More Real, Please
Dreams of home (Feat. C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and George MacDonald on an alternative to Nostalgia, that which we Long for and that which Tabernacles with us).
This is where I write about being at home and in exile, so here are some more rambling thoughts about such things — and no less than four Lewis quotes to boot, beginning with one from The Weight of Glory:
In speaking of this desire for our own far off country … I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence …
Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter …
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.1
At the risk of committing an indecency, then, I broach this topic. Writing this has helped me clarify (and obscure2) my thoughts in a good way, so perhaps it may bring a healthy light (and shadow) to a reader also … Such subjects as these might be better expressed in stories, music and art, rather than thoughts, though, so I will not begrudge a reader for ignoring this and continuing their contemplation of vessels more glorious.
I'm not afraid of dreaming — which is to be uncomfortable with where I am and to long for something better and more beautiful. Perhaps I'm a little afraid of becoming lost in a dream, but that's not to say I think it's wrong to wander in and out of one. Dreaming in this way is like praying, and it is more powerful than reality in just the same way as a miracle is. It defies (and defines) the laws of reality in a way that proclaims something deeper and even more real.
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.3
I think we shall always be caught up in, lost in, entangled in, enchanted by or captivated by one thing or another. If we must choose our master and our judge, I would rather be enchanted by a dream than enslaved by a resignation — for there are few joys that rival the meeting of two souls wandering in a similar, hopeful cloud.
(side note) The Nightmare
Perhaps I should take a moment to make a little clarification before continuing. In a conversation I was listening to this morning,
brought up the chapter in Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader wherein Prince Caspian sails through a part of the sea in which dreams come true. That might seem like a great thing, but the reader quickly discovers that they might just have to live through a nightmare instead. See, we struggle to tell the difference sometimes.It would be flippant to suppose that the dreams spoken of in that chapter are entirely unrelated to the kind of dreams I am writing about. Waking and sleeping dreams share the title for a reason: they both whisper some secret anent longing.
A nightmare has a similar kind of power to a dream, but it is bent towards a worse future. The line between them can seem quite foggy to us — for there is but one perfect dream and an infinite array of potential nightmares of varying degrees of imperfection. The path is narrow and shrouded in mist. I am writing of the one dream — the one tune, whose echos reverberate through all things beautiful, good and true — and thus, again, forgive me, you will find some shadows in these thoughts.
Those beings lingering in hell or purgatory in Lewis’s The Great Divorce might believe they are in a dream — they are, after all, pursuing those things they have convinced themselves they long for — but the shining figures know it is a nightmare compared to what could be (their dream). And most of the deluded, when shown the dream, cannot stand it — for the love of God is to them the fire of hell.
Some, though, react more in a way described by Tolkien in On Fairy-Stories:
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.
In another part of the essay, Tolkien touches again on this topic of longing and reality, mirroring the hesitancy in that first quote from Lewis:
But in the “Eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world … It is a serious and dangerous matter. It is presumptuous of me to touch upon such a theme; but if by grace what I say has in any respect any validity, it is, of course, only one facet of a truth incalculably rich: finite only because the capacity of Man for whom this was done is finite.
The Nostalgia
In speaking of the real and the more real (the nightmares and the dream, perhaps), we might consider the bittersweet surreality of recalling the gems of our hometowns4. I write ‘gems’ in reference to how Tolkien’s thoughts regarding religions and cultures other than Christianity are often phrased: that they have gems of truth in them that are only fully redeemed and consecrated in the life of Christ5. Similarly, our Nostalgia holds gems of truth that can only begin to be consecrated through the dream and the longing.
I often think of the sappy peppercorn tree near the shearing shed in the green and yellow hills — hills of pasture and canola. The big old farmhouse with the blue-green, patterned wallpaper. Ducks beside the orchard. Border collie with her pups outside the boot room (I might have imagined this — I was very young when Zoe had her litter). Quite the home, despite face-traversing huntsmen and summer-roving browns.
I often think of the watermelon farm in the scrub — where we moved when I was seven. Endless hectares of red dirt outback in every direction. One particular wet-season evening of adventures with palm-sized scorpions and ultraviolet torches always comes to mind. Quite the home, despite the oppressive heat and the hit my face took from an eye infection and a few bee stings.
I often think of the policemen’s paddock across the road — in the town we moved to next — the touch-football ovals and netball courts nearby, and the river beyond. The rope swing — though it gets cut down by someone every few months — and its century-old tree that you can climb using the boards nailed to its trunk. There are three or four places on the bank beside the tree where you can take a meticulously measured run-up and jump, usually only just clearing the roots and fallen limbs obscured by the murky water. Those tangling roots are the quickest way of climbing out again. Quite the home, despite countless scrapes and bruises from the river red gum and the threat of numerous discarded syringes, fish hooks, broken bottles and nibbling yabbies.
