Because you are the age that you are
and because I am the age that I am
such thoughts must be remembered
and many feelings are muted

And so I reach back
straining my memory
reaching as if behind my back

For the fiery restlessness
striving to pursue, to attain to remarkableness
To do something, to serve, and put hands to the plow

I remember the ache for beauty
That has never gone away
The longing for a better world

To cast off, cast away
For far off land - brighter seas

It’s still there of course
even after all these years, and the intervening things
Perhaps I have sterilise it
Perhaps I’ve neatened and straightened it
places it in tissue paper

Perhaps life has muted the ache
Dulled the pain?
In part. It is so.

But I have learnt too, in these years.
Of the Lord’s patience
Of the cost one pays
To be slaves, even as we are kings and queens

Oh dear one
You must also pay it
Perhaps you’ll pay it away from me
Where I cannot comfort you

But I am only a selfish sort
This talk of sending you off is all vaulting sentiment
It isn’t for your sake that I pray you’d stay
It’s for to lessen my agony

And if there were another way
I’d rage like the best of them

On Tim Keller's Use of "Mythos"

Tim Keller, the Thinking Evangelical's Favourite, has written a book on marriage. And it has caused much a goodly stir in Christian circles. Moi, I haven't read the book, but I did read Keller's far shorter essay on marriage and singleness, on which, by all accounts, the book is based.

The essay is excellent, not the least for his situating Christian singles and marrieds within the wider community of the people of God, and in arguing for theological reasons for marriage. Tim Keller is also a big C.S. Lewis fan, and is responsible for introducing Lewis to a whole generation of young Christians of the 21st Century.

However, as each new generation reads 'the old books' with the preoccupations of the present age, so what Keller uses of Lewis is reflective of what 21st century Western Christians are concerned with. There is a simplification of Lewis' thought, and, to a certain extent, the reinvention of an idea, or at least a far narrow application of a Lewisean theme.

A comprehensive Attraction

Keller's book on marriage contains a beautiful exhortation to wisdom in choosing 'the one to love.' Keller argues for a 'comprehensive attraction' between prospective marriage partners, one that is not based on superficiality nor sexuality. Rather, he advocates a love and commitment for the other person that is based on character, as well as their 'mission in life.' Such attraction encompasses not only who the other person currently is (imperfect as he/she may be), but who they will become - their hopes, their longings. One must love who the other person is becoming, and be committed in helping to bring about this future self:

'Marriage partners can say, “I see what you are becoming and what you will be (even though, frankly, you aren’t there yet). The flashes of your future attract me.'

These are lovely, profound ideas, which challenge the lens through which we might look at prospective marriage partners. Keller asks us not to necessarily look for Mr. Perfect-Epitome-of-Christ-Right-Now, or Miss-Paragon-of-Godliness-Already-Perfected, but to find someone flawed, but one who is growing, and who is willing to change and be moulded throughout their life by grace.

Mythos Misapprehensions?

But then Keller narrows his definition, to suggest that comprehensive attraction should be directed towards someone who shares your longing for God:

Ultimately, your marriage partner should be part of what could be called your “mythos.” C.S. Lewis spoke of a “secret thread” that unites every person’s favourite books, music, places or pastimes. Certain things trigger an “inconsolable longing” that gets you in touch with the Joy that is God. Leonard Bernstein said that listening to Beethoven’s Fifth always made him sure (despite his intellectual agnosticism) that there was a God. Beethoven’s Fifth doesn’t do that for me. But everyone has something that moves them so that they long for heaven or the future kingdom of God (though many nonbelievers know it only as bittersweet longing for “something more”).

Sometimes you will meet a person who so shares the same mythos thread with you that he or she becomes part of the thread itself. This is very hard to describe, obviously.

This is the kind of comprehensive attraction you should be looking for in a future partner.

Again, this is thoughtful, sensitive and helpful advice (even if it narrows down my potential marriage partners to a possible 7 people in the world: 4 of them dead, 2 Octogenarians - one married, another still sexily single, and the final one probably yet to be born!) Keller is essentially arguing that we ought to look for someone who understands our Sehnsucht, our longing for something beyond this earth. All well and good, as far as it goes.

