A Heavenly Hope

What has repeatedly and without fail caught your heart’s attention up until this very moment? Think! What, when mentioned, has made your heart pump faster, has made you move to the edge of your seat, has captured your imagination and made up your day-dreams? Is it the promise of a happy, healthy, successful family? Or the allure of a powerful career, capable of influencing people, policy, culture, a tour de force of philanthropy, good reputation and landmark creativity? Or the aroma of love, of blemishes and faults erased under the hot passion of a lover’s intimacy, of a heart finding its true potential and feeling as loved as it longs to feel when partnered with Prince Charming, with Mrs. Right? Or the hope of commanding the armies, shaping politics, discovering your true self, being critically acclaimed, becoming the person you long to be but never have been, of being adored for talent, praised for generosity, loved for charm?

What is it? If just the right political party was in office, or if social justice, equality for all, would finally catch the masses’ hearts and become a real thing, or if you would drop a few pounds, settle down and find a spouse fit for making you feel wanted, make partner at your firm, become financially secure, maybe if you could just be somebody, everything would change. Then, only then, you could be the person you could only hope of being. The chains would be broken, freedom at last. Only then could you know in your heart of hearts, that you are praiseworthy, that you are fit to be loved.

We are indulging creatures, craving energies that pulsate through our blood and intoxicate our minds. Sex, in today’s age, has become a search, a means to an end, a ritual that demands sacrifice of the soul in its purity for a brief moment of delight in the physical. It is a way for men and women to like themselves again; men feel secure because they can woo a woman, women feel secure because men wish to woo them. But for that brief moment, in the ritual’s most intimate sacrament, the whole world ceases to be. The cravings and particular longings of the separate lovers swell into one; they are so entranced in the act of love that the body cannot handle the pleasure and the mind likewise is overwhelmed with dopamine. Joy flourishes and blossoms; the seed in each lover’s hearts takes root and for an infinitesimal second, beauty lives in each person. They have fulfilled their longing, overwhelmed with pleasure, overjoyed with delight, overflowing with love; they have taken part in the beauty that has usually eluded them.

But the beauty withers and dies faster than each person can put their clothes on; each lover reverts back to where they started. The body wills them to repeat this action as soon as it tastes how pleasurable sex can be, and so the separate lovers will replicate the act of love in hopes of replicating the physical and spiritual delight. As soon as the heart finds a vessel, a means, to feel love and fulfill, if only slightly, the desire to bring praise and admiration to the self, it will latch onto the means. No matter what the cost. I use sex, and only am referring to unmarried sex, as an example of the incessant, yet subtle drive for satisfaction human beings have always been controlled by; I use it also because I think sex and the need for it is a perfect encapsulation and a perfect symbol of how humans respond to their emptiness/need for love. We need praise and love to feel human, and everything in life we do is a way to receive that praise and love.

So how are our hopes heavenly? I have begun to see, especially in my own psyche, a craving, an overbearingly powerful, yet subtle, longing to be loved, respected, adored and admired. The feeling an orchestra gets when the audience rushes to their feet, when an author reads overwhelming praise for her work, when a father receives a warm embrace from his son— this is what I am referencing. Yet, I cannot fully describe it. And the more I attempt at giving my particular desires a fair description, the more clumsy and forced it sounds. All I can explain is this much— to be enveloped in a reality that is as stunning as a sunset on the beach, as tender as a room of family lovingly gazing at a newborn baby, as lighthearted as my childhood days, as captivating and beautiful as life, at its fullest potential, can be, is what I want out of my existence. In short: I want perfection.

And I would argue that it is along the lines of what every single person to ever exist on this planet has always and will always want. We have always wanted perfection, and with the recent (by recent I mean the last 40 years) secularization of American culture, the replacement of theologies with ideologies, we not only want perfection, but we desperately demand its presence in our lives. It has been interesting to see the chain of articles being published in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to legalize same-sex marriage, that the work for achieving total social equality for all is far from over and will be attained in the future.

Perfection, or beauty in terms of efficiency and virtuous laws/citizens, in our politics, culture, relationships, jobs, kids, spouses— now that, especially in learned spheres of America, this life is believed to be all we have, the pressure for perfection in all aspects of life is unparalleled. For the unbeliever, the average, secular, agnostic bordering atheist Joe, the craving for beauty and perfection is even more consuming. As Camus says in Myth of Sisyphus: “Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” But the unbeliever is, or at least should be, constantly reminded that according to their beliefs, beauty never lasts; that we all end up rotting six feet below the ground, no matter how much beauty or sex or money or friends we were able to acquire in our lives. It is all for naught in the end— even the most profound, intimate moments of our lives, where we feel that we actually mean something in this meaningless place. (come on, we both know that can’t be the truth of life)

