Give me something sacred

The last few weeks since I arrived here in the UK have been absolutely bizarre. They have been challenging, but oh so stimulating.

To be honest, I often feel very lost here, though I've never been late to anything because I've had trouble finding a location. So much of my life has been changed ever since I came here. Something deep in my soul wants to turn and run. I've heard numerous analogies about building up walls around one's heart, and those ring true, but the desire to clam up that I felt was more organic. It's like the natural overgrowth that will consume a garden if it's not carefully manicured. It's a suffocating aura, and I've felt it's cloak hover over me more than once in recent days. I wonder if this wish to hide is in any way related to Adam and Eve's urge to cover themselves with fig leaves after they sinned. They felt adulterated and unwhole, as if who they were was something shameful. Who they were is not shameful, but what they did was. At this point in my life, I oft struggle with knowing that God loves me as a person and that that fact should be more than enough to give me joy every day. As Tim Chaddick's Reality sermon titled 'The Infinite Value of God' says, God is the most valuable thing we could ever know, and once we find that we should know that we have his riches.

These identity battles have plagued me before when big changes have come in my life, and I ask that God would help show me his rock solid truth in his time.

Sunday, I strolled through the spires of Oxford under a pristine blue sky that quickly ferried clouds from horizon to horizon. We stopped by the church were C.S. Lewis attended and took pictures with the fabled lampost that inspired the Narnian landmark. On the drive back to London, grey clouds dotted the sky in an almost evenly-space, yet still irregular pattern. The sun pierced though the lattice to cast shadows on rolling hillsides covered in green patchworks.

Last night, I listened to Needtobreathe sing over an hour of beautiful music. I don't know their new album very well, but their lyrics, passion, and music created an intoxicating mix. I'm a trained musician, but the love of music that permeated my life in my late high school years has been fading for several years and has been altogether absent for the past few months. Somehow the concert revived a part of me. I miss being the passionate person I used to be, not because I want to go back and re-live those green dock-light memories, but because those memories remind me of the passion that feels like my own sacred soul-secret.

Today, I raced with my brother down the Greenwich slopes that overlook London. We laughed and yelled and almost fell more than once in the soft mud. Some of the summer garb of the neat rows of trees graced the geometric network of footpaths that we had temporarily strayed from. The splotchy tufts of grass on the hillside formed a confluence with a thick green carpet as we reached the bottom. I wanted to lie and roll in it, but the knowledge of the mud that lay underneath the surface and the potential damage it could do to my new jacket kept me from indulging my whim.

Here, I've felt homesick and very at home at the same time. I can't nearly describe the sentiment, but I think some of it relates to these words of C.S. Lewis that were read by the Vicar in Oxford.

"In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." -The Weight of Glory

I seek that ultimate density that sinks through all other aspects of my life, that other-worldly material that cleaves through my spirit, that fire that burns away the flesh wrapped around my heart, that truth that catches our frantically cast anchors and never lets go.


Hey now, this is my desire
Consume me like a fire, 'cause I just want something beautiful
To touch me, I know that I'm in reach
'Cause I am down on my knees, I'm waiting for something beautiful
Oh, something beautiful

-Something Beautiful, Needtobreathe