That Future Time

"It's a black and white world right now," said Liz. "It's like it's not the one we live in."

I saw the treetops etched into the sky and the stars reflecting on the water like little white flowers, and understood exactly what she meant. We were caught in a momentary Shangri La, a paradise that we neither understood nor deserved. In that moment, everything seemed to make sense. Not that we had somehow made sense of it, but that its truth had been laid out before us and no longer needed to be discovered or sought after. In a strange and inexplicable way, it felt like a foretaste of that future time when God will make His dwelling place among men. We could feel His presence in that clean, quiet place, and without asking we knew each of us felt the same.

There have been few times in my life when I have experienced pure beauty the way I did that night. The kind of beauty that is only made possible by God's glory being infused into everything in sight and emanating back out from it, "like shining from shook foil." Such was the beauty I saw then, not just in the hot springs and the mist and the forest and the stars, but in Liz and Allison and Leah and Lydia too. Christ truly "plays in a thousand places," does He not? And we are his masterpiece, his magnum opus, made in His image in a way I don't think we'll ever fully be able to comprehend.

I wish - how I wish - I could somehow recognize this beauty everywhere. It's there for the discovery, I have no doubt. But we humans are so dense and insensitive that it takes a starlit night in a utopia of hidden hot springs to inspire that kind of wonder in us. That we are able to experience it at all is something of a miracle. "What is man, that You are mindful of him?" Perhaps one of the greatest and most perplexing questions ever asked... what is man? We are nothing more and nothing less than the beloved creation of the God of the universe, called by Him sons and daughters.

If only we could love Him as He loves us, and love each other the same way. One day. For we are indeed "the possibility of love more deeply than we are cells." And there will come a day, perhaps not soon and certainly not here, when we will embody the love that is now only a possibility.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

- T.S. Eliot

Authentic

I go to a school - Wheaton College - where “authenticity” is a big byword. Basically, Wheaton students who aren’t particularly enthusiastic about being Wheaton students complain that other Wheaton students aren’t “authentic.” The implication being that they aren’t authentic Christians. And there was a time when I was one of those authenticity-criticizers. But I grew out of it, for the simple reason that I know too many amazing people of God among my friends, and to call them fake would be ridiculous. The problem remains, though, that the community as a whole at Wheaton often feels forced and, well, inauthentic. Something is missing.

In philosophy class last spring we talked a lot about theodicies. Ways of vindicating God’s goodness in light of the existence of evil. An idea that kept cropping up was that a condition does not exist unless its opposite does. It sounds confusing, but it’s really not. Light cannot exist without darkness. Courage cannot exist without cowardice. Good cannot exist without evil. The sun, after all, seems to shine brightest through clouds, and the stars gleam most intensely in the blackest night. That was when I figured out, for the first time in a long time, what’s missing at Wheaton. Not authenticity. Our students are some of the most sincere and passionate people I know. I believe we have authenticity, and in abundance. No, what we're missing is regular interaction with non-Christians. 

Not that non-Christians are in every sense of the word our opposites. In fact we share a whole lot in common. But they are in the sense that we know Christ and they do not. And it all goes back to the philosophy idea. We are nothing - or at least what we are is significantly diminished - when we are cut off from our opposite. The "problem" at Wheaton isn't inauthenticity. It's isolation from the unchurched world. This is why A Christian Ministry in the National Parks excited me so much. A chance to be surrounded by and know and love my “opposites.” To stand out? Maybe. Or maybe just to stand. Because being with non-Christians doesn’t just remind us of how much they need God. It reminds us, perhaps even more so, of how much we need Him. 

Now I’m here, and I’m realizing every day how true this idea actually is. I am living, eating, working, and playing with non-Christians. I’m also blessed by the support of a group of fellow believers. We are able to worship and fellowship together, and then go out into everyday life and share Christ’s love with those who don’t know or understand it. There are no questions about authenticity. None. We love being with each other, not because we’re cooler people than our non-Christian coworkers, but because we share a common faith, and as such know a deeper kind of friendship than would otherwise be possible. We love being with everyone else because it’s what we’re called to do. We don’t go on mission trips. We live in our mission field. It’s a unique sort of ministry, but it shouldn’t be. This is how the Christian life is supposed to look. Like a glacier that feeds waterfalls that go on to form innumerable rivers and streams, He pours into us so that we might pour into others. I have never seen this in action the way I have seen it here. And it truly is beautiful. 

Jesus told us to pick up our cross and follow him. And the path He took wasn't easy. It was full of joy and pain, contentment and suffering. Full of opposites. 

Gilead

I have found that good books can be broken down into two basic categories. Some, upon finishing, give the reader a sense of accomplishment. You turn the last page and feel a sort of quiet satisfaction. Others leave the reader wanting to turn back to the beginning and start all over again. You reach the end and suddenly you have a void inside, as though without this unfinished book in your hands, you are somehow incomplete. A few very great books paradoxically manage to do both. 

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, is one of those few. I won my copy as an award back in my senior year of high school, and it's been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. Actually, that's a lie. I read the first 50 pages or so on my way back to Wheaton last August, and it spent the rest of the school year in the door of my car. I finally decided to finish it, more to ease my conscience than anything. I guess I felt like the poor book deserved it after everything I'd put it through. 

You might be wondering at this point what me reading a book has to do with the Tetons, and if you know me well enough to be familiar with my occasional, seemingly endless goings-on about the wonders of literature, you might be thinking this is one of those posts you have no interest in finishing. I have a point, I promise, and it isn't just to tell you you should go read Gilead. Although you should. 

"There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent," writes Robinson's protagonist, Reverend John Ames, "and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us." I'm not sure I've ever read anything that so aptly encapsulates my experience with nature, up to and including this summer in the park. 

