We have talked a bit about life's diversions and distractions and how they bring temporal satisfaction, not because of their intrinsic rewards but because they release people from enquiries about the self. Here I want to talk about the role that reason plays in aiding our growth.
We cannot of course achieve full blessedness in Christ just through things within the self. But the external things which best help us to become blessed in Christ are not things of diversion nor are they things of escapism. They are things which elicit the true joyous feelings that one should feel from being alive in Christ; in fact, of being created at all. We did not ask to be born, but by the grace of God we were born - each one of us was in His mind even before the universe was created. It is not difficult to imagine what a man's state of mind will be like if he dismisses this in favour of seeking transitory thrills and distracting escapism; for he is seeking to escape from something glorious into something false. And how is he to know the difference when even the things he is using as a diversion are all part of this reality created for us? Well, he is going to face a lot of diversion along the way - and that, thankfully, is the duty of reason - to bring a man back on track whenever he steps off it.
It is, of course, easy to have sympathy with people who spend their lives seeking diversions, for they know not the severity of what they do. The delusions occur, not just in the searching process itself, but also in the perception of the end result; that is, men believe that the successful attainment of these things will somehow eradicate the hunger from within the inner-self. That is why you see in foolish men a pursuit of lust instead of a pursuit of love; you see a pursuit of self-preservation in excess, thereby denying and negating the true pleasures of charity; and worse, in really bad powerful men you see the pursuit of power at the expense of humanitarianism.
It is no coincidence that all the things in the world which involve pleasant actions towards others are also the things which bring about pleasant changes to the self. When Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount, He was instructing us to do these things not just for others but for ourselves too. It might be true that this whole human realisation - the part that offers affirmation both of our present condition and of our future condition has within it, hints of our original perfect self and hints of our present sinful self. And if we are to receive the message properly, we have to embrace those feelings which tell us that we will not be content or fulfilled until we are perfect again; until we are restored to our former condition.
When we seek solace in diversionary things we prolong the most exciting things that are available to us. Seeking perfection does not mean dispensing with fun or enjoyable things; rather it involves fun and enjoyable things in our journey to the divine. If anyone ever thought that Christianity tries to expel jocularity from life, I would say that just the opposite is true. Those who know and understand themselves most are those who know that any attempts to take ourselves too seriously is to dispense with knowledge of our creaturely selves. We are laughable not by our talents but by our faults. We are the greatest of God's creatures, we are much smarter than apes, but the greater a creature is, the greater his or her faults; after all, an ape is never embarrassed by himself, nor a dolphin, nor a dog, nor a cat.
Men restlessly pursue most things (depending on their culture) - and the most aggrandised object of pursuance is love. It is easy to cherry pick all the imprudent factors in gambling or alcoholism or covetousness, but even love, the thing which all men and women say makes the world go round, can cause a man to go wrong - even if it is pursued with the utmost care and affection. A non-Christian man commits himself to the pursuit of non-Christian love; he tries hard to be a nice, caring, faithful, honest person and earnestly pursues someone with the same qualities. But what is he experiencing if not the biggest diversion of all? Love has played a cruel trick on him; it has convinced him that all he needs to make his inner-hunger go away are the qualities which his beautiful beloved could give him. But the real illusory nature of this pursuit is only realised with foresight.
Give him every evening twice the pleasure (hypothetically speaking) that he will feel from loving his beloved, but on the condition that he does not go near her and you will reveal to him the true nature of pursuit. It is not in the having it is in the wanting. Offer the same proposition to a Christian man as regards his Christian wife, and he will tell you the greater pleasures lie not in the beloved but in the Christ that is in the beloved. He will know that the beloved is special not just because she is part of him, but because she is part of Christ. With this situation (unlike the first) you cannot separate the pleasure from the pursuit, for once you have realised the true nature of Christ, you are not pursing mere pleasure, you are pursuing perfection. The first man's pursuit is based upon delusion, for he must convince himself that he would be happy receiving with her the pleasure which he did not want twice as much of without her. He is forever creating an object to relieve him of his hunger; an object which if kept for long enough will reveal to him the true futility of unwise pursuits.
