Flight.

For earthbound, two-legged beings, humans have one strange and curious longing that none of the other creatures on earth desire: we all long to fly.

I can't imagine the cow looking up at the bird in the sky and thinking to itself: "If only I had wings." And no monkey, after swinging freely in the rainforest canopy, would ever dare catch itself imagining flight. Yet, deep within our subconscious, deep within our hearts, yea, even deep within our souls, humans long to fly. That's why our mythologies (and our psychologies) are peppered with dreams of flying men, and why some of our greatest inventors have been those who have attempted to give us wings. That's why our modern systems of communication (both commercial and entertainment) are full of Red Bulls that give us wings and other forms of synthetic elevation.

In the movie Avatar, Jake Sully says that he keeps having dreams of himself flying. What he desires here is both natural and supernatural. He desires natural freedom of movement (ie, he doesn't have working legs, so he desires freedom from his natural bondage); but he also reveals that he desires supernatural freedom of movement (ie, because humans don't naturally fly anyways -- whether they are physically handicapped or not).

I've been musing about this a lot lately. Flying is risky business. I wrote a poem about the danger and glory of flight on my personal blog. To fly is inherently both simultaneously terrifying and dangerous. It reminds me of something that John Eldredge once said: "To desire is to open our hearts to the possibility of pain; to shut down our hearts is to die altogether." (Desire, 23) And desiring [= hoping] is a lot like flying.

In the spiritual sense, I believe that hope and flight are the same. They are dangerous. Hope deferred will make the heart sick. When your wings fail you will plummet... and the landing isn't pretty. But they are also both glorious. When desires comes, it is a Tree of Life. [See Proverbs 13:12] When you fly, when you soar, it is unlike any other feeling on this earth.

I am convinced that there are two types of flight in the world. The first I will call Mechanical Flight, and the second I will call True, or Organic, Flight. In the ancient Greek tale of Icarus, Daedalus warns his son not to fly too high or too low. Icarus, though, captured by the joy of flight itself, flies towards the Sun -- his wings subsequently melt and he dies in the sea. In Iron John, Robert Bly calls young men like Icarus "ascenders." They are so focused on the joys of flight that they end up crashing and burning. In modern Christianity when we see a pastor or a young person do this, we say that they have "burnt out."

But I want to propose a different thought. Perhaps Icarus' problem wasn't that he flew too high, but that he flew with the wrong type of wings. As William Blake said, "No bird flies too high, if he soars with his own wings." See the birds of the air! None of them ever have to fear the heat of the Sun. And, from a Christian mysticism perspective, I believe that God made us to keep flying higher and higher. At least, that seems to be the nature of His Kingdom -- a continual progression and growth in the Presence of God.

St. John of the Cross expressed this in his poem "Of Falconry":

Upon a quest of love,

hope sturdy and steadfast,

I flew so high, so high,

I caught the prey at last.

 

In this divine affair,

to triumph – if I might –

I had to soar so high

I vanished out of sight.

Yet in the same ascent

my wings were failing fast –

but love arose so high

I caught the prey at last.

 

Just when this flight of mine

had reached its highest mark,

my eyes were dazzled so

I conquered in the dark.

I gave a blind black surge

for love – myself surpassed!

and went so high, so high

I caught the prey at last.

 

The higher up I went

there, in this dizzy game,

the lower I appeared,

more humble, weak, and lame.

I cried, But none can win!

and sinking fast oh fast

yet went so high, so high,

I caught the prey at last.

 

Then – marvelous! – I made

a thousand flights in one,

for hope of heaven will see

all it can wish, be done.

I hoped for this alone;

I hoped; was not downcast.

And went so high, so high

I caught the prey at last. 

       (St. John of the Cross, from The Poems, 37-38)

St. John flies with different wings than Icarus did. Had he flown with mechanical wings made from the strength of man, he would have fallen and crashed and burned. But he flew on organic wings, on the wings of faith and hope. On wings that take their strength from God rather than from man.

Jake Sully finds the same. He is offered mechanical flight: the Colonel tells him that if he will follow orders, he will get his legs back. But Jake's heart knows that there is better out there. He dreams of it. He doesn't dream of walking; he dreams of flying. When Jake Sully finally decides to be one of the Na'vi [notably around the time that he falls in love; there could be another post altogether about the differences between synthetic falling in love and divine falling in love...], he discovers a flight that is risky and dangerous (symbolized by Toruk Makto), but altogether worth it.

