Annal 88: Tale from the Blustery Day

Yesterday afternoon I decided to get out for a walk.  It was a beautiful day, though not in a typical winter way.  The sky was grey and warmer weather in the  morning had caused some of the snow to melt.  It cooled in the afternoon, so it was icy, snowy, windy, and almost dull in colour.  But it was beautiful.  The whole time I was walking, I kept trying to describe to God how what I was seeing and smelling and feeling seemed to stir me.  All I wanted to do was write, and yet I had no idea of what I wanted to write.  I wanted to write a story, but there was no tale that seemed to be worthy of what my heart wanted to say but could not express.

I have spent the last day trying to figure out what I was feeling.

It was as if I knew something was there, but it was something I recognized only in part.  As if I was only inches from pulling aside the veil and seeing what was on the other side, but was incapable of doing so at the same time.

What bothered me was my inability to describe it, and the fact that I wanted to write but didn't know what.

Tonight my sister and I went to the gym and I was listening to a podcast while working out.  It was a sermon by Timothy Keller, the pastor of Redeemer's Presbyterian Church in New York.  He is being hailed as the C.S. Lewis of our day, and I would definitely suggest that if you get a chance to read his books or listen to him, that you do.  The message I listened to was entitled "The Wounded Spirit," and within the last ten minutes he said something that I could not forget.  Here it is:

"In the Bible the Tree of Life is an image of immortal, eternal life, but also it's an image of irretrievable loss... a longing for something we remember, yet we've never had. In all of the music you go to kind of give yourself a high, you're actually looking for a song that you remember but you've never heard. What you're looking for in love is arms that you remember but you never really had. That's what the Bible's saying, that's what the Tree of Life is, and unless you understand that, that what you're looking for in everything you're looking for is the Tree of Life, you're never going to be wise."
Keller then followed it up with a quotation from Lewis' Mere Christianity.  In his chapter on Hope, Lewis says:

"Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.  There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.  The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.  I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers.  I am speaking of the best possible ones.  There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.  I think everyone knows what I mean.  The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us."

I am longing for something I vaguely remember, but never really knew.  And this is why, no matter how complete a moment may be when I am walking, no matter the symphony of the wind as it sings with the leaves, and no matter the ballet performed by countless snowflakes, I feel as if something is missing.  Those moments remind me of a completion that I have never really known.

And they press me toward the completion I desire and know I need.

Such is the life of a Christian single.