Sarayu began humming the same evocative tune he’d heard earlier…. The melody stirred Mack deep inside, knocking again at the door.
—The Shack
As you have probably gathered by now, I suspect that the fingerprints of C. S. Lewis are all over The Shack. And nowhere more so than in the riveting scene when Papa runs across the porch and lifts Mackenzie off the ground with a hug as wide as the universe. Such a scene is born from a long and brutal journey, winding through great hurt into the discovery of the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit and the freedom to be.1 Both Young and Lewis write as grown men who have learned to play again; they write, as someone said to Lewis about his writing, “as though you enjoyed it.”2
I have listened to Paul share his story for hours and hours in three different countries. He is always the same. His voice sounds like a blend of the voices of Kevin Costner and Tom Hanks, and he grins like Donald Sutherland, as if he knows something that you don’t, but are about to, and he will enjoy every minute of your awakening. What Paul knows is that Papa is good, and that you are accepted as you are, and he knows that you believe that you are not. For me, Paul’s voice, his grin, his eyes anticipating your surprise, all come together when Papa shouts, “Mackenzie Allen Phillips!” on the front porch.
Within us all there lies a broken dream, “our inconsolable secret,”3 as Lewis calls it, that is so precious to us we protect it with a thousand defenses. “The secret which hurts so much,” Lewis says, “that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.”4 We know that we are made for glory, but we’ve only known hints of its joy. In the midst of life we long for more. Something is missing; creation is aflame with a glory we cannot touch, but we know it’s ours. We are moved by ancient music, but cannot find the great dance. So “we pine,” as Lewis says.5 But such pining is too much to bear. So we bury our longing, and protect our dream’s sleep.
Back in my college days at Ole Miss, I once bumped into Miss Mississippi. I had met her several times, so we greeted one another. It was around Homecoming, so as we talked I asked her who she had a date with for the big weekend. She paused for a moment, and then said, “Baxter, I don’t have a date. In fact, no one ever asks me out.”
I was shocked. “How in the world do you not have a date? I would have thought your phone never stops ringing.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “No one calls me.”
Every now and then I think about how odd it was that the reigning Miss Mississippi hardly ever had a date. One day it dawned on me. There is a huge risk in picking up the phone and asking someone like her for an evening out. Rarely does a “No” feel good, even a polite one; but somehow it seems to hurt more if the “No” comes from someone of standing. Perhaps it’s better not to run the risk, and just settle for something else.
What if the grand promises of the New Testament, of abounding life, of the river of living water, of love, of a kingdom of righteousness, joy, and peace in the Holy Spirit, turn out to be a sham, a terrible trick of the gods? What if we find a closed door at the end of our longing? What if we hear that dreaded and shattering “No”? What if at last we miss the great dance altogether? Better not to listen for the music. Better to put the phone down. Better to bury the dream.
In this world it is best to keep such romanticism at bay. “Grow up,” we say to ourselves, “put such silliness aside, and just get on with it.” Perhaps it’s better to compromise with our hearts and live a half-life than to risk the prospect of such a bitter disappointment. But then we hear a rumor in the wind, a line from a song; we see a smile, or a sunset; or we read the scene of Papa shouting Mackenzie’s name, or hear the “haunting tune” of Sarayu (132, 234), and our insides tremble with hope. Our dream is awakened.
Such is the burden of being alive. How could we dare run the risk? There is no pain more bitter than the death of a deep dream, and no dread as terrible as its awakening without hope. But what if Papa is real? What if Jesus is passionate that we know his Father with him? What if the Holy Spirit is determined that we live in the freedom of Papa’s embrace?
Lewis was a rare academic who harnessed his great mind in the service of his heart’s pain, until he was at last “surprised by joy.”6 As such, his writings sing the song of the longing heart.7 He knows about our dream, and he knows the truth. He was aware of “almost committing an indecency”8 in bringing up our inconsolable secret. But how can a man who has met Jesus’ Papa be silent?
As a boy in Ireland, Lewis was smitten by an encounter too beautiful for words. It was only a fleeting moment, but it was real, and “in a certain sense,” he says, “everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.”9 Thankfully, he could never let it go, and his whole life became a long quest to discover what that encounter, and others like it in his youth, were all about. He came to call them “stabs of joy.” A “stab” because it hurt, and “joy” because even the pain of the stab was better than anything else in life. But what was it that Lewis encountered? What were the “stabs of joy”? What is our inconsolable secret? What exactly is our dream all about? It has to do with Papa’s smile, and Lewis has written beautifully about it.
