Look back at me!
I was collared in this dangerous position by one Dorothy Sayers, with a train of thought that can be (mostly) collected by the following quote:
"Except," said Christ, "ye become as little children"--and the words are sometimes quoted to justify the flight into infantilism. Now, children differ in many ways, but they have one thing in common. Peter Pan--if indeed he exists other than in the nostalgic imagination of an adult--is a case for the pathologist. All normal children (however much we discourage them) look forward to growing up. "Except ye become as little children," except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot see the Kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day one must be born again.
Nostalgia is a dangerous business - more dangerous than going out of your door, for there at least one has the healthy posture of facing forwards. Looking back at one's door, or back down the paths one has already trod, the scenery seems to take on a variety of unhelpful colours: now at times rosy-pink with idealisms and fond whimsies, again at times blackened with irredeemable guilt, and still other times blanched and shriveled under a haze of apathy.
The appropriate answer to all of these (and any others; I do not claim that these are the limit to sins of retrospection, merely the foremost ones I see in myself) is 'bosh!' Perhaps if I were a dead creature inside, sick unto lifelessness in my soul, I might be excused for seeing things this way. In Christ, I have no excuse, except for the pretentious playacting of a frivolous adult who would rather spend these precious years pretending to be dead instead of laying claim to all the privileges of the life of Christ within me.
In Christ, I am alive. In Christ, I see with the eyes of a living woman. True, I still wrestle with the body of death, but it is a thankful sort wrestling. The fight is most unfairly matched; the discrepancy is entirely in my favor. Christ is my champion. Every day I may look at the past, understand the wrongness of myself in it, boldly confess: I died to that, and now I live, and so understand the utter goodness of God in my past. There is neither pink nor black, only white - though not the white of a tabula rasa, for what good is a blank-slate past to me or any human? I would only bloody and muddy it again. The expelled demon would only return with his fellow hellions to find the house in order and ready for his next season of residence. The blank slate will not do. This is a white of guiltlessness, of a clean conscience before God - but beyond that still, the blazing fire of the hope of glory, so rife with colour that we can only express it as this sum of all colours that cannot be pinned down to one or another: white.
I could drag around all that nostalgia, like so much dead weight on my back, looking to the image of who I would like myself to be, surrounded by a cloud of events to witness to my total failure in the past and probable failure in the future. But to quote Matt Thiessen, I'd rather forget and not slow down. This is how the race was made to be run, and we to run it: struggling not under the weight of a past that will always be better than the future, or a past that can never be redeemed, but one where the past contains the assurance of justification, the present the painfully sweet perseverance of sanctification, and the future the unshakable promise of glorification. We run as children, laying aside every perplexity and pain and pleasure of the past which will so easily ensnare us, and find (in spite of all our instincts to the contrary, which protest that putting all these things aside is painful and can't possibly be what we're meant to endure - we thought that pain was only a part of persecution!) that the yoke is easy, and the burden light - because they are fashioned by Almighty God, who is all goodness and all wisdom, whose purpose is His glory and our holiness ('all things for good'), and who does not fail in his purposes.
(I am very tired, apparently. I nearly wrote 'the yolk is easy', when I knew I meant yoke, and that I prefer mine over-easy (yolks, that is). I'm afraid the word-playing bent to Sayers' wit is seeping into my vastly inferior mind, with far less impressive or entertaining results. Sleep is the only outcome I can recommend for myself now. Adieu.)
I like yolks.
All I really have to say is - "Thank you!" That's the kind of thing one is glad to read on a cloudy morning after one has recently crawled out of bed. Thank you oh so much for posting your sleepy thoughts. ^.^
Concurrence on the previous comment from hither.
These are sleepy thoughts? I probably couldn't keep up with thoughts while you're wide awake, unless they had to do with the usual breed of puns that come flowing forth :-)
(or is that just when you're around the Noells?)
I know. Her sleepy thoughts are so profound. Perhaps she descends into a deeper consciousness of wit and profundity, and all that, when she is sleepy.
Propositions about Anna's nature aside, thanks! I've wondered about the passage "Except ye come as little children," and I think this sheds a great deal of light on it. I think Lewis called joy the serious business of heaven, and you always seem to be about that business: your posts are full of it.
This is an absolutely outstanding piece, Anna. It is eloquent in the fullest sense of the word. I very much enjoyed it, thanks. - m