In his book, "The Weight of Glory," C.S. Lewis talked about the difficulty we humans have imagining God's goodness.
"If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels," Lewis wrote, "it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased."
In today's first reading, the author of the Book of Wisdom says something similar. "Who can know God's counsel, or who can conceive what the Lord intends? For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans."
This passage seems to agree that our minds struggle to imagine God's intentions for us. Our imaginations are simply too timid to see as God sees, and to know as God knows.
In today's Gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples that "whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple." At first glance, this might not seem like the greatest of all invitations. I mean, how many of us want to carry a cross as Jesus did? It is a journey of sacrifice and suffering.
Yet if we consider that our deliberations are "timid," and realize that we have a hard time conceiving of how God wants to fulfill our deepest desires, then we may just have to be open to the fact that perhaps the way of the cross is not a way to endless suffering but the way to endless joy.
The problem is, if we cannot "know God's counsel," or predict how God will work, how can we experience the infinite joy that God offers? Perhaps we need to stoke our imaginations and, contrary to what we may have been taught, inflame our desire for happiness so that we will not be so easily pleased - that we will be satisfied with nothing less than infinite joy. Why settle for mere success and popularity and financial security when the redemption of the cross is offered to us?
Jesus calls us to dream big - to dare to imagine that we can follow him and find a happiness and a bliss that transcends pain and suffering. If we follow Jesus, and even if we don't, we will experience hardship and difficulty. We will carry heavy burdens and heavy hearts, all the more if we dare to love others as Christ loves us. But we are promised we will also experience something wonderful, something greater than what we can imagine, a love and a happiness that is beyond the world we can see and touch.
This is good news for those of us who are in the midst of our own difficult journeys. It can be hard to imagine that there is such a thing as a holiday at the sea when you are having trouble getting out of bed each day. Though we may not always be able to conceive of exactly what the Lord intends, we can be sure that it involves infinite joy for each of us.
Bill Peatman writes from Napa. |