This life has never been enough; even the ancient Greeks and original existentialists constantly complained about the sufferings and imperfections of life, and always preached an improvement of life, a harnessing of the goodness and creativity of humankind to improve the lot given to us for however long we have. In short: whether our hope is in heaven, or our hope is to have heaven on earth, either way, our hopes are heaven-centered, they are heavenly. Perfection, beauty, love, kindness, peace, tranquility— the soul wants nothing else. C.S Lewis puts it like this:

“Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson’s remark that the élan vital is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death—as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility” (The Weight of Glory)

He goes on to say:

“We do not want merely to see beauty… 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. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in.” (The Weight of Glory)

How much is enough? Can any amount of sexual partners please your appetite? Can any amount of 0s in your bank account ever satisfy your financial drive? How many hours do you need to put in at the office or in the classroom to feel like your existence is justified? Are you ever fit enough, can you ever leave the house without checking yourself out in the mirror? How many friends are needed before you can feel secure about yourself? When can you ever be content with the lot you have been given?

Christ implored his disciples to perceive, understand, see, hear and remember why He was with them: to fulfil their thirst for more. If our hunger for sex can’t be appeased, is it plausible to think that maybe it is more than just sex you have been striving for, and that maybe you have just been using sex as a means to find that something? If our thirst for comfort in friendships, social status or our bank account never lets us settle in, never leaves us comfortable in our skin, is it reasonable to think that the comfort we seek can only truly be found in something more powerful then what wealth or popularity can offer? The list is endless, but my point is short: if we cannot be content with our lives or even ourselves, that must mean that we weren’t meant to be. We weren’t meant to be just drowsily accepting of what life offers to us, we were meant to discover something more. If physical delight is what we most delight in, spiritual pleasure what we have most pleasure in, relational comfort what we take the most comfort in, we must be designed to be comfortable, pleasurable and delightful creatures. That is what we care about the most, correct?

But our search has led us to a dead end; we haven’t found pleasure, comfort or delight because we haven’t found the correct thing to put those energies into yet. Lewis tells us that we are like content, ignorant kids, content in the mud, happy with making mud pies because we just simply do not comprehend what it means to be offered a trip to the beach. What’s the trip to the beach supposed to symbolize? Seeing God face to face, “seeing Him as He is.” That is the culmination of all our efforts at self-gratification, and the promise Christianity offers to us; the crescendo to the symphony, the climax of the story, a long hike’s end at the top of the mountain— He, the chief good of all goods, the base of all joy and pleasure from which their streams flow into our reality, is what we have been looking for. His face is our heart’s desire. Just to see it, capture its grace and mercy, to feel His rhapsodic love spill into our souls and taste, taste His aesthetic beauty.

We have sex because we crave this moment, and romance is the closest thing we can find to an aesthetic experience so powerful that it leaves the whole self hypnotized with its rapturous charm. But this is nothing, sex is nothing compared to seeing the Father how He is— it is an echo of the sound we long to hear, an undercooked, raw appetizer meant to dimly foreshadow the coming of the feast. If we can’t fulfill our desires on this earth, could they be meant for something other earthly, namely for an eternity in heaven?

“The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be like to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.” (The Weight of Glory)

The mysterious yet captivating utopia we all long for.

And Christ, being the Son of the Father, has shown us His all-loving, all-just nature, bestowing on us the love from our Father that His perfect existence, not our half-hearted efforts, deserved. Through the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, can we “be called Children of God, and that is what we are.” We have been designed to seek out pleasure and feel it’s warm, comforting embrace; God designed us this way because He is the most delightful of all delights, the most comfortable out of all comforts, the most pleasurable out of all pleasures, He is the base from which all good energy flows. And because His nature is such, we were meant to discover how pleasurable and delightful He is, and that the vessels offered to us (good food, sex, comfort) in this life are meant only to symbolize the pure, blissful, aesthetically pleasing and fulfilling nature of our God. It is only fair to say that His face is behind all attempts at satisfaction, both physical and emotional. But no amount of life’s appetizers can fulfill our appetite. As Lewis says:

“I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and 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. Not only in a child either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures— nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect a moment— a very, very short moment— before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please.” (The Weight of Glory)

And this delight in knowing we are praiseworthy in God’s eyes, through Christ, is what, in all attempts at bringing love or glory to ourselves, we have searched for. High and low, subconsciously and consciously, in a concerted effort and in the hum drum of daily life, we have looked for the words, “You are my Child. With you I am well pleased.” And the soul takes refuge in the knowledge that this is the truth: we have pleased the one we were created to please, even in our guilt-ridden, insecure, prideful being, and we will experience joy, bliss, love, purity, friendship, perfection, pleasure, and comfort in their natural state, in their intended state, for an eternity in paradise. We will drink from the fountainhead of all good; we will be with God Himself, the chief good from which all goods flow. We will taste and see that the Lord is good.