring ones available! For many of us, the word maturity itself carries joyless connotations of dead-eyed lectures about character formation and the importance of taking responsibility—the kind of things you find in work retreats and finance seminars. Who can show us—Americans spellbound by youth—how exciting growing up is? It’s at this juncture that Dante Alighieri emerges as the titan of spiritual maturity among poets—the poet to show us why every Christian can’t wait to grow up. The Divine Comedy chronicles this poet’s long and difficult journey to heaven. The picture we get is one of gradual ascent; Dante begins in hell, moves on to purgatory, and finally reaches heaven.29
In the poem’s final moments we are treated to one of the most profound invitations to spiritual purity and divine communion in all of Western literature. When Dante finally gazes upon Jesus Christ, the “Sum of Grace,” his vision is deepened so fantastically that he is “ever more fervent to see in the act of seeing.”30 Here the heavenly vision plumbs such unfathomable depths that Dante is powerless to describe it as anything less than an “abyss of light.”31 This “abyss of light” is the ultimate refiner’s fire, burning away any last vestige of the old self that would hinder Dante from coming face to face with his Maker. Paul’s dark glass has been finally shattered.
C. S. Lewis contends that every earthly desire cloaks a powerful wish “to please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son.”32 Whenever our desires misfire, we discover an eternal appetite in our hearts, and though this experience is never less than painful, it is instrumental in awakening us to the kind of longing that, properly expressed, will lead us straight to the source of our fervent spiritual yearning. Each one of us has beating within our chests an instrument of infinite capacities fashioned by a God of infinite capacities. Because of this, there is a unique fit between our Creator and us. Our urgent need to be known and loved by God is what Lewis aptly calls the “inconsolable secret” of our hearts.33
Gazing into the inexhaustible riches of the Living Radiance that is God, Dante finds himself growing in direct proportion to how much of God he is able to see and understand. To his great surprise, the only one who changes amid this progressive revelation is he,
and not because that Living Radiance bore
more than one semblance, for It is unchanging
and is forever as it was before;
rather, as I grew worthier to see, the more I looked,
the more unchanging semblance
appeared to change with every change in me.34
In this moment of supreme adoration, God’s vastness finds new expression in Dante’s heart. The more of God he has, the more of God he is capable of receiving. But this is an everlasting transaction because the infinite heart Christ has knit within each of us will be satisfied by nothing less than eternity with him. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God,” writes Matthew, and we would do well to remember this verse every time we are tempted to stray into the territory of aimless discipline and vain legalism. Let us never forget that our efforts toward purity and spiritual transformation have a colossal target: We want to see God “as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).
Lewis faithfully adapts the spirit of Dante’s vision for his Chronicles of Narnia. When Lucy—the most spiritually alert among the children of the Narnia series—is reunited with the great lion, Aslan (the Christ figure of the series), we are treated to this remarkable exchange:
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”35
The more we grow in our pursuit of Christ and the riches of his glories, the greater we will find him to be. My prayer for all of us is that when we pause on the threshold of heaven, we will indeed be worthy to see our Maker. On that day, I pray that our wildest dreams will come true, that King Jesus will smile upon us and say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:23).