Shadows and Dust

The paltriness of our lives is largely due to our fascination with the trinkets and trophies of the unreal world that is passing away. Sex, drugs, booze, the pursuit of money, pleasure and power, even a little religion, suppress the awareness of present risenness. Religion dabbling, worldly prestige, or temporary unconsciousness cannot conceal the terrifying absence of meaning in the church and in society, nor can fanaticism, cynicism, or indifference.

-Brennan Manning, from Abba's Child

In an interview with Mel Gibson concerning the release of his Passion of the Christ movie, he was asked about his faith, about that which compelled him to make such a movie.

He recalled his ascent to worldwide fame by saying that he'd been to the pinnacle of all the secular world could offer him - he had attained all he'd ever wanted in this life. His wealth, his fame, any addiction that he could conceive - nothing that he'd desired was withheld to him. Anything he had ever wanted, he could get, he could try, he could attain. "And," he said to conclude, "it's not enough."

It wasn't for me money or fame. It was perfection, and meeting everyone's expectations-so-high. I prided myself on my impeccable performance in everything I did. Those things I couldn't do perfectly, I avoided. Those who would dare to see through my façade, I stayed far away from. Until at the end of years of this, I crashed. What I had most wanted I could have if I worked hard enough. But it was all illusion. I remember in the dark of my bedroom one night declaring the same, "it's not enough."

I have forgotten this, though, in the busyness of my days and the striving to do "good works". I've forgotten the reason for the hope I have. It might be only, "because it's not enough," and nothing more. But the desperation for the Enough is fuel to drive us passionately on the journey. Integrity Worship's book Desperate for You says, "Desperate people are passionate people... Desperation can drive us almost as much as it can drive us crazy. It's a fine, fine line. But probably the most worthwhile one we ever walk. If you've ever had that ceaseless ache in the center of your heart, you know the depths of the word desperate. Desperate people ache for fulfillment. And they'll go to any lengths to get it."

As people who have had a taste of that Enough, be it ever so slight, we long, desperately to eat our fill. We are called "believers" not as much because of the creeds we profess and wear like garments as because of the panting inside us that propels us in a desperate search for the One we know we must be made for. And all this talk of feasts and bread and wine and water - we somehow connect with that. It is familiar to us because we have become intimately familiar with our ache that keeps us walking. And we wonder if it's not given to us as a gift, a treasure - or a compass, even.

Because now the words, "Come to me if you are thirsty" make sense. They reverberate in our hearts like an echo down an empty well.

Brennan Manning continues,

Whatever the addiction--be it a smothering relationship, a dysfunctional dependence, or mere laziness--our capacity to be affected by Christ is numbed. Sloth is our refusal to go on the inward journey, a paralysis that results from choosing to protect ourselves from passion. When we are not profoundly affected by the treasure in our grasp, apathy and mediocrity are inevitable. If passion is not to degenerate into nostalgia or sentimentality, it must be renewed at its source.

We will largely be unconvincing and unconvinced disciples until we come to the end of ourselves and realize even with exasperation that there's not enough wealth or fame or attainable perfection in this life to satisfy us. The best moments are fleeting. In this life, all good things do come to an end. That will take us to either the lowest places of despair, or the deepest places of desperation. As C.S. Lewis explains in Mere Christianity, "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exist. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in my self a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

Because, and here's the hope - it's I think as simple and humble as this - we will one day have it. All. It's still not going to be in the money or fame or booze or that one perfect relationship we are trying to hold onto or sex or performance or that beautiful bag of potato chips or that mission trip to Mexico. Those are just shadows. It will be in Him. All of it.

A few years ago I gave my wife as a birthday gift a jar of dirt. I know, I know, romantic guy I am. I had inscribed on the side of the jar the words "Shadows and Dust." We both knew well what it meant. It is a line taken from the movie Gladiator. Proximo, the trainer who originally purchased Maximus and trained him as a gladiator, had himself once been a gladiator. He had stood in the arena and had heard the audience cheering him on. He had participated in glory as a gladiator, and after he had been freed by Marcus Aurelius, he was haunted by it. "Shadows and dust" became a phrase he used to help him remember the reality of both illusions (shadows) and death itself (dust). Proximo, having tasted of the former glory of Rome, defied the Pratorians who had come to capture Maximus. He was killed at their hands. Moments before they entered the room, his face is set toward the sun and you can hear him whisper, "shadows and dust."

There will come a time when all things will be well, and all manner of things well. We will know God. We will know God fully. We will know and be known. And we will be home. Lewis finishes his though, "I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."

This life that we speak of is our heart's deepest and most passionate desire and the source of its most poignant ache. George MacDonald writes, "The thing that can mourn can mourn only from lack; it cannot mourn because of being, but because of not enough being. We are vessels of life, not yet full of the wine of life; where the wine does not reach, there the clay cracks, and aches, and is distressed..." It is also the most unattainable except by pure, undistilled Grace. Grace that this God who apparently wants us far more than even we could even want Him has lavished upon us. In other words, we get it, we get life. That, my friends, is indeed Good News.

"...Life must be assisted, upheld, comforted, every part, with life. Life is the law, the food, the necessity of life. Life is everything." -George MacDonald