What makes me nervous, however, is that Keller inadvertently simplifies CS Lewis' argument regarding Sehnsucht/Longing. For readers of Keller who have not encountered Lewis, they might mistakenly understand Sehnsucht to be that quixotic mixture of deep joys and passions, which, if shared with you, will ear-mark someone as your 'soul mate' or 'kindred spirit.' It would also seem that Sehnsucht is located in the realm of romantic love, and is part of the mysterious magic of such. Sehnsucht then becomes subsumed within the search for the one who will understand and relate to such deep feelings within us, and who will, in Keller's words 'become part of the thread itself.'

I am not suggesting for the faintest moment that Keller is idolising Sehnsucht, and I would be the first to declare that a marriage founded on a weaved unity of 'secret threads' of joy must surely be beautiful and wonderful. But I cannot help but think that a cursory reading of Keller on this will lead to either a misunderstanding (and unhelpful idealisation) of 'Sehnsucht', or an over-zealous longing for romantic relationships that will recognise our Sehnsucht.

Mythos Realigned: Getting back to Our Source

For Lewis, Sehnsucht was never something to be found patterned in another human being. That is, while we might find some (or a great deal) of common longing in another, so that we might meet a person and exclaim: 'And so you like this too? But I thought I was the only one!', Sehnsucht essentially shows our aloneness, which longs for understanding, but which cannot be found fully in anything or anyone of this earth, but in God himself.

Keller quotes CS Lewis' use of 'secret thread' without elaborating the context in which Lewis makes his case (and really, how can he? Keller is after all writing a book on an entirely different theme - marriage!) The phrase comes from Lewis' The Problem of Pain, in which Lewis caps off his work on suffering with a moving chapter on the Longing for Heaven. This secret thread, while Lewis acknowledges others to possess, is uniquely our own. We rarely, argues Lewis, actually find many others who share the same pangs at the sight of beauty:

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of ...

But such should not discourage us, but merely show us our essential uniqueness. Your soul has been made unlike any one else's, and, is always, utterly and bereftly, incomplete, until it finds its refuge and fulfillment in its Maker:

Our soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance ... [Sehnsucht] ... if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away, but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is ....

Sehnsucht is Augustine exclaiming in his Confessions:

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

But what about Relationships in the Here and Now? Friendships? Marriage, even?

Of course, Lewis is not saying that we can't find fellow humans who see a similar beauty, or joy, or longing in the things of this world that stir it up in us. Indeed, he spends a lengthy paragraph, in The Problem of Pain, and in Surprise by Joy, as well as a whole chapter in The Four Loves, detailing the joyous meeting of such friends.

But in the end, Lewis' conclusion is that it is because the love of friends and the love of marriages fail, that Sehnsucht is seen for what it really is. Such longing cannot be fulfilled in human relationships alone, and our 'connection' with one another is limited. Sehnsucht points to the exclusive relationship that we, the created ones, must share with our Creator. That is the very nature of Sehnsucht - a tantalising teaser, echoes heard in song, and promises hinted at in sunrises - glimpsed in our relationships perhaps - but pointing to fulfilment elsewhere.

Romantic Love, or the love between friends, of the deepest and intimate kind, will never be enough. They are honourable, glorious things, to rejoice in, and not dismissed (as if we're cold-blooded cardboard saints who are beyond human relationships). But it is only when they are put in their rightful place is a believer's life, as one of the lesser gods, that the True God enters. And by entering, enable us to enjoy these lesser loves, in the whatever form he has chosen for us - be it in marriage, or in singleness with rich friendships and in solitude.

Please don't hear me saying that looking to marry your 'secret thread' friend and lover is bad. But that is not the point of Sehnsucht in our lives.

The very purpose of Sehnsucht is to point to something outside the relationship. Looking for a secret thread partner, as if he or she is the one to fulfill your Sehnsucht, is foolhardy and oxymoronic. And though it might be wise for a life-long relationship to begin with an understanding of each other's Sehnsucht, there is no rule that says that a secret thread of Sehnsucht must be the basis of any relationship.

To misunderstand the power and reason for Sehnsucht in our lives is a pitiful waste of a gift of God. Perhaps this is the hardest of all for single people, as we live in a world where romantic love is touted to be the ultimate union and connection two people can have together. What are we singles to do with such longing that seems to point towards fulfillment in another of flesh and blood, but there is none?

This entry is already too long for me to mount an argument that single people reflect the humanity that is to come, and plagiarise Halden and Myers, who suggest, with delicious provocativeness, that 'if Christ is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness, since Jesus himself did not participate in any of these experiences.'

I can only acknowledge the unfulfilled longing of singles, and echo Walter Trobisch's challenge: "The task we have to face is the same, whether we are married or single: To live a fulfilled life in spite of many unfulfilled desires."

