Waves of Change: Thoughts from C.S. Lewis and life after Biola.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and a little reading, and most of my thoughts have come together into one thread. That thread is the topic of change, and this thread is beginning to weave a pattern. This pattern began months ago at graduation, has carried through many recent conversations, and has now coincided with my recent readings.

One of the many things that I love about books is that they don’t change. Sure, they may wear out, but the story it contains remains the same. A few weeks ago I turned back to one of my favorite stories, looking for the same beauty and comfort that I experienced when I read it the first few times. As I turned the pages of C.S. Lewis’ novel Perelandra, I understood a different aspect of the story that I had missed. The story itself had not changed, of course, but my understanding of it became much deeper. I blame Torrey for that.

When I first read Perelandra, I understood at some level that the book was about the struggle between Good and Evil, purity and corruption. The reader is wrapped up in a desperate battle where the fate of the world is hanging in the balance, and defeat seems certain. I believe that the story of the struggle, both ideological and physical, is deeply true, even if set in a myth. It taps into a place in my soul that I care about passionately.

But the thrilling truth that I missed was that the power of the temptation lies in the desire for stasis. For all the people like me that eat the same breakfast cereal in the morning for months or years, this is a powerful temptation. And for everyone else, I believe that everyone needs some static thing that forms their very basis for defining reality. Often this can be a location, like your bedroom, where you go to hide when life becomes overwhelming and you just need a place where you know you are safe and all the bad things in the world are on the other side of the door. For others, it can be a person that understands and comforts, no matter what’s going on. Whatever this “stasis point” is, its presence is everything, and without it life and emotion are uncertain drifting.

Now take Perelandra. For those who haven’t read it, the characters in the novel live on floating islands made of plants, and the whole world is a temperate sea. No one in the novel is particularly attached to any one floating island, and the concept of territory on an endless sea is almost meaningless. All the characters live on a constantly shifting landscape, and live a life of simple subsistence where all good things are recognized as coming directly from God’s hand. However, there’s one temptation: the Fixed Land. There is one solid island in the world, but living on it is forbidden.

And so the temptation presents itself: one can live an idyllic life constantly adrift at sea, or defy God Himself and live on a Fixed Land. Just like the choice between eating of the Tree or not, the choice seems simple to those who know the consequences of evil.

Besides, is it really so hard living atop a floating paradise, even if it does move from wave to wave? When all the really delightful things are atop the waves, why cling to a Fixed Land?

But think about it a moment. Do you really want to live a life where you fall asleep one night and wake up in the morning to completely different scenery? Do you really want to live not knowing where your next meal is coming from? What about school? A job? Why should things change so often? Isn’t something permanent much better than a temporary setting? See, we become attached to things we consider to be permanent. Houses, churches, friends, jobs and many other things that we don’t want to change. And they’re painful to give up, there’s no denying that.

But as I’m learning, clinging to something that I want to be permanent when God has a wave coming for me is wrong. The Paradise of God’s will floats on His ocean of plans for me, whether that be calm or turbulent for me. What’s even worse in a way is trying to project my expectations onto that next wave. I have all sorts of expectations for what God wants for me. I’m willing to follow His Will, as long as it aligns with my expectations. Those last sentences sound really silly, don’t they? We say that God knows what’s best for us, and we may even believe that in our heads. And then in our hearts we plan for what we think is the best course for us, and God has to roughly show us that we’re wrong. And in the end, we were struggling for a perceived good when God had something so much better in store.
I’ll just leave you with a few verses from Proverbs:

16:9—A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.
20:24—A man’s steps are of the Lord, How then can a man understand his own way?