St. John had found a flight of pursuing the Presence of God that was radical and dangerous -- to the point that he was imprisoned for his love of God. But he knew it to be altogether worth it.

Icarus, on the other hand, and the Colonel, are earth-men with mechanical wings. Their wings are not fueled by the strength of God, but by the strength of men. And it is because of this form of pride that they fall. The devil has the same problem -- he viewed his beauty as his own, rather than as a gift from God. Mechanical flight will always lead to a long, painful fall.

But organic flight, flight "with our own wings" (as William Blake might put it), flight not by our own strength, but because someone else gave us wings, flight that is of heaven, rather than of the earth -- it is glorious and beautiful. There is no greater feeling in the world than flying knowing that the very wind that takes you up is the Breath of the Holy Spirit. Through Him, we can dare to desire, dare to hope, dare to dream, and dare to fly.

A Poem. "Flight."

One of the symbols that God has given me for my life in Christ has consistently been my "wings." I know when I'm soaring in His Joy because my "wings" feel open and free to fly and soar and go places. I love that sense of exhilaration in the Spirit, knowing that I'm led by Him.

All that being said, flying is scary. The image here is not as much about flying, but about standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to fly, but waiting for the wind. I can jump, I can take risk, without the Holy Spirit... but if I do so, I will fall and hurt myself.

But if I wait for that Wind... Then I can take that risk, and the most beautiful things can happen.

Once upon a summer sky – in open air I stood by
      a vast expanse of sweeping green
      of trees and horizons yet unseen
With heart wide open and lightly-sealed lips – I stood atop a precipice
      inclining on the Voice that led me there.
 
It seemed so long and I grew cold – I felt as though I had grown old
      and that tree and squirrel were passing my stage
      and the world around me went from age to age
With heart reluctant and frozen lips – I stood atop a precipice
      waiting on the Voice that led me there.
 
Yet soon altogether, with great surprise! – spring awoke and brought the sunrise!
      a light wind tapped along my skin
      and I knew that now was time to dive in
With heart unlocked and smiling lips – I jumped out from my precipice
      falling on the Voice that led me there.
 
Wings spread open, arms stretched wide – my descent quickly turned into a glide
      but without risk can there ever be flight?
      (Like can day exist without the night?)
With heart flying free and laughing lips – I soared beyond the precipice
      flying by the Voice that led me there.
 

(10/24/13)

Fairy Tales.

Earlier today I read the first few sections of "The Light Princess" by George MacDonald, which I hadn't done in a little while. It's such a strange little story about a princess who gets cursed on her christening to have no gravity -- both physically and spiritually. She's completely light -- she floats up to the ceiling and she views everything as a joke.

I love my little collection of George MacDonald's fairy tales. Each of these little stories [except "The Giant's Heart"; I didn't like that one] are wondrous, and floaty, and beautiful, but also deep. For instance, there's this glorious moment, which C.S. Lewis alludes to in his writings, in "The Golden Key," at which Mossy and Tangle see shadows from a land that they cannot see, and they long to go to "the land from whence the shadows fall." Or there's a moment in "The History of Photogen and Nycteris" in which the two future lovers see each other for the first time and do not understand the other's fear of the day or the night.

There's something about a fairy tale that can, in a simple way, express the deep realities of our souls. Last night I was with a group of friends, and we discussed the Disney movies and how some of those early movies (like Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty) rang with deep truth. This is the same way that I felt about The Last Unicorn -- something about that novel rung a deep chord with me, and I still can't quite get over it yet.

MacDonald knew this when he wrote his fairy tales. In his essay, "The Fantastic Imagination," he said:

"If a writer's aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an Aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. ... 

... The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for whose sake it exists. ..." 

          (George MacDonald, from The Complete Fairy Tales, 10)

I love that. "If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it." And wake that music he does, with such phrases and tunes like:

"He [Mossy] had not gone far before the sun set. But the rainbow only glowed the brighter. For the rainbow of Fairyland is not dependent upon the sun as ours is. The trees welcomed him. The bushes made way for him. The rainbow grew larger and brighter; and at length he found himself within two trees of it. 

It was a grand sight, burning away there in silence, with its gorgeous, its lovely, its delicate colours, each distinct, all combining. He could now see a great deal more of it. It rose high into the blue heavens, but bent so little that he could not tell how high the crown of the arch must reach. It was still only a small portion of a huge bow. ..." 

