Too Much of a Good Thing

It has been a dry season for me lately. Between raising support and being in a lot of transition, it has been difficult to spend a lot of time in the Word or in the study of it. Instead I've found myself reading several genres I haven't read for awhile: biography and science fiction. It is interesting to see how truth is spoken (often with greater meaning) through the means of story instead of proposition. Narrative instead of argument. One particular area where these stories have spoken to me is in the question of satisfaction. That is, what does it mean to be satisfied and where is that found?

A quote from a biography of Catholic priest Henri Nouwen:
"We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated intuitive knowledge--that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition. This truth is so disconcerting and painful that we are more prone to play games with our fantasies than to face the truth of our existence. Thus we keep hoping that one day we will find the man who really understands our experiences, the woman who will bring peace to our restless life, the job where we can fulfil our potentials, the book which will explain everything, and the place where we can feel at home. Such false hope leads us to make exhausting demands and prepares us for bitterness and dangerous hostility when we start discovering that nobody, and nothing, can live up to our absolutistic expectations."

I think Nouwen says it so well when he remarks that we would prefer to "play games with our fantasies" instead of facing the truth of our dissatisfaction head on. We fear the fact that nothing will truly satisfy us, and so we simply pretend that it is not true, and then immerse ourselves in all manner of sexual, success and relational fantasy to numb the pain.

Now from C.S. Lewis, in his science fiction book Perelandra:
"Looking at a fine cluster of the bubbles which hung above his head he thought how easy it would be to get up and plunge oneself through the whole lot of them and to feel, all at once, that magical refreshment multiplied tenfold. But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which has restrained him over-night from tasting a second gourd. He had always disliked the people who encored a favourite air in the opera--"That just spoils it" has been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards...was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself--perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over gain, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film... Money, in fact, would provide the means of saying encore in a voice that could not be disobeyed."

Lewis points out that when we find something we believe does satisfy us, we feel the need to make an idol out of it (though he doesn't use those words). He describes the way that we take the hint of satisfaction that this world offers and try and suspend it, or maintain it for as long as possible. In our world there is no sense of the reality that certain pleasures or satisfaction might have their time and place and then be finished. Or, even more, that the hints of pleasure and satisfaction that this world offers are mere signposts pointing us to the true source of satisfaction. It is as if we were traveling to Chicago and saw a sign saying "Chicago 30 Miles" and decided to stop there and bask in the joy of how close we were; setting up camp and seeking to cling to that satisfaction as long as possible, all while missing the point of the sign in the first place.

We won't be truly satisfied by anything this world has to offer, nor will we be able to turn its hints of satisfaction into something lasting. Whether it's biography or science fiction, the truth is the same: "Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever" (Psalm 73:25-26).