Fraught as these places were with discomforts, these are just a few of the gems that made me feel at home — and, of course, some discomforts certainly serve to make a homecoming adventure sweeter. From the perspective of a deeper reality, though, I would sooner call these the lands of my childhood exile. I would call them Nostalgia — they being not as real as the longing they stir in me.
The Longing
… the kingdom of God is at hand [ἤγγικεν — can mean ‘brought near’ in the context of space, time and personal relationship; arriving; intimate; graspable] …
Mark 1:15 (KJV)
I fancy we have a home we cannot see — but which tabernacles with us as we wander and is, in truth, more real. George MacDonald suggested we could see shadows cast by it6, and I’ve come to believe him. The stick you take up in a game of make-believe — a game of dreams and longing — to strike hither and thither at imagined enemies is the shadow of a shining sword. The accepting warmth you feel when wandering through the gems of the town in which you grew up is the shadow of a kingdom beyond the upper-most sacred confines of your imagination or Nostalgia.
So perhaps because we linger in exile — in a place that is real but less real — our home remains a glorious shadow, a dream, a cloud of light in which we sometimes wander and find respite.
Lewis said something similar in The Problem of Pain:
The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy.
It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency.
Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
And again, from a different, more dreamlike perspective — after pain, death and exile are no more — in The Last Battle:
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now ... Come further up, come further in!
And here is a passage from George MacDonald’s adaptation of The Golden Key, which I think Lewis was perhaps reiterating in the previous quote:
They climbed out of the earth; and, still climbing, rose above it. They were in the rainbow. Far abroad, over ocean and land, they could see through its transparent walls the earth beneath their feet. Stairs beside stairs wound up together, and beautiful beings of all ages climbed along with them.
They knew that they were going up to the country whence the shadows fall.
The Tabernacling
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us …
John 1:14 (KJV)
Here, the Greek word translated ‘dwelt’ (ἐσκήνωσεν) is the verb form of ‘tabernacle’ (tabernacled or made his tabernacle), which — to my understanding — is another way of saying ‘and he pitched his tent among us’ (which is indeed how some more expanded translations put it). I think this word was chosen carefully, given its clear connotations.
As the Israelites wandered in exile for forty years after leaving Egypt, carrying a tabernacle that they hoped was more real than their predicament, so we all wander in lesser realities searching for shadows that point homeward. They had a tent that was the shadow of a garden or temple. They forged golden shadows of cherubim. Moses engraved stone tablets with laws that shadowed those first written by his Jehovah.
Indeed, as the tabernacle was to them a shadow of the primordial garden, a dream of an eternal temple sustaining them through a temporary trial, so, by His grace — and as He tabernacles with us — we come to see the cloud of light that proves heavier than pain and death. In the end, we see that the glorious cloud can even roll away weighty stones.
We see the tomb is empty.
The heaviest, most terrible aspects of reality cower before this shadow of the arriving kingdom.
The dream is more real.
The Symbolising
In terms of weight/glory:
Wind/Cloud/Shadow/Dream > Deadwood/Stone/Senses/Reality
~
Motivated by the transcendentals — lightening the glorious and glorifying the light — balancing the scales — bringing the kingdom of God near — marrying heaven and earth:
Symbol/Story/Music
(Fire and Mist are good symbolic examples, for they are where the wind meets the wood and the cloud meets the stone.)
Christ with His Bride is the symbol that redeems and consecrates all other symbols — the church building, for one, in the architecture of which, reality and the dream (the real and the more real) must reach for each other. Find in this meeting, this Holy of Holies (within the garden/tabernacle/temple/cathedral) the fire, mist, music and story made sacred, drawing the exile homeward.
PS. For one of the more overt integrations of this theme into my fantasy writing, see this overture.
This quote from Lewis’s The Weight of Glory was brought to mind by this note from
, which in turn prompted a few of these thoughts.I phrase it this way because I was recently reminded (via
’s profile) of this quote from Horace: ‘In labouring to be concise, I become obscure’.From Lewis’s Miracles.
These thoughts are scattered throughout Tolkien’s writing implicitly — though a more solid reference can be found in this passage from a letter Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves:
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself [. . .] I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.
I believe George MacDonald suggests this in his adaptation of The Golden Key.
I'm glad my thoughts were able to prompt some of your own! Thanks for sharing.