Hope

"Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more -- food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else more." -- C.S. Lewis from "Hope" in Mere Christianity.

For Lewis, that something-else-more meant "a continual looking forward to the eternal world." A.K.A. Heaven. But Heaven is just one kind of transcendence. And even Lewis admits this "looking forward" can be seen at work in other matters.

Methinks that maybe -- just maybe -- we're in the process, as a country and a world, of figuring out just what our collective something-else-more is. I, for one, am scared and daunted by that challenge, but more than that: I am hopeful.

Just spent 90-minutes or so in a bookstore reading some of Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz. Christian memoir thingy. (Hence the foray back into Lewis for something a little more seminal.) Miller's way more into the doctrine than I am -- I can't really even call myself a Christian, though matters of faith (as they are so-called) do indeed have a good bit of my attention in this life.

Whatever.

I mention Miller because he did offer a good metaphor for God-fear. Once at the Grand Canyon, he got all wobble-kneed at the immensity and beauty of it all. He had an impulse to leap out into it, and that impulse scared him to death. God-fear, says Miller, is just like that.

As a collective organism, we here on Planet Earth, stand puny at the precipice of something larger than we can know. It's scary and daunting and our knees wobble. But it also brings us face-to-face with a grand and limitless sky -- the best invitation we'll ever get at transcendence.

That's what I'm talking about. You heard it here first.*

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(*Okay: you heard it here most recently. And isn't that what blogs are all about?)