The Wish

In his Pensées, Pascal wrote that everyone aims toward happiness, but no one reaches it–  except he who has faith.

Except this isn’t actually completely true. At best, the man of faith has moments of true contentment. God grants us this to waken us to the Reality that there is contentment somewhere, even if it’s never here for too long.

It’s what Kierkegaard calls the wish; we desire that we would be satisfied. But we aren’t. So we choose to either kill that desire, or live in a way that we seek that which will fill this gaping hole. To kill it is a horrible loss, because then we have killed our Knower, that function of the heart that comes alive when we run into Truth.

It’s this knower that ultimately leads us to God. Pascal comments that all of these contradictions of philosophy don’t lead him to skepticism, as it has for so many; rather these contradictions are the very things that lead him to the conclusion that somehow, somewhere, there must be more than this. As Lewis put it, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

And we need this desire, this wish. And we need it to come and go. We are fickle, broken creatures, and if we don’t continually run into that pang of longing that keeps us awake, a pang that sometimes becomes a full-on ache, we’ll forget. Or as Annie Dillard puts it in Holy the Firm, we’ll “fall asleep at the wheel.” Were we to be able to stay awake on our own evil and pain would be an unmitigated travesty. But pain can also be a severe mercy. It’s this pain that allows us to both stay Awake and to realize that our longing for something more may actually point us to something more.

I don’t want to argue that evil is the best thing for us, because that simply isn’t true. Evil is wrong. Even redemption doesn’t change that. Forgiveness may wash it away, but only by acknowledging that it is, in fact, wrong.

However, given our parameters of corrupted beings who have chosen to rebel, and the fact that we are ultimately created to be united with a God who has “hidden himself from the wise” (Luke 10:21), it is a form of grace that we are allowed to suffer in this lifetime, for through this suffering our opportunity to turn and be saved is miraculously preserved. We shouldn’t be amazed that a good God doesn’t protect us from all evil; rather, we should be amazed that He is able to redeem evil in a way that such an obvious wrong can actually be turned into a form of the good.

~ by Michael on June 19, 2008.