                        (George MacDonald, "The Golden Key," from Ibid., 121)

It's amazing what a few lines of text can do. You can almost see that heavenly rainbow which hides the Golden Key at its feet. Or, later on in the story, the flying fish that goes to find Mossy; or the shadows which fall from an ethereal land that is better and more joyous than ours.

I find it interesting that I have mentioned fairy tales only very briefly on this blog. In truth, I believe that there is no better vehicle of True Mythology than the fairy tale -- it almost does not need interpretation. (MacDonald himself says the following: "A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that... you... should know what it means?" (Ibid., 7)) The Fairy Tale is glorious because it is a Meta-Mythology. It is a Myth about the Myth. It is an Allegory beyond Allegory.

Bah. It's hard to talk about it, or to express exactly what I mean by that. Hopefully, reader, you get the idea.

And maybe that's why I've only briefly mentioned fairy tales thusfar on this blog. Just like how I only briefly touched on the interpretation of The Last Unicorn. It's deep the way that the Parable of the Soils [some people call it the Parable of the Sower; but in InterVarsity, we call it the Parable of the Soils] is deep -- because it's self-referential. Fairy tales are sublime. They're hard to catch.

Like a Unicorn. You might see them [briefly], and you might recognize them [if your heart is pure], and you might even get to touch them [if they let you]. But you will never ever catch them.

A Poem. "Surprise."

I wrote this one this morning thinking about many different things that the Lord has been doing in my life lately. I had received a prophetic word two or three weeks ago that said that the Lord would be shifting my paradigms and shifting my life -- and He had been whispering to me about "Rain comes down from Heaven // Flowers spring up from the Earth" [ie. seasonal changes] for some time now...

As I thought about that, I remembered something that C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne (see Yours, Jack, 309) about how his wife had sensed Jesus on her shoulder, and how she was worried that she might have some unrepentant sin in her life... but when she turned around to see Him, He had a blessing in His hand and a smile on His face.

Jesus keeps looking at me with this mischievous (but good) smile on His face, and I know that He has, as He told the Lady Julian, a "great goodness" in store. This poem is an expression of that reality -- that we serve a God who loves to bless us and surprise us, both in little and in big ways!

Every morning is a new sunrise
Every day is a new surprise
Whether it is seen by amber skies
or captured within amber eyes

Sometimes I can sense Him behind me
      waiting for me to turn around
and when I do – flinchingly, hesitatingly –
      I see Him there with a smile not a frown
and eyes
which say: “Surprise!” 

I wake up and see the Sun
or when I go to walk or jog or run
Everywhere glorious hiddenness is being revealed
Everywhere beautiful surprises are being unconcealed
 
Sometimes His Spirit comes to me
      and says “I have something to share”
and when I listen – wrestling, afraid –
      I hear Him speak things good, beautiful, and fair
and sighs
which say: “Surprise!”

(10/16/13)

Refuting the Corn-King Jesus. A Thought on Context and Composition.

[Man, I haven't posted here for a long while! That needs to change!]

I was reading the Bible earlier today, and as I read it I couldn't help but think about the strangeness of a certain postmodern theory that, effectively, claims that Jesus is a mythological figure taken from other religions.

I think one of the major flaws with this belief -- that is, the belief that Jesus is a fictional character created to represent a Jewish version of the "Corn King" myth -- lies in how we deal with the context and the composition of the New Testament. (And, by extension, the Old Testament as well.)

The advocates of the "Corn-King Jesus" belief make the following claim: that Jesus, as He is portrayed in the Gospels, is a fictional character, based on a real man, who represents a Jewish interpretation of the Corn-King myth from other religious systems of the day (notably, the Greek Dionysus and the Egyptian Osiris). This belief is not a new belief, either, as it has been noted in comparative mythology [most notably, The Hero with a Thousand Faces].

Before I refute the concept using, as the title suggests, the context and composition of the New Testament, I would like to say [shockingly!] that the adherents of "Corn-King Jesus" actually make a good observation. Like most scientists, philosophers, and theologians, they make great observations but come to poor conclusions from those observations. The similarities between Jesus and other "dying-and-returning-god" myths are uncanny. I would like to note, in particular, the story of Balder the Beautiful from Norse mythology -- how the most beautiful of the gods is killed and slain by the scheming of Loki. Or, for instance, Queztalcoutl, the dying god of the Aztecs who returns with the sun...