We live in a broken world. Not many things happen as we wish. But God is still sovereign, and our Father. What else is there to do, but to trust and obey; pleading for more faith and courage, each day? At the same time, we're allowed to rail and wail to God, and to question all we need. Just see some of the Psalms.

One must also understand that the secret thread can be found between friends, not merely lovers. The thread might come in singular, but the things that it ties together are plural. If we understand Lewis' argument regarding the individuality of each person correctly, one person will never fully share your Sehnsucht, but perhaps a number of dear friends (not excluding your spouse) might share in the varied experiences that bring you to joy.

In the final analysis, Lewis himself would have told you, that all longings (for marriage, for deep friendships, for understanding, for beauty, and for love), force us to go back to the Original Source, the love that is Christ's self-giving to us, and the glorious, 'big-picture' future that is already been secured for us:

But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand ... For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you - you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God has His good way, to utter satisfaction.

January Hymn

The sun is scalding hot.
The pavement crackles with wind and dust,
And our skins blister, soaking up the brightness -
stretched with light until we can hold no more.

We walk,
Stepping carefully amongst the wreckage
Of December past.
The same gait. The same pace.

Our heads are always in the clouds.
People should look up more, you always said.
There’s so much to see in the sky:

The tips of old buildings. The light rounding out sharp corners.
The birds weaving like living smoke.
A lone geranium plant from a high window ...
We laugh ourselves stupid at cloud shapes.

(I’d built an edifice of my own, by this time.
A paper castle full of manuscripts and ideas.
Some in languages we know.
Some in ones we would learn together.)

And so we run.
Blithely, rejoicing in each other’s strength.
And we stumble, in the same ways -
Our feet fall on the same jutting stones.

But that’s the trouble, you say.
We’re too similar, without being the same.
We’ll never really run a parallel course.

Well my friend, as the song goes:
When your mind’s made up, there’s no point trying to change it.
So we'll close January and wait for February’s new.

I pray. Not knowing what to pray:
I shall always fight words that curtail your freedom,
Even if it means fighting myself.

So I ask God
For a cold day.
My eyes no longer streaming,
trying to see in the summer sun.
When I will go out,
Stepping on autumn leaves.

The light will be older then. Mellower.
And through the mist 
I will see Keat’s fruit, ripe and hanging low.

Full to overflowing from two trees.
Yours and mine. 
Side by side.
(Much like any others, really.)


And perhaps we shall see, what was always intended:
The strong independent roots. The distinct branches.
Yet the interlacing green. The shade they provide.

And the breeze,
When it whistles through the leaves,
Makes a sweet, straining tune.
You take the high notes, I the harmony.
The melody is (of course),
His.

New Year's Resolutions

Written around the end of December 2011. But only found today...

**************

I'm quite a grump about New Year's resolutions. I'm realistic about myself, knowing that I am a fey and fickle creature, lazy to the bone, and can barely stop drinking coffee for a week, let alone keep a noble resolution for 365 days.

So I make some silly ones that are easy to keep, and over which I shan't pour scalding regret, if I did break them.

But this New Year's Eve, as I look back over my 20s and look forward to turning 30, seems a good junction to reflect, and ask myself some bigger questions about who I am, and who I would like to become.

I've never been much of a New Year's celebrator (I expend all my anticipation and excitement over Christmas), and I'm rather immune to the shiny excitment of a fresh new year (blank pages, unknown plans etc.) But Chesterton reminds me:

"THE object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."

-'Daily News.'

And so it seemed providential that this week's sermon at church mentioned Wesley's Covenant. Another local church had this in their weekly bulletin:

"John Wesley adapted a Covenant Prayer for use in services for the Renewal of the believer's Covenant with God. In his Short history of the people called Methodists (1781), Wesley describes the first covenant service; a similar account is to be found in his Journal of the time. Wesley says that the first service was held on Monday 11 August 1755, at the French church at Spitalfields in London, with 1800 people present. The prayer had some of its origins in the puritan, Richard Alleine. Services using the Covenant prayer have been included in most Methodist books of liturgy since. It has become usual to use this at New Year. We will offer the opportunity to pray this prayer today:

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

(Book of Offices of the British Methodist Church, 1936)."

Perhaps, instead of resolutions, which look to the will and strength of the man or woman to accomplish, we could pray this instead. Every day, for 365 days. And trust that God will work this in us, hourly, daily, for this year, and beyond.