And in truth it is not very difficult to help a man realise his true situation. Take away from a non-Christian man pursuing a girl all the prospects of sensory pleasure, leaving him with just her inner-self, her personality and her character alone, and you will reveal to him the true emptiness of his pursuit. Of course, God says that these are things we should be pursuing first, but they do not belong in selfish, godless pursuits - for selfish pursuits help a man deny his true wretched self. It is going to be very difficult but if it is at all possible to get him thinking about pursuing things which are not tied up in selfishness, you might have the smallest chance that he will start to think more about his real inner-hunger and his real creaturely position. This applies to everyone - for if anyone ever wants to know the true nature of something of this kind, they must take out the sensory pleasures attached to that something, and they will see that all the things which are on the surface essential parts of everyday pleasures are, in fact, tainted, no, controlled, by selfish and sinful wretchedness. There is, of course, in the pursuit of love, no bigger insult to a woman than to want her body before you want to know her mind.
There is something very commendable about a man whose primary desire is to serve God; in fact, such humility we should all admire. But it is equally true that we often witness men and women whose primary and pathological desire is to be admired by fellow human beings. The first case is glorious, the second - odious; for they have fixed their minds on the desperate, vicarious, situation of men who derive pleasure from admiring instead of achieving. Of course it is true that happiness comes from external things, but it is no good coming outside of ourselves to look for them - for we are only imbued with spiritual things when we have opened our hearts and drawn them into us.
All of us, without exception, look for contentment, but we all choose very different methods for attempting to achieve this. Some look to love, some to their friends, some to organised groups - but the desires are the same no matter which method a man is using to find this expiation. We all know our true sinful nature, but it has not always been noticed that none of us are particularly resentful at such an admission. Men do not like to hear it from other men (particularly in anti-theist situations), but we do not wholly reject the notion deep within ourselves; we all know the true nature of the self. It has escaped the notice of the majority of unbelievers in the whole history of unbelief but no man or woman who had no faith in God has ever found anything close to the glory that has been hungered for by everyone who has ever lived.
They continually wonder what this thing could be, all the time failing to realise that only those who know God have a chance of finding it. It may not sound, to many people, very fair or just or democratic or politically correct - but it is true, there are no concessions made in obedience to expedient legal fiction; Christ is the way, the truth and the life. And if this is offensive, we should not be at all surprised, for Christianity does not just demand that we accede emotionally; it demands that we know the truth. It does not matter one bit what we would like to be true or what we think is a fairer system - we are dealing with ultimate realities and ultimate realities must condition only our thinking, not our feelings and desires. Passionate striving, if it leaves behind reality, will continue to disappoint and deceive. There is nothing in the whole of creation that will replace that which God is offering us. Of course, there are many stubborn people who will carry on doing it their own way - but it is not really their own way quite so much as they think; for wherever this stability is sought, its constituent parts - that of intellect, passion, zeal, rationality and knowledge - are really subordinate to a dominating inner-system which tyrannises all objects of clarity and holds them hostage in the company of futile wish-thinking.
Those who have resisted this methodology and found themselves a little closer and then fell away know full well the irresistible charm of rational pursuit, and in the process, they know full well that any regression to familiarity cannot be anything other than anti-climactic. The visions of new beginnings showed them the real frustration attached to all those parts which can only be possessed in the absence of new beginnings. This desire of new visions has been part of them all along - but it took a brief hint to show them how they could not manage indefinitely if it remained absent.
And this is perhaps the biggest confusion of thought in modern men; they have extrapolated a small part of their real nature - the part that should be offered to God - and they have taken it as their whole enthusiasm for other things - for hobbies, for passions, for superficial growth. This betrayal of truth has become second nature to them. They have made promises to themselves - promises that the true part of their reasoning which lives deep in their inner-soul could not keep. That is part of the reason why there is little hope for those who do not recognise God as man - they fail to see their own life purposes at the same time. In a subliminal sense they have wished that God never became man - they have missed the whole point of the story of creation.
Bertrand Russell asserted that if he met God he would enquire as to why there was so little evidence of His existence - but to be guilty of this type of thinking is to be guilty of further inner-psychological maladjustments. The central part of our hunger was never conditioned to wish for a God that would reveal Himself every time a man requested proof. The gradual perfecting of our faith is the only way in which we can know ourselves properly. Every small chapter in the whole story has been enshrouded in this divine mystery. We have been given as much of the divine as our present cranial capacity can take. Christ came so that God was not absent from mankind; therefore His dying meant that those who truly searched for Him would find Him and those who rejected Him could make no demands of a better testified appearance of the divine without contradicting the history of human eye witnesses. He has given us a true pathway to the divine, not just through those who know Him but also through the dissatisfied nature of those who do not.
