Do you care less about the Christian faith?

In his latest column, Norwich local government officer, author and Proclaimers church member, James Knight, looks at the perennial problem of apathy and indifference to the Christian message. 

 

Jane Austen once said ‘I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal’ - and I think this is very often the opinion that people have about Christianity; ‘I do not want Christianity to be true or real or interesting, that way, I will never have to bother much about it’. And this objection is perhaps the most difficult of all to combat; difficult, but not impossible. 

 

Those who object to Christianity on scientific grounds or analytical grounds are perhaps more likely to be convinced than those who do not wish for it to be true, for deep down, those who want to debate, often, in a subliminal sense, want you to show them that it is true. Once their old nemesis ‘pride’ is broken down’ we often find that those who were once sceptical are pleased to be shown that their own laws of logic are in accordance with (previously implacable) standards of truth and falsehood, that is, they find that the face of their own thinking is perfectly in accordance with yours, but they did not give yours full consideration - for surely all Christians have given atheism much more consideration (even for the purposes of denying its validity) than most atheists have given Christianity. As Tennyson said, ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt’. 

 

So to some extent we are asking how we can convince someone who does not want to be convinced, that is, we are faced with the problem of helping them change their desires, to lead them towards an even bigger desire that already exists inside of them - the desire God talked about in Ecclesiastes 3:11 when He said He has set eternity in the hearts of men. 

 

So how do we do that - how do we help someone locate that desire? In one sense it is something only God can do; but there is a way in which all good Christians can assist someone along the way, that is, help them to 1) realise that this eternal desire exists within them, and 2) realise that within a variety of other lesser desires, there is always something that never wholly satisfies.

 

This desire is recognisable from other desires by two things. In the first place, though the sense of desire is intense and even tormenting, the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a pleasure. Other desires are pleasurable only if satisfaction is imminently expected. 

 

Tiredness is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to sleep. If we have no hope of sleep, the tiredness is not pleasant at all. But this eternal desire that we are discussing, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be rich, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt or experienced it. This hunger is more excellent than any other fullness that can be imagined, but it is easily sublimated into other things; it is easily shifted into something which earthly satisfactions can temporarily stifle. 

 

If you keep the sceptics on the subject for long enough they should be able to see that when the desire is long absent, that is, when earthly satisfactions provide transient relief, the heavenly desire will again soon be longed for. That new longing becomes a new instance of the original desire, but if it is not correctly located, it will, once again, be ascribed to earthly things.

 

This may sound complex, but it is simple when we live it. ‘If only I could feel now what I once felt then’ we sigh; not realising that while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we sorrow for is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness. For this agreeable desire cuts across our everyday distinctions between desiring and having. To have it is, by definition, a desire; to desire it, we find, is to have it. In the second place, there is an extraordinary mystery about the object of this desire. Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some perennially inexperienced) assume, when they feel it, that they know what they are longing for. Thus if it comes to us when we are driving past a beach we think, for a brief second, that we are desiring childhood all over again. 

 

An even better example is when Christmas approaches. Do you not always feel that Christmas is going to bring you a taste, just a brief taste, of that flavour we have sought ever since we were children? That somehow our teenage years and then adulthood have taken away from us something which only existed in our childhood years. But now notice that this feeling actually occurs in virtually every present thought about nearly every past thought. It was different then, there is a feeling that a certain magic once existed which is impossible to locate in any present moment. I do not wish for you to think that I am talking about rewards gained by our own wishes; I am talking about desires that pertain to something not quite tangible. 

 

In life there are different kinds of tangible rewards. There is the reward that has no intrinsic connection with the things you do to earn it, and is quite alien to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we strongly disapprove of a man who marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the appropriate reward for a real lover, and we do not disapprove of him for desiring it. The suitable rewards are not simply conjoined to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. But this desire for a homecoming, the desire to know God more and more is something wholly different, even though the desire is often entangled in other desires.

 

When we are looking for a past earthly magic, we are not fixing our minds on God, we are sensing His majesty but only in a way that leaves us, in the present moment, short and dissatisfied. This works the same way with love too. When we desire to fall in love, we are, in the deepest subliminal sense, firstly desiring to fall in love with Him. When we find our earthly beloved, we long for God to show us even more of Himself because we expect to find it in our beloved too. After all, we should not be in love with anyone who is not gong to reveal to us more of Him. 

 

And here we can see that our best way of helping someone locate their desire to know God is to show them how their earthly impressions are, in fact, quite misleading. Every one of these supposed objects for the desire is inadequate to it. It is when Christmas is over for another year that the resounding roar of the past is at its most deafening. But if you could, for a brief moment, come into contact with that magic that you were desiring you would find it was nothing more than a switch in your own perception - that time has caused you to mistake it for your desire to become more godly. If you went back you would find either nothing, or else a reappearance of the same desire that sent you there. A rather more difficult, but still possible, contemplation of your own memories, would, if located properly, reveal the same existence of that euphoric desire that some precipitate reminder of the past now moves you to long for. It was never in the past like we thought it was, for the past still had us chasing the same magic we are chasing now. Those remembered moments were either quite unexceptional at the time (and owe all their allure and enchantment to memory) or else were themselves moments of yearning.

 

It appeared to me therefore that if a man carefully and assiduously followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity became apparent and then steadfastly abandoned them, he must come out at last into the visible knowledge that the human soul was created to enjoy some object that is, not only never fully given, but cannot even be perceived or imagined as given, in our immediate mode of instinctive experience. This desire was, in the soul, the throne that only God could sit on.

 

And at this point in my journey I have noticed something remarkable has happened, something which I presume that all other Christians either have experienced or will experience at some point on their journey. I do not think of those past yearnings like I once did; I do not have any wish to recall those echoes that once roared such enchanting delight over me. And I realise that when we start our Christian journey we continue to search freely for dusky objects, that is, we pursue that longing which we have had since childhood; the longing which we believed could only be eradicated by re-experiencing those times which we wrongly thought contained the restorative of the magic. But I do not think we should be worried by this occurrence, for it can only really go wrong if we pretend the desire is no longer in us, or worse, think that we have already extirpated it from new longings. The true discovery of Christ inside us is the harmonisation of the new desires with the old, that is, true realisation that the old desires were only disguises of the new and real desires.

 

The desire for past magic was, all along, God calling you forward, towards Him, for a future magic not yet fully appreciated. The dialectic of longing, carefully and deliberately followed will recover all mistakes; it will head us off from all false paths, and force us not to suggest, but to tangibly experience, the gradual substitution of old desires for new ones. We will have started to realise that other desires always pertain to something ‘not fully present’ in any experience. Whatever you try to identify with them turns out to be not them but something else. The thing you long for calls you away from the self. The desire itself will only continue to breathe if you abandon all the things that impede it. This is the ultimate law - the seed dies to live; he that loses his life will find it (Matthew 16:25).