I think the reason we humans find nature so damn incredible is that it has been around so much longer than we have. My roommate and I drove up to Yellowstone on our day off, and we saw geysers and mud pots literally spewing out the insides of the earth. We saw a canyon cut over hundreds of thousands of years by what is now a swiftly rushing river. We saw mountains that have existed long before we were born, and that will go on existing long after we're dead. We wondered about the first people to ever lay eyes on these things, and beneath the wonder was a deeper understanding that even those early discoverers were merely walking in on something almost too timeless to imagine. Reflecting on all this, I very much feel my "mortal insufficiency to the world." 

But we also saw whole forests consumed by fire, leaving only the skeletons of trees to attest to their former greatness. We saw hillsides slowly but steadily eroded by storms, and that will one day be reduced to little besides sand and dust. We saw the increasingly thin layer of earth over thermal pockets that threaten to blow America's first national park sky-high. We wondered about how different the world would be. The fragility of it all was unsettling, shocking even. I was reminded of W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming," when he writes, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." It's a very biblical idea, really. "For the present form of this world is passing away" (1 Corinthians 7:31).  Looking at it in this light, I feel "the world's mortal insufficiency" to me. 

If there is one theme that Gilead affirms more than any other, it is that life is precious. It is precious for its brevity. It is precious for its permanence. In one sense, the world will outlive us all. But in another, it is just a blink in the space of eternity. "The world is passing away along with its desires," writes John, "but whoever does the will of God abides forever" (1 John 2:17). There will come a time when we, as did the beloved disciple, will see a new heaven and a new earth. 

Though I was never able to find such eloquent words to describe them, I'd pondered these things before I read Gilead. I had even written about them before. But I'd never come to a conclusion quite as beautiful and, I believe, as true as Ames's:

"I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets."


There, I hope I've made my point. By which I mean I hope I've made Robinson's point. Now go read Gilead.

On The Road

Thomas Browne once said, "Be able to be alone."

I wasn't sure what to expect when I pulled out of my driveway at 6:15 on Tuesday morning. All I really knew was that I had a long trip ahead of me. I wasn't even sure how long. I had the numbers of course. 2,100 miles, 36 hours. Seven full states, and good-sized states too. But three 12-hour days of driving was something I couldn't quite wrap my head around. I just knew that I needed to do it. Alone.

So I hugged my parents goodbye, internally thanking them for not putting up a fuss about letting their little girl take off across 3/4 of the country by herself, and left.

You can drive all the way from New York to California on Highway 80. I got on at the eastern edge of Pennsylvania, and didn't get off until central Wyoming, where 287 took me up into the mountains. Such mountains. I first saw them in September of 2008, when my family drove through Grand Teton en route to Yellowstone. Jagged, snow-covered peaks rising high and fast, their sharp summits piercing the clouds. No other mountains are quite like these. They are the young gods of the Rockies.

There is something indescribable about seeing the Tetons after three days of driving through some of the flattest country there is. Don't get me wrong, corn is great, but it gets kind of old after, oh, a thousand miles. Once the Appalachians petered out in western PA, fields were about all I saw. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa. Corn, corn, corn, wheat, hay, corn. Next came the empty straightaways of Nebraska, the ones Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty takes at 110 mph. I didn't go quite that fast. And then dusty, scrubby Wyoming slowly turned into hill country. Then the hills were speckled with tableland, then cut through by canyons and gorges. Then they got bigger and bigger, and suddenly I spotted one with snow on top.

From there on there were just mountains beyond mountains, as far as the eye could see.

I thought of Lewis and Clark, coming through the seemingly never-ending Great Plains, cresting their first peak in eager anticipation of what might be on the other side, and seeing this. An impossible expanse of range after range, each higher than the last. My reaction was significantly more excited than I imagine theirs to have been.

On wound the highway, further up and further in, as C.S. Lewis once put it. My GPS counted down the minutes as I took in one breathtaking view after another. I reached the final pass, which took me high up into the National Forest, where everything was covered in snow. I rolled down the window just to remember what winter feels like. Then down into Jackson Hole and the park's entrance. The ranger at the ticket window was the first person I'd talked with face to face in over 24 hours. It went ok. He asked for $25.00 and I told him I was an employee, and he said never mind about the $25.00. A few minutes later I rolled into Colter Bay Village and stepped foot in Grand Teton National Park for the first time.

So. How long was it? And what was it? Well, it was 2,100 miles and 36 hours, just as I knew it would be. But now I understand what those numbers mean. They were, and will forever be, a piece of my life. Three days spent almost entirely alone. Days spent listening to music, mostly folk, and hearing Kerouac and Harper Lee read aloud by Matt Dillon and Sissy Spacek, respectively. Days spent staring through my windshield, getting pissed off by trucks passing other trucks and the innumerable stretches of "road work," complete with orange cones and closed lanes and reduced speeds and no workers to speak of. But there was no one to complain to. So I got over it and kept on driving. They were good days.

To be honest, I don't remember much of what I thought about. Which is sad, since there were some good thoughts. Perhaps I'll have them again someday. Perhaps not. It doesn't really matter much. I enjoyed them at the time. But I held on to at least one important thing. This trip reminded me of a truth I had nearly forgotten: solitude has its own, strange beauty to it.

I think everyone should take a good, long, meaty solo road trip at some point in their lives. It's good for the soul. Some tips: Don't be afraid to forfeit hotels for campsites. Make it a game to see how long you can stay on cruise control without breaking. Discover the rough satisfaction of chewing on beef jerky. And start each day early enough to see the sunrise.