Look around you and you will see three types of people in the world. Those who know God; those who do not know God but would make the necessary life changes if they thought He were there; and those who do not know God and would make no changes to their way of thinking whichever were true. Included in those three types, in variable proportions and varying guises, is every type of human thinking. The first are happy and following enquiries in accordance with rationality. The second are waiting for things to happen (however unconsciously) and the third are foolish and dissatisfied. Of course, you cannot tell on hearing that a man is a staunch atheist whether he falls into the second category or the third, but whatever his reasons are for disbelief, he belongs in one or the other.
It is true that many men will have conflicting inner-desires and conflicting reasoning when it comes to discovering Christianity. But in searching for Christ, the disparity does not occur in the same way that it would if a written statement contained two contradictory notions. We are dealing with something quite different within the human mind; for human reason will sometimes conflict with desire but sometimes it will pass right through without any conflict at all. Thus we cannot treat conflicting desires as enemies to rational thought, we must find whichever one is in obedience to reason. This is why we must not simply suspect that there is 'something' out there (as many do) - for even our sharpest reason tells us that such apathy is nearly an opposite of reason.
If Heaven and Hell are ultimate realities, then we find that humans are present, playing within the whole centre - they are right between damnation and paradise. All the time we are trying to master things within the two extremes when really we should be trying to get to the right extreme. If all that is in between will pass away, we are compelled to make every effort not to be standing stuck in the middle when God returns.
If your present mode of thinking is sullied by an indifference to religion, then it is your natural state being held hostage by the strong sway of post-modernist thrall; that is, you have been consumed by contemporary philosophies which tell you what 'proper thinking' is. Or perhaps indifference has been caused by your own personal feelings regarding a personal tragedy, or an affliction; perhaps you are saddled with dreadful personal woes, inferiority complexes, or no sense of belonging. Whichever it is, our Lord God is watching over you; He understands the difficulty of your journey. Even if you are tainted by an overabundance of pride, arrogance and self-regard - if your solipsistic tendencies far outweigh your desires for humility; His grace stretches out to you.
All these examples I have just given have one substantial commonality; they are all, deep down, alien to the self. The farthest point of wisdom somehow seems like it was made for something else, when in fact, we were made to discover it. We are bound by various laws to receive all kinds of knowledge - we are floating in uncertainty if we make no attempt to work towards the farthest point of wisdom - for there is certainly nothing in covetousness, or pride, or avarice, or lubricity, or creative delusion, or self-worship that is going to help us escape the uncertainty of the centre. We must only go back to the centre when we have mastered the extremes - we must, as Pascal said, 'fill all that lies between them'.
The Bible says that those who do not know God are 'like infants being tossed back and forth by the waves' (Ephesians 4:14). That is the true nature of unbelief - we do not, in one sense, believe in anything eternally worthwhile if we do not believe in the Almighty God. Whenever we think we have established truth we invariably find that the self-hunger which can only be fed by God Himself is telling us of better things. Even love itself cannot put an end to this, for when we give our love to things outside of Christ, we are going to be told by our inner-self that greater love does not exist anywhere outside of Him. This established point of lucidity upon which we think we have stumbled turns out to evade us every step of the way - for there are no fixed points to ultimate wisdom - wisdom is ultimate because of its continual progression.
If you ever think you understand it fully, you understand, at best, a very small part of it. Its stupendous allure is really an inherent part of our natural state, so often contrary to our second instinct, almost never contrary to our first. But suppression is our game - that thrall of micro-evolutionary progression tells us that the past should be left where it is, for all worthwhile things will, they say, be brought with us. Nothing we observe, if detached from thoughts of ultimate reality, can reconcile finite things with the infinite. But each facet of pursuance leads a man to build the right foundations; just as a jigsaw puzzle will start to look clearer the more pieces you fill in - the same applies to our discovering the whole truth. There will be intimations both of progression and regression, but it was never the job of the senses to tell us which is which; it was always the duty of reason.
Earthly life brings for us many challenges, and also many distractions, digressions and temptations. A huge part of our growth in Christ is to separate good and bad influences, and stay focused on trying to be as Godly as we can. In Christ we have a wonderful Lord who can help us stay on the right path. I think it is important for us to remember that, particularly in times when earthly life makes great demands - for its pulling power can easily lead us astray if we are not focused and disciplined. It remains a great comfort to us that He hears us when we are in need, and is willing to help, if we are willing to ask.
.
