Often I think that in this life we flirt with eternity in rare moments... as we look upon stars that no longer are, but continue to shine through the inconceivable distances of space...or when we fall in love with the sight of the sun as it retires behind the horizon, setting the skies aflame and filling our souls with colors so vibrant and mysterious that they moisten our eyes...and we conceive and philosophize about timelessness and a heaven beyond reach and by doing so perhaps we drive around it's boundless edges... and it seems apparent to me that we deeply long for it...for something like nothing we know. To be engulfed and changed by the eternal and to be lost in it's endlessness. If you ask any number of people about their deepest desires, the desires they may be initially too embarrassed to share...I think that more often than not, somewhere in between the lines of their words you will see a profound ache for the celestial... the rub though, the difficult reality, is that we cannot have it, no, not yet...and so we fight with an awesome tension...all the days of our lives... and this is life, enduring through this tension... carrying a cross on the hills of our own calvary... and trading it one day for a crown.
I had this idea further illustrated to me on my recent trip to Idaho Falls. We drove a total of 1800 miles in the course of 4 days...driving up through Northern Arizona, in through Utah and then up to Eastern Idaho... we also made our way up to Montana to experience West Yellowstone. I must have taken about 800 photographs or more... there was so much wild majesty...that I often found myself questioning whether I could trust my eyes.
Here is a little bit of what I wrote on my trip:
Northern arizona changes quickly from huge plots of desert land to a deep evergreen forest, guarded by giant armies of pines, mountains covered in them. Soon, the landscape will shift again and my eyes quickly adjust to accept the alterations in color and rock formations...the dark mountains turn into mineral rich, brick-red cliffs...and just as one begins to grasp the views...again the surroundings of the interstate give way to great piles of peculiar grey sediment interrupted by strange canyons... I have a persistent impulse to pull over every mile or so and explore the details of each crack and crevice and canyon... and I imagine each of these canyon giving birth to another and then another...until it is too deep and profound for the eye to see...I imagine that I could follow the cuts of earth and travel as Jules Verne once wrote, to the center of the earth...
As we exit the desert state that hardly seems to be a desert at all, we drive straight through two strong cliffs that stand only a narrow lane apart... and as we pierce through this wonder, closed in by divine barriers, I feel as though the earth herself has whispered to me a secret...something personal and sacred...something that leaves her a bit more vulnerable to me than before. A dozen miles beyond, the canyons increase...in distance and in size...they are giant walls that appear to hold the weight of heaven on their broad shoulders...and I am simply, breathless.
Utah is another dramatic change in topography. The canyons begin to disappear...as if God were somehow paying attention to our imaginary dotted lines...our man made borders... The mountains are sharper, their edges more pronounced, chiseled like the faces and bodies of our pop culture icons. The mormon church considers this the place of Zion, the new Jerusalem... and I begin to see why one might have such a thought. The green and charcoal hills look as though they are the result of great intention and focus, as if sculpted by the hands of a master... At one point, we found a deserted plain... the mountains receded to the distance... and I got that feeling you get when you sit on a beach and stare at the ocean that seems to wrap around all of existence....I sighed at gorgeous fields of green meadows... and then dense thunderclouds rolled in from the east and the west in perfect harmony, as if they had determined to meet there at that very hour... they covered the skies from one end to the other...creating a blanket over all... it was as if they were trying to trap in every drop of beauty set before me...
In light of that, I came to realize something, admittedly an unusual thought. All this splendor and glory was simply too much...
The thing is, I am a nature freak. In fact, I can hardly stay put in the city...I am always driving out of town...I love aesthetic beauty... creation...the work of His hands...and yet after a while...after having been completely immersed in it...I actually felt overwhelmed. It is as if I could not begin to understand the beauty in even one small region of the world, I could no longer process it. My senses went numb, my mind grew tired... And so I wonder if even the beauty I so deeply desire at the core of my being is too infinite for me in fact.
The bible tells us that one day, we will be given new minds and new bodies, heavenly ones and this resonates with me... and I'd imagine that this transformation will mean we will receive beauty differently...perhaps even more comprehensively... and I like this idea... I like the thought of being able to swim in the skies...
And I guess I've said all of that to illustrate that there seems to exists an unreconcilable space between how things are and how they should be...I feel it everyday, I see it in my experience and that of others and in fact, the world seems unable to escape this predicament. It is this space between the finite and the infinite, between the most desperate cries of our hearts and that which might quench their insatiable thirsts, the space between the life we dream about and the one we must endure...
between our hopes and our hopelessness...
between man and God...
and it is this space that stands between who I am and who you wanted me to be...
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