In his famous sermon, now an essay published separately as The Weight of Glory, one of the finest sermons ever penned, you can find three profound insights into our inconsolable dream. The first we might call the desire to be baptized. I don’t mean baptism in the sense of water or the church sacrament; I mean baptism in the sense of being immersed in something to the point of being utterly filled with it. Lewis is writing about beauty, the simple pleasure of seeing something beautiful, and about how in seeing it we want more. And this wanting more is surely part of what awakens in our hearts as we read about Papa’s embrace.
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t.10
I think I have read this paragraph a hundred times over the years. It never ceases to amaze me. There is so much here. Notice the words “to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” And I wonder if Lewis is right when he suggests that our fairy tales are really about this deep dream, that they are the projections of our longing hearts. The longing is not so much about beauty as it is about being filled, baptized. But filled with what?
In Mere Christianity, Lewis notes the biblical distinction between bios and zoe.11 Although both words are translated as “life” in our English Bibles, they mean two different things. Lewis says that human beings in their natural condition, from their mother’s womb, have bios—biological life—but not zoe, or spiritual life. The difference between the two, Lewis says, is like the difference between a photograph and a real place, a statue and a real man.12 We could say it is the difference between broken, sad, and angry Mackenzie, and Mackenzie embraced and delighted in by Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu.
“This world is a great sculptor’s shop,” writes Lewis. “We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”13 The filling we long for is a filling with real spiritual life, not bios but zoe. But what is this spiritual life? What is zoe?
The second aspect of longing Lewis writes about in The Weight of Glory has to do with reunion. It is a longing “to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off,”14 and “to be acknowledged, to meet with some response.”15 Here Lewis shifts from the abstract to the personal and relational, from discussions of filling and fullness and life to being noticed, heard, and known—to fellowship.
But there is yet a third dimension. For it is not merely fellowship for which we long, but fellowship of a certain kind. In the essay Lewis talks about glory in terms of fame. Not the fame of Hollywood—“not fame,” Lewis says, “conferred by our fellow creatures”—but fame of a much more profound nature: “fame with God, approval or (I might say) ‘appreciation’ by God.”16 He elaborates:
Nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised.17
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—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.18
Lewis moves from longing as the desire to be filled (baptized) to the desire to be reunited, reconnected, and known (fellowship), and now to the desire to be a thrill to the heart of God. It is when you combine these three that you come very close not only to the soul of the universe, but also to naming our own inconsolable secret. When Papa embraces Mackenzie, our inner world leaps with hope that it could be so for us. What we want is to see Papa smile at us. We want to be a delight to the Father’s heart, and to be so filled with his pleasure that our whole being dances in it. And that brings us within a hairsbreadth of the blessed Trinity and the great dance of the triune God, not to mention the stunning dream of the blessed Trinity for the human race.
Lewis was shocked at this. He said it never crossed his mind that what he longed for was God. “No slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy.”19 But gradually it began to dawn on him that behind the whole universe was Something vast and deep and ancient and beautiful, and very alive.
And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.20
Behind Lewis’s longing and ours is “the first dance,” the original dance, the fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit. This fellowship is not boring, joyless, sad, or empty, and certainly not religious. This is a living fellowship of passion and delight and love, of creativity and music and joy, of glory and oneness and life—zoe.
The secret longing of our souls is to be taken into this circle and given a place in it, to pass into it, to bathe in it and be filled with this life, to be noticed and known and embraced, to share in the very delight and pleasure that the Father has for his beloved Son, to share in their joy together in the Spirit, and to live in its freedom. As Lewis says, “The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us.”21
Such a thought is almost unbelievable, but I think it is tucked away within us, and wrapped up in a box labeled “Too Risky.” Such a longing is too much to bear. What could be more painful than to hope for such a dream and then miss it? And who among us actually believes that we could possibly be “a real ingredient in the divine happiness”? Why would God smile at us? So we bury our dream, and move on with life. Then we read of Papa’s shout, full of such passion and love and delight, and the dream is awakened.
It hurts to hope that it could be so. But what if it is already true?