(As I've intimated in previous posts, though, I don't believe that Mythology plops up from out of nowhere -- it is developed through the psychology and spiritual encounters of mortal men. Should we be so surprised that man, who was created in the Image of God, has so many images that reflect, albeit impurely, the Nature of God? Or, for instance, should we be so surprised when we believe in spiritual beings and spiritual encounters [both good and evil] that people outside of the Middle East also had spiritual encounters? -- This should be enough to refute the Corn-King Jesus concept... but I have another purpose for this post.)

The thing that bothers me so much, though, about this theory is its core misunderstanding of the context and composition of the New Testament. When we look at the Gospels [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], we do not see mythological writing or storytelling. Whether you believe the writers trustworthy or not, or whether they were in the right mind or not, it is evidently clear that the authors of the Gospels wrote those Gospels not as mythological texts, but as historical recordings.

This is generally clear no matter what work of literature we look at. When I read a novel, I know, at the very least, that the author intended it to be read as a novel. Maybe it does have some nonfiction events in there -- or even semi-autobiographical events [for example, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer stories] -- but the author wrote it in such a genre that I, as the reader, can recognize how I read it.

This is vitally important if we want to understand the proper interpretation of any literary text. You might not believe Luke the Physician when he says: "it seemed good to me to write an orderly account for you... so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught" (Luke 1:3-4). But, at the very least, we can be 100% certain that Luke believed that his readers would receive his text in that way.

There's an apologetic concept used by Josh McDowell that notes, vitally, how most of the early evangelists of the Gospel died for the sake of that Gospel. Mark gets dragged around Alexandria by a rope around his neck; John gets boiled in oil multiple times until the Emperor gives up and places him on Patmos until he dies; Matthew gets slain in Ethiopia. Why would men die for a lie? Why would men die for a fantasy? A false mythology?

My purpose in saying all this is to underscore the following things: the writers of the Gospels at the very least, contextually, wrote their writings in a manner that would be received not as mythology but as history (particularly Luke). These same men faced persecution for writing such a history, which would have been considerably less offensive were it a mythology. Rome had plenty of gods, so the addition of another mythological tradition, even one that claimed supremacy, would have been considerably preferable to a historical account that claimed supremacy.

When we read the Gospels, we read them as History. They don't sound like a mythological story.

That's the Beauty of it.

I might have mentioned this concept in my previous post about The Last Unicorn, but the amazing thing about the Incarnation is this: "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us." (John 1:14) The Myth, the thing that we've heard whispered about for centuries and millennia, the Promise of God, the very Word of God -- He "becomes flesh." He becomes real. What we have in the Gospels is the strange and miraculous concept: the Corn-King, which we've heard about before, is actually a real, flesh-and-blood Man, and He has power to change us.

That's the Beauty of the Gospels. They are History. They are read as History. Whether or not you believe that what they say is true, you have to admit that they make the claim that they are true. This is not something that you seen in other mythological literature. Those tales say "So they say," or "Thus says the ancients," or "Some believe,"... They never say: "Dionysus was a real man, here, in history." Now, there were people who believed that; but none of the mythological literature tries to claim historicity. Only the Gospels do. Only the Gospels claim [with, I might mention, third-party sources that back them up] that Jesus was a real man, that He made real claims about God and about Life and about Salvation, and, most importantly, that He really did raise from the dead.

And I say all that to point us at something important about textual context -- that is, that the genre and type of literature of any text can point us to, in part, the author's meaning and the proper interpretation of that text. You might not believe that the Gospels are Historical. I do. You might not believe that Jesus was a real Man. I do. You might believe that Luke was making it all up. I don't. But unhesitatingly we must agree that, at the very least, Luke believed that his hearers would believe that his writing was Historical. And that very fact tells us something very important: that Luke was trustworthy [he's a doctor! -- and he's attested of some manner of honor in Paul's epistles as well], that Luke's audience already believed something about Jesus, that Luke's audience would receive what he was saying without having to see what he was talking about. ...

And to me, this refutes the Corn-King Jesus belief. If the Gospel was just a mythological cloak which the Gospel-Writers wrapped around a historical man, then why are the Gospel-Writers' writings so well-received? If, as the Corn-King Jesus folk say, the Resurrection was just a mythological after-addition, why is it written so uncannily... amythological? There's one angel, maybe two. An earthquake. Some dead people come back to life. And yet, the Gospel-Writers just toss those details off on the side. There's no trumpet. There's no explosion. There's no retribution against those who slayed the Savior. In fact (it's so undramatic it's hilarious), the apostles actually don't believe it initially. (And two of them are going to write the Gospels...)

Context matters. The method of composition matters. And you can learn a lot about a